When you call a company that's too big to bother employing an actual human to answer its phone, you get put through to an automated system that guides you, via button pressing, to the part of their organisation that you require. That, at least, is the theory.

It's a lovely idea. They (the company) get to lay-off their telephone operators, and you (the poor bastard who just wants to ask a simple question, or pay a bill) get to type in enough digits to represent the bonuses that the company's executives are going to get paid, for laying off the staff who used to answer the phones. See, everything is cyclical.

Of course, one digit out of place, and you have to start the call all over again. There's never an option along the lines of, "Press 8 if you don't have thin, child-sized fingers, and have therefore misdialed".

One of the things that really annoys me is when, having typed in 200+ digits, including your phone number, social security number, inside leg measurement, and hat size, you're then asked for the same information, all over again, when you finally get through to a human being. I mean, what's the point of typing it in the first place? Can't these companies' systems pass on a simple numeric string? They don't seem to have a problem passing around the numeric strings that they use to send me a bill.

But my real beef is with the grammar of their voicemail/customer-avoidance systems. In the US, the phrase, used all too often, is, "Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received."

Well, let's see... I'm making ONE call, so the order in which it's being received is:

begin sequence my call end sequence

My call is not being received backwards, or upside-down, so short of some disturbance in the space-time continuum, that causes my call to be split, in the forth dimension, and arrive at their phone system as a series of calls, it's always going to be a sequence of one call.

What they mean is, "We answer incoming calls in the order in which they arrive".

Of course the torture doesn't stop there either. Dear me no. Whereas previously when put on hold, you were merely driven insane by bad "hold music", now, it's a barrage of advertisments for the institution with which you're trying to speak.

Other stock phone announcements when on hold, include the classic, "Your call is very important to us..." one. The full text of which, is actually, "Your call is very important to us, if you owe us money, but not important enough for us to spend our money on employing enough staff to handle the number of calls we get at any time of the day or night."

Of course, given the general standard of heartless cretins that companies usually employ for customer service, avoiding a corporation's carbon-based life-forms could be seen as a good thing.

But by far the biggest pain the arse with regard to automated phone systems has to be those systems that call your house, then ask you to hold for the next available operator. Yes, THEY call YOU, and then put YOU on hold!

I have a strict policy with those systems. Namely, if they can't be bothered to have a human being call me, then their call is not important to me, and will be hung up upon, in the order in which it was received.