42 minutes and holding….

Thank you for calling VeriCom Customer Care. Your call is important to us, though not as important as it is to you. If you are calling from a touch-tone phone, press or say 1. If you are calling from a rotary-dial phone, please stay on the line while a customer-care representative makes mocking, derisive faces. Para assistencia en espanol, go to South America and try your call again.

Your call may be monitored and/or recorded for staff entertainment purposes. For security reasons, please enter the last four digits of your junior high school locker combination, followed by your mother’s pet name for your father on evening when she’s had too much sherry.

To save us money and expedite the dismissal of customer-care representatives, our express automated-speech response system is now available. To use this system, press 1. To speak to a customer-care representative, call the Peterson County unemployment office. To hear these options again, hang up and call back.

Welcome to the express automated-speech response system. Please say your 67-digit personal account number, located on the upper lower left middle corner of the one page of your bill that has gone missing, followed by the pound sign. If you thought * was the pound sign, say Ding Dong.

I heard: 894375904279643850432759478847686350542356889448590824837698072459. If this is correct, say Yes. If this is not correct, it’s your fault. Your are mumbling, or have a funny accent.
For payment information, say Payment. If you have calls and charges you don’t understand, say Pinhead. To hear these options again, say Attention Span of a Gnat. To hear the call of the long-toed stint, say kirrrrr-PIP! wacka wacka wacka!

Welcome to the automated payment information center. Our records show a payment of $149 was posted on January 23 2002, following a 12 day processing period, during which time Account Receivable Clerk June Smetak was unaccountably absent and consequently your payment was recorded six days after the due date. A late fee of as much as we can possibly charge without government intervention has been posted to your account. Accounts Receivable Clerk Smetak has been promoted. Whoever said life was fair?

To exit the express automated-speech response system, press or say 1. To enter your 67-digit person account number against for no specific reason, press or say 2.

Please wait, a customer-care representation will be with you shortly, or be short with you, or something. Currently all of our representatives are busy helping dilute our profits. Calls will be answered in the order in which we feel like. Your expected wait time is 42 minutes. Your expected blood pressure is 210/130. You may hear clicks followed by silence. You may hear “Whole Lotta Love� done entirely in string. You may hear yourself say regrettable things, which may be monitored and/or recorded.

For example, our records show that you used the phrease “gabbling nitwit� during your last call to customer care. This has been noted in your record and will be reflected in the quality of service you receive and the tone of voice of the customer-care representative, should you somehow manage to reach one.

I’m sorry, 0 is not a valid prompt, even if pushed furiously 11 times in rapid succession.

To use our expressed automated-speech response system, press 1. To hear our website address, press 2. To speak to someone about your anger-management problem, press 3.

3 is not a valid prompt. Thank you for calling.

Updated: October 10, 2002 — 8:14 pm