You open your browser, go to Google, search the name of some company, poke around on the website, click through a drop-down menu, and scroll and scroll and scroll until finally you find a phone number.
OK, good.
Ten minutes proving we’re human to a website. Twenty-seven minutes on hold. Forty-five minutes correcting a bill.
You dial and wait. There’s no ring; the voice comes on almost immediately. You don’t need to press eight for Spanish, so you wait a little longer. The menu resets, and you listen intently. Finally, you hear the directions for billing, so you press seven. Some more audio menus are read through, a few more buttons are pressed, and then finally you hear: “Please wait for the next available representative.”
Ah, finally. You’re there.
Not quite.
Till human voices wake us
The same automated robo-voice comes back and lets you know the estimated wait time is 27 minutes. So you put the phone on speaker and try to make yourself busy.
Finally, after nearly half an hour, a human voice comes on the other end. She has an accent you can’t quite place and can barely understand. In the background is the din of other voices chattering away. She’s in some room somewhere with 14 other customer service representatives talking to 14 other annoyed customers.
She asks for your name, birth date, address, Social Security number, and phone number. You give her all of it, and now, finally, after 35 minutes, she asks what she can help you with.
You explain the problem. She repeats herself when you ask because you can’t understand what she said. After another 10 minutes of back-and-forth, she informs you that she cannot remove the charge because the plan auto-renewed more than three days ago. If you wanted to change plans, you needed to do so within three days of renewal.
She offers to help you change the plan for next month, but you can do that yourself on the website. You’re sick of being on the phone. Forty-five minutes of your life are gone, and you have nothing to show for it.
This is stolen time.
Thick as thieves
Our time is stolen by chatbots, outsourced call centers, and robo-voices in never-ending audio labyrinths that loop us through the same menus again and again. It is stolen by our garbage collection service, our internet service provider, our health insurance company that ran the wrong code for a procedure that should have been covered, leaving us to spend 90 minutes on Tuesday trying to get the bill fixed.
It usually goes unremarked upon. We know we’re annoyed while it’s happening, but rarely do we scale out the fuzzy numbers and consider how much of our lives we spend fixing the mistakes of companies we already pay.
No, it wasn't always like this. I am not old, but I am old enough to remember when you didn’t routinely end up on the phone “talking to” a machine with no obvious gateway to a real human being. I remember my mother on the phone litigating charges, but it wasn’t that often. Yes, people had to mail more things before the internet. But it’s not that hard to write a check or lick a stamp.
The problem of stolen time comes partly from advanced technological systems that are supposed to make our lives easier and often don’t. But it isn’t just about technology. It’s also about the collapse of competency and accountability.
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Footing the bill
A company cuts costs by outsourcing customer service. It automates another department. It builds a system so enormous that normal customers cease to be people and become account numbers. Then when the system screws up, the company doesn’t pay for the mistake.
You do.
Not necessarily in money. In time.
You spend the morning on hold. You repeat your account number to three different people. You explain the same problem four times. You fight with a chatbot that keeps insisting it has answered a question it clearly has not understood.
The company saves money. You lose an hour.
And that hour has to come from somewhere. It comes from the work you need to do, the family you want to see, the friend you meant to call, or the half-hour when you simply wanted to sit somewhere quietly and do nothing.
We don’t notice all of this stolen time adding up because it disappears in small increments and the thieves are so numerous. Ten minutes proving we’re human to a website. Twenty-seven minutes on hold. Forty-five minutes correcting a bill. An hour trying to cancel something that took 30 seconds to sign up for.
So we accept it as an inextricable part of modern life.
It isn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Time is finite. We only get so much of it. And I don’t particularly want to spend mine listening to hold music because some giant company decided employing enough people to answer the telephone was an unnecessary expense.
It’s stolen time.
I want mine back.