Automated Telephone Services

Angelika And there's something else you have to deal with here in everyday life at every turn. I'm talking about "automated phone directories." By this, I don't mean automated services you can call to check the time, movie schedules, or the weather report, but rather the phenomenon you encounter here lately when you call certain government entities, like the city administration or the waterworks, but also banks, health insurance companies, large medical practices, airlines, cinemas, basically almost anything that isn't a private call.

When you do this, you don't immediately get a person on the line (as is hopefully still common in Germany) who can then connect you or give you an extension, but instead, you get an automated message informing you of the options available and prompting you to press certain numbers on your phone. Usually, it starts with the option to choose (at least here in California) the language in which you want to hear the whole mess, typically English or Spanish. When you call an airline, for example, you might hear the tinny voice saying: "If you want information about the arrival time of a plane, press 1. If you want to book a flight, press 2. If you want to cancel a flight, press 3. If you want to reconfirm a flight, press 4. If you want information about our frequent flyer program, press 5. If none of these apply to you, press the * key."

The problem is that you usually have to listen to everything, and you often forget which number you were supposed to press. No problem, because at the end, it always says: "If you want to hear this message again, press #." As if you'd have nothing else to do! Now you might be wondering if there's a trick to bypass the whole thing. There actually is. You can simply pretend that you don't have a touch-tone phone yet, and are still on one with a rotary dial, and with this, the connection would naturally break if you started dialing wildly. However, this trick doesn't save time either, because you usually end up on hold forever and have to listen to music before you finally get a person on the line. Besides, this trick probably won't work much longer because no one has rotary phones anymore. Since I'm sure that these "automated phone directories" will soon come to Germany as well, you now have something to look forward to.