Press Zero to Scream Into the Void

From their inception, I have fundamentally despised automated answering systems. You know the ones: Press 1 for this, press 2 for that.

Each selection opening another menu, and another, and another, an endless cascading maze of options that somehow feels exactly like using Windows twenty years ago.

I have fucking hated these things for as long as they’ve existed, and I know I’m not alone. So we learned the tricks. We pressed “0” in hopes of reaching a real human. They closed that loophole by routing you right back to the first menu. We yelled “customer service representative,” then just “representative,” over and over until, eventually, something worked and you landed on a person’s desk.

An actual fucking person.

Enter AI.

Of course someone saw an opportunity to permanently close those loopholes. Of course they did. Because now the automated answering systems don’t just frustrate you, they argue with you.

I use a mail-order pharmacy. It’s been convenient. While I was in the hospital, I apparently neglected to pay a small balance from a prior order. That one unpaid balance caused the system to decide, unilaterally, “Fuck it, you don’t get meds.”

I found this out after I got out of rehab.

In December, I logged in, paid the balance, and logged out, reasonably assuming that since I had fixed the problem, the prescription would become unstuck and get filled.

Logical, right?

Wrong.

Today I logged in and saw the same status: STOPPED.

One vial of insulin left. Cool. Great timing.

So I called them.

And there it was: the AI-enhanced automated answering service. This thing didn’t just exist, it had a tone. I yelled “customer service representative” for the fourth time, only to be told:

“I understand you want to talk to someone, but I need you to let me try to solve this.”

No. No you fucking do not.

That’s when it really hits you: this isn’t about efficiency. This is about gatekeeping access to humans. The system isn’t designed to solve problems. It’s designed to keep you inside the maze long enough that you give up.

After eight goddamned minutes of looping, deflecting, and arguing with a machine, I finally reached a real person. He fixed the issue in under fifteen seconds.

Fifteen seconds.

Which tells you everything you need to know.

With the rise of AI, we’ve also embraced the outsourcing of anything executives consider “trivial”, even when those things are vital to the people trying to survive them. Through technology, we took an already terrible solution and made it objectively worse.

Congratulations.

We didn’t automate service. We automated avoidance.