GORDON LIGHTFOOT | Local
IS IT THOUGH??
Jayden Gardner, a 29 year old plumber from Hamilton, is beginning to question the narrative being fed to him by an automated voice message over the phone.
Gardner has been on hold for over an hour waiting to talk to his Kiwisaver provider about changing his investment settings.
While sitting on hold, he has been listening to brief segments of kiwi songs from the early 2000s, including the likes of Brooke Fraser, Fast Crew and Nesian Mystik, indispersed with a voice message saying “Please hold. Your call is important to us”.
“I’ve heard this person say that my call is important to them probably fifty times now. And yet here I am, still sitting here waiting for someone to pick up the phone.
“My call can’t be that important to them can it?!” he exclaimed, wondering why he was dedicating so much of his scheduled day off work for this.
The repeated voice message in between songs played in painfully low quality audio appears to be a standard tactic from call centres of today.
“Like, they keep telling me this, but I’m starting to think that my call maybe isn’t important to them at all. If they’re so certain that my call is important, why is there this need to keep reaffirming that? I never asked them whether my call was important to them, so why bring it up?
“It’s like if someone just out of the blue told you that they weren’t a murderer. Why would you say that? Sounds exactly like something a murderer would say,” said Gardner as he edged closer to hanging up the phone.
When the fed up tradie finally got through and said he’d like to change his kiwisaver investment from “growth” to “aggressive”, he was promptly informed that all the people qualified to make this change had gone home for the day.
More to come.
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