I am on hold with music that is no doubt the same music played on loop in the fifth circle of hell. It’s been 35 minutes. It will be 50 minutes before the system will hang up on me because I am not a leaf in its automated customer-service decision tree. I am angry and frustrated. There is no way to talk to an actual human. 

My credit card company referred me to a monitoring service when its data systems were breached (again). The monitoring service sends me a sexual-predator alert about my file. What? I can’t get into my account because my password won’t work, and I have to be on the site to change my password. 

I call the customer-service number and try to get myself routed to a human by saying the word “agent” 25 times. By the time I get to an actual human, she sympathizes and says that the magic word is “fraud”—you always get to a human immediately because in the case of fraud, the credit card company is the victim. The fraud humans can route you to other humans who can help me change my password. It turns out that no one thinks I’m a sexual predator, I just live in the vicinity of one.

Sound familiar? In the increasingly automated world of customer service, custom service—actual humans who can solve problems and answer questions—is on the wane. What we increasingly get are automated........

© Time