I'm sure you've had one of those calls...you know, the one you make to some business or some such, and then you get put on hold, which is made worse if you first have to listen to a multitude of computerized prompts to get to the Hold part, and worse still if when you get put on hold you have to listen to some seriously horrendous musack. OK, and yes, I do realize that's probably a run-on sentence. Thank goodness I don't get paid to be 100% grammatically correct. And who am I kidding really, I don't get paid to blog. At least not in money. And how much is chocolate really worth these days?
But I digress...
I am bringing this stuff up about being on hold because of a recent phone call to the IRS. Which arguably could stand for I'm Really Stupid. And why, you ask? Well I'll tell you why.
First of all, the IRS really does have seriously horrendous musack while you're on hold. I mean, it's worse than bad. It gives bad a, um, bad name. And you really would think that considering all the money the IRS steals from hard working Americans, that they could afford some slightly less annoying musack while we're on hold. Michael Jackson, anyone? Anyone?
Secondly, you can only hear "Your call is important to us...yadda...yadda...yadda..." so many times before you really want to just take the phone and lunge it into your own chest. Repeatedly.
And thirdly, because I waited on hold for over an hour. Yes, you read that correctly, folks. Sixty. Plus. Minutes. All to find out why the Hubs and I had gotten a notice about an incorrectly applied Employer Tax Deposit. See, I had to call to find out why the payment didn't apply correctly. Nowhere in the notice I got did it explain--anywhere--WHY the payment went awry.
So finally, after over and hour of waiting, when I finally got through to "Ms. White," if that's even her real name, and I told her about the notice and asked what the problem was, guess what she told me?
"Your payment arrived late."
Me:
When is it due? (Honestly, I've been making those payments for years and hadn't even realized it was due on a certain day of the month!).
Her: The 15th.
Me: But I made the payment on the 12th.
Her: But it didn't post until the 16th.
Me:
And furthermore, may I just say, WTF?
But I was growing old tired of the phone call at this point, so I stated that I'd be sure to be more prompt with my payments in the future. Ahem.
Before I let dear "Ms. White" go, however, I wanted to get my tax dollars worth and point out something for the sake of tax-paying Americans everywhere. That being, that if the IRS would have simply bothered to put one simple sentence on the payment error notice that they sent me--one that stated that payments are due on the 15th and that my payment was received one day late--then I could have avoided being on hold for OVER A FREAKING HOUR, and I wouldn't have had to bother the dear, dutiful, now-sighing-a-bored-and-patronizing-sigh-in-the-background Ms. White with such a trivial issue in the first place!
Seriously. Would it have been that hard or costly to put one simple little sentence on that notice to explain that? It's not like the IRS paid for that paper notice, or the ink that was printed on it, or the envelope it was mailed in, or the stamp that was affixed to it. I DID. So how difficult could it be to include in such notices the actual reason you are getting them?! Wouldn't that just be a clever idea or what?
In the words of my mother, Ergle.
So really, what I got out of this whole experience is, other than that the IRS stands for I'm Really Stupid, is that when you are on hold--be it for 60 seconds or over 60 minutes--when they tell you that "your call is important to us," they are actually lying. Like, for real.
And also, perhaps more importantly, somewhere in the IRS call center is some lady allegedly named "Ms. White," who is way too easily bored and annoyed
