Behind the Ironic Column

I’ve had the unfortunate experience in recent weeks of dealing with a government agency that has a long and convoluted series of voice mail menus and messages.  I’m a veteran of voice mail systems, so it only took a couple of passes for me to know which numbers led to more of the same and which ones would put me out into a holding queue for a real person. 

Of course, they forced me to listen to a series of messages they had determined to be “important” before I could get to those numbers, but that’s not an unusual feature.  The most annoying thing was the cheery message that periodically cut through the canned music to say “we’re sorry for YOUR delay.”  

While it’s certainly nice of them to acknowledge the delay, I feel vaguely irritated by the YOUR in that statement.  It’s not MY delay — I didn’t cause it and if I had any control over it, I certainly wouldn’t be experiencing it.  All they really need to do is change the pronoun. Or just leave the pronoun out and say THE delay to make it more impersonal.  And it would be very nice if they added some general guess about how long the delay might be.  I know that other systems do add something like that. When they tell me the average hold time is 45 minutes, I hang up and try at a different time.  In this system I have no idea how long it might be, but every time they come on and mention YOUR delay, my stress level ticks up a notch.

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