A man in Ohio recently set a personal record that no one asked him to set.
Dave Kowalski, 41, called Verizon customer service about a billing error on a Tuesday morning.
Somewhere in between, he says he memorized the entire hold-music playlist and started naming the songs.
Scroll through any social platform for five minutes and you'll find thousands of Americans describing phone trees that feel engineered by someone who hates joy.
Press 3 to question every decision that led you here.
He spent roughly a full waking day fighting a charge smaller than a fancy coffee.
When he finally reached a human, the rep was lovely, fixed it in ninety seconds, and apologized.
The system, not the person, is the villain here.
Verizon, for its part, has been pushing customers toward self-service apps and chat bots for years.
The company says most issues can be resolved without a call.
It's also true that when the app fails, you get punted into a phone maze with the warmth of a DMV waiting room.
T-Mobile has built an entire ad campaign around mocking the competition's customer service.
It's the telecom equivalent of dunking on your rival at a pickup game, except everyone watching also hates their own phone bill.
Let's talk about those bills, because that's the real American pastime.
Hidden fees, surprise charges, promotional rates that expire like milk.
The average household pays well over a hundred bucks a month for wireless service.
For that money, you'd think someone would pick up on the second ring.
Reddit threads on this topic read like group therapy.
One user calculated that hold time plus frustration equals a worse hourly wage than their actual job.
Another claimed they aged two years during a single transfer.
A third just posted a screenshot of a 3-hour call timer with the caption "AMA." There's also a darker corporate reality.
Telecom giants have cut thousands of support jobs in recent years, betting that automation can handle the volume.
Problem is, automation handles the easy stuff.
The moment your issue is weird, you're a ghost in the machine, wandering from menu to menu like a character in a video game with no exit.
He announced this on Facebook, and forty people commented with their own horror stories.
A few defended Verizon, noting that every carrier stinks in its own special way.
It's a race to the bottom, and we're all holding the phone.
Maybe nothing changes until enough people walk.
Or maybe we all just accept that a chunk of our monthly bill buys us the privilege of waiting on hold with a robot that says "your call is important to us" without a trace of irony.
Our take: the fact that "good customer service" feels like a luxury in 2024 says everything about how these companies see us.
Final Thoughts
And line items don't get to talk to a human before lunch.