Nuisance Communications

 

by Pa Rock

Old School Communicator

I realize that I am an anachronism, and I also realize that, given my advanced age, I am unlikely to ever change some of my more annoying behaviors - and chief among those annoying behaviors is the way I communicate.

I have almost quit going to fast food drive-thru's because the first thing the speaker asks me has changed from "What can we get for you today?" to the far more rage-inducing "Will you be using your app today?"

Well no, I won't be using my app.  In fact, I don't have an app, don't know how to get one, don't wan't an app, and wouldn't use an app even if you walked out to the car and showed me how!  Just give me my damned burger!

I also strongly resent the fact that people who use apps in the drive-thru lane slow traffic and get special deals for using their apps.  The special deals are age discrimination because younger people are more likely to use apps than are us seasoned senior citizens.    One has to wonder how our jihadist Supreme Court would view the matter!

Yesterday as I was about to leave the house to go to town, I received an email from my car insurance company asking for the current odometer reading on my car.  I have some sort of insurance discount for not driving much.  The email asked that I enter the current reading in my insurance app so that they could continue to give me the discount.  Not knowing if I even had an insurance app, I decided that since I was headed into town anyway I would just stop by the insurance office and give them the information face-to-face.  

The young office manager at the insurance company did not seem eager to address something that clearly could have been handled through an app.  She began by asking if the message had come by email or text, and I told her that it must have been an email because I don't read texts.  It took several minutes to get it all sorted, and eventually she was able to transmit my mileage to the insurance carrier.  The young lady, who was very patient and nice, told me that the next time I could just phone it in and she would take care of it.

One thing I can say about my local auto insurance agency, when I call their number a human being answers!

I work with three health insurance providers (Medicare, the carrier for Medicare Part D, and a supplemental insurance provider) and none of those three have a human being to answer the phone - and, in fact, my Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) provider will absolutely never place a human on the line.  That same provider has been trying to contact me by phone - rather insistently - but when I answer it is an automated response.  I will not sit at the phone punching numbers in an effort to communicate with a machine that wants to give me information that will save them money.  If an insurance company sincerely wants to impart information to me, surely there is one human somewhere in the bowels of that giant organization who could pick up the phone and call me!

So I hung up, and I will continue to hang up until I am shown the basic courtesy of being contacted by a living, breathing person.

Or maybe they could text my app and then upload it to the cloud - whatever the hell that is - and I could get around to reading it in my next life!.  By then I ought to be up-to-speed!