You know how it goes - you think that whatever your issue of the day is, one simple phone call should sort it out. Do you never learn? Do you not know by now that with the advent of answering services and call centres mean that no single problem is sorted with one phone call.

Take the utility companies for instance. If you have an issue with a bill they have sent, you might just as well pay up because by the time you have sorted it out, you will pay just as much in a huge phone bill as what you saved on sorting the problem. Life is never easy.

There are one or two ways it could go. The usual routine is that you phone a British utility company and will immediately be put through to an Indian call centre. Not only will you struggle to understand what they are saying but they will have no idea what you are talking about. Of course, they will do their best but eventually you will either give up or they will pass you on to another number in Outer Mongolia.

Four and a half hours later, you are still on hold and dying to use the toilet. You just know that the minute you dare to rest the phone from your ear and run to the loo, that is the moment they will answer your call to a silent line and they will then cut you off, leaving you to start from scratch with the Indian call centre and the Outer Mongolia answering service again.

This doesn't just apply to utility companies. Pretty much everybody that you need to deal with in an official capacity will have set up their own answering service to screen calls and you can get completely lost in a veritable maze of choices and suggestions: press one for sales, press two for returns, press three for change of address, press four for change of name, press five to claim and press six to self destruct because the option you want isn't there and you can't remember what the first five were.

An answering service is there to assist busy offices from wasting time on unimportant calls. It frees staff up to filter out what is essential and to deal with that. However, these types of answering services can be frustrating for callers at times, depending on the set up. Of course, if you know who you want to talk to or who you want to leave a message for and if you know their extension number that you can punch into the automated service, then it may take a little longer than a normal call but you should get there eventually.

If you don't know these details ore actually prefer to speak to a real human for advice, the whole answering service is a lot more complicated and frustrating. You will be pushed from one department to another, again forgetting what the first options were and having to start all over again. This can be particularly difficult if you are trying to ring a doctors surgery.
If mine are anything to go by, the answering service is left on with a recorded message of when the opening times are when you know full well you are already within those time constraints.

When your doctors surgery implement an answering service, you might just as well forget it, or try to be ill at a convenient time, such as when the surgery is shut and not simply 'not taking calls'. At least this way, you'll be able to nip off to your local hospital and get seen to long before you get off hold on a surgery answering service.