Evenin' All.

Well, that wasn’t much of a hiatus, was it?

So anyway...

I needed to talk to HMRC today (that’s the Brit equivalent of the American IRS. Don’t know what you call it in Ireland, Thailand and Australia - apart from a word beginning with b, that is.) They’ve sent me two coding notices in quick succession, and one of them doesn’t make sense. I called the Helpline number.

As is usual these days, I sat through a series of menu options and recorded announcements. Finally there was an announcement that said ‘OK, now I’ll put you through to somebody who can help.’ Without a pause, another announcement cut in. It said (slightly abbreviated) ‘All our enquiry staff are helping other people at the moment. You might want to call back later. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.’ And the call was terminated. No offer to let me hold, so no option but to hang up. I tried it six times through the afternoon and evening with the same result. That’s the ‘Helpline.’ I found another number for HMRC in the phone book and dialled that one. All the same announcements, menu options and ultimate termination. So how do I get to talk to HMRC to resolve my query?

And then I got to thinking, as ever (bane of my bloody life! I think I think too much.) What I thought was this. Menu options and recorded announcements are a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to be that you called a number, and it was either engaged – in which case you hung up – or somebody answered, usually fairly quickly. I wondered just how much this modern system is costing the great British phone subscriber, so I did a rough calculation. Lets’ suppose that an average of 10% of the population makes one call a day. That’s 6 million calls at a cost of around 5p per minute. And let’s say that each call has an average of 1 minute’s worth of menu options and recorded announcements. That’s £300,000 a day – over £100m a year boosting the profits of the phone providers. And people wonder why I have suspicions about who’s actually running this culture, and for whose benefit.

One thing would help slightly. Could we please have billboards dotted around the country saying ‘Your call might be recorded for training purposes, and to help us improve our service.’ A few people might even believe it, and it would at least save us having to listen to the same thing every bloody time we call a company or official department. Thank you.