Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: “Your call is important to us … please hold.” But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away – intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is “experiencing high call volumes at the moment”, nevertheless your call is still important to him/her/it – you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours.
Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice – at least in the UK. A survey commissioned by the New Britain Project thinktank found that the average Briton spends between 28 and 41 minutes every week coping with inefficient customer service systems, and that nearly four-fifths of them are frustrated by “the wasted time, the unnecessary friction, and the quiet resignation that has become part of daily interactions with both public and private services”.
