1. May experience a delay...

[jack]

There are two sorts of people listening to "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. You may experience a delay.". People trying to achieve something in their life, and people who just want to listen to the message.

You might think the latter was just sarcasm. But even if there aren't any people, I think it's a sort of people.

And in actual fact, when writing the first sentence, I actually considered ringing back just to transcribe the message accurately, so it IS possible someone would just want to listen to the message.

If I go on, every sentence needing a sentence to explain it, this'll go on forever. Literally. It's called a Markov chain. Look it up, people. Unless one of the sentences is explained by a previous sentence. Or itself. But being explained by itself isn't really "needing a sentence to explain it". But then, a pre-existing sentence isn't either.

Anyway, there are two sorts of people. Almost all of them actually ARE experiencing a delay. Per se. Qua delay. Ipso facto. Et cetera. A very few of them may NOT be experiencing a delay. But no-one MAY be experiencing a delay. Why pay someone to record a message that is ALWAYS false simply by listening to it?

Why not go the whole hog and say something like "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. This statement is false."? At least that would be an INTERESTING wasteful inanity.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I hate silly phone messages too, but with me it depends very much on what sort of music they make me listen to in between. If it's silly messages and pop music, by the time someone actually answers, mongoose is showing her little teeth. On the other hand if they politely intersperse it with Bach (or even Mozart, come to that), mongoose doesn't mind so much. Mongoose is usually playing Mini Match on the Power Pets site with the other hand while she's waiting anyway. :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The music here was actually acceptable (it was something modern, but seemed to have some sort of soul rather than just being painful or the most generic possible). That alone pre-empted out a large chunk of my rant, though see reply to flurble.