Online customer service has become as much of our lives as lawn care and parking—you know really important time-sucking stuff. But here’s what makes me grumpy. The recorded voice on the other end says, “While customer service is very important to us, all our operators are assisting other customers.” Translation? We’re too cheap to hire enough employees to do what we say we’re going to do. Why not come clean: “Hey sorry but we cant take your call for a variety of reasons, the IT guy’s sick, my brother-in-law is on break and the new kid we hired just took a better paying job.” We’ll all get a good chuckle and you’ll be able to swallow when you tell someone where you work. I’m Grumpy Old Dan Smith.