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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY We crave a human element If there is one thing elderly people don't like, it is change -- particularly change that makes no sense. It's not that we older folks are hard-headed and against improving things. It's just that we truly believe the old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." When was the last time you called an insurance company, a bank, or any other large business and instantly talked to a human being? What you're likely to hear is a metallic voice saying, "If you want to find out about the balance in your checking account, press 1. If you want to know the balance of any other account, press 2. If you want to transfer money from one account to another, press 3." And so on. A caller hanging on through all of this would finally be told the three-digit number assigned to a real live person, or some systems automatically send the caller to an operator when the end of the recorded menu is reached. If you press a number you're likely to get another recording that says, " All of our account representatives are busy. Please hold." So you hang on the phone and hear what used to be called "elevator music" back when Muzak piped bland tunes into businesses. And you wait. And you wait. My wife, Nora, says that if you ever want to listen to music, and your radio or record player isn't working, all you have to do is dial up one of these big companies that put you on hold, and you'll never run out of music. She says some enterprising company could do us all a favor by publishing a directory for "on-hold" music: 1. Corporation XYZ will feature jazz on all their "on hold lines" this week. 2. Corporation ABC is bringing to their on-hold customers, at great expense, a revival of Beatles' music this week. 3. A company selling camping gear will feature Garth Brooks and western music on their on-hold all this week. Another feature of these automatic answering devices that irritates people is the practice of assigning a three-digit number to each employees. The recorded voice says, "If you know the extension number of the person you are calling, please enter that number now." Most people don't know the extension number, of course, so the recorded voice reads names and numbers of employees until the caller hears the one he or she wanted. What if Heaven had a telephone answering system like the ones the big corporations have? It might work something like this: (SOUND:) Numbers being punched into a telephone. Phone rings. (RECORDED VOICE:) If you have a touch-tone phone, you may select from the following options: If this is an emergency, press 1 now. If this is about past prayers, press 2. If you need to repent, press 3. To check on the status of your request, press 4. If you are angry, the number you are calling has been disconnected, so please hang up and re-dial. For all other prayers, our business hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time. If you are calling in this time period, please press 5 now. (PHONE RINGS, RECORDED VOICE) All our angels are busy right now. Please stay on the line and the next available representative will speak to you. Have your born-again date and ID number ready. (SOUND,CLICK, HYMN MUSIC, RECORDED VOICE) All our angels are still busy. However, your questions and comments are very important to us, so please stay on the line. (CLICK, HYMN MUSIC) . Of course, this is not the way that God (or heaven) works. Answering machines that gave callers a recorded menu of services became popular a few years ago. Even nonprofit agencies signed up for the systems when they were new. They were sold on the idea that a good bit of money could be saved by eliminating receptionist jobs. Now interest in the elaborate answering machines appears to have peaked. Some agencies and companies are learning that dispensing with the human touch is not the way to help callers, even if the system saves the cost of telephone operators. Most elderly people and many young ones, too, think trading the position of a live receptionist for a mechanical device can be a real waste of money. The people who put large sums of money into those machines that keep you from talking to real live people don't realize that you can't bond with a machine. Clients and customers get impatient and irritable. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA