Time to go to war on "voice recognition"

If anybody reading this feels the way I do, you will no doubt have one major pet peeve when dealing with seemingly any large company these days: calling them up and hearing a computer-generated voice on the other end saying "speak to select the option" or something of that nature. Apart from the fact that speaking to a machine makes us feel like idiots, as often as not the voice on the other end will then say "I didn't hear that, speak to select your option (again)". However, it was when contacting Telstra earlier to sort out yet another overbilling issue, that the simplicity of the solution dawned on me.

I made the call during my lunchbreak at work, simply because the billing enquiries line isn't open hours that are at all convenient. When the voice prompt came on, I simply said nothing. The voice prompted again, I said nothing again. After the third voice prompt, I was (wait for it) actually transferred to a real human being. No frustration, no looking (or sounding) like an idiot, and surprisingly, no problems. Then it dawned on me, if more people did this, those companies would end up transferring more callers to real people, which would either force them to implement another menu selection option, or simply refrain from sacking human beings to force their customers to talk to a computer. Either way, it would be the end of this rather annoying "technology".

Consequently, I propose a quiet revolution. The next time you call a company and get one of these stupid options, simply sit there in silence. Eventually you'll go through to customer service, at which point you can actually talk to a person and get some answers. It's not difficult, but if enough people do it, we might get somewhere.