Plaidophile

Back in the good old days of number-prompt menus, you could access most systems without talking and disturbing others (in an office or while on a cellphone), and any talking would be limited to actually speaking with a real person. With frequently-accessed systems, you could remember a quick series of keys to get to frequently-accessed menus, and also interrupt the speaker by simply making a selection when you know which one needs to be made. If you knew you just needed to speak with a live operator, you could just press 0 and immediately be put into the queue.

But every single system is switching to these horrible voice-prompt systems, where they direct you to *say* what you're looking for. This is broken for many reasons:

• You usually can't speak your selection until the prompt is finished (and often the prompt is quite verbose)
• It always asks for confirmation of your selection, usually with a stupidly chatty "Let me make sure I understood you right" ramble
• Any background noise or speech problem confuses the heck out of it (heaven forbid that anyone with a cold or laryngitis or whatever tries to use the system)
• Sentence fragments spoken in a loud, clear voice tend to disturb/annoy other people in an environment much more than actual conversations

One particularly bad offender is T-Mobile. Until a month ago they used standard number menus, which I had grown quite accustomed to, and found to be very convenient. In order to pay my bill, I would just call 611, enter a few easy-to-remember selections, whip out my credit card and punch that in, and be done with it. But then they switched to the worst voice-prompt menus I've ever tried to use, right in the middle of a horrible cold which made it impossible for me to actually navigate the menus without it "helpfully" just putting me in the CSR queue. I never even got to the point where I knew whether it would even still let me enter the credit card information via keypad, either - for all I know it might even require you to speak that out loud as well, letting everyone around me know my credit card information!

So, now when I remember that it's time to pay my bill, I can't just whip out my phone and take care of it in about a minute; instead, I have to wait until I get home, keep remembering about the pending bill payment, and then pay it online with their web interface (which tries to sell me new rate plans and useless services that I don't want or need before I can get to the bill payment).

I'll probably just switch to paying my T-Mobile bill via my third-party bill-payment service, which just sends them a check, meaning that now they need a human to manually process a piece of paper sent via the postal service, raising their expenses and therefore my costs, instead of allowing their electronic payment processing to do it all automatically.

Nice work, T-Mobile.