The Next Luxury Item for the Rich: Talking to Humans
In the future, you’ll have to pay to talk to someone
I remember what it was like to pick up the phone, call my doctor and speak directly to a person who knew me by name. That’s gone now.
In the future, just talking to another person might be a luxury only the rich can afford. Having a real human say, “How can I help you?” will likely cost $100 per hour.
The rest of us will be stuck arguing with bots.
This trend isn’t new
I didn’t realize until I started thinking about it just how many human interactions have already gone away. Do you know that some people used human-run answering services before answering machines and voicemail came along? That option disappeared a long time ago, but it was one of the first human-on-human interactions to go away.
I took my young grandson to a casual restaurant recently that used to have actual servers come to your table to take your order. I hadn’t been there for a long time, but discovered that now they want you to walk in and enter your order on a touchscreen. When your food is ready, you collect it and carry it to the table yourself. You fetch your own condiments and drinks and clean up after yourself when you are done.
I won’t go back. If I’d wanted the fast-food experience, I’d have gone to one of those places, but I didn’t. I had wanted a server to take care of my grandson and me, and I expected to tip that person appropriately. Another job lost, another meal diminished.
That’s just food. But when it comes to your health, the loss of human contact is much worse.
The case of the disappearing humans
If you’re much younger than I am, you may not realize that you used to be able to call your bank, pharmacy, etc. and speak to a human without pressing multiple numbers. Someone answered the phone and directed you to the correct person.
You have no idea how nice that was, or how much faster. Or just how much less stressful and annoying and frustrating it was. If you think spending several minutes going through the process of listening to interminable options and pressing buttons and then being on hold for a prolonged time is normal, well, it’s not. Or it didn’t used to be.
We handle a lot of things on our own now that used to require human interaction but now require a phone or an internet connection.
Got drugs?
Getting through to my pharmacy is now such a hassle that I stopped trying. It’s literally faster and easier to go there in person to tell them to order my medication that my doctor has already told them to order.
The hassle I endure is something that would not have happened back when we had locally owned pharmacies where the owners got to know the customers. Every single month, when I go to pick up my prescription, they tell me they didn’t order it because it turns out my insurance doesn’t cover it.
Every single month, I tell them I am completely aware that my insurance does not cover it and that I work an extra job to pay for it and I would very much like them to actually sell it to me. Every single month, this is news to them.
It is impossible, they say, to simply place a note on their system with this information. I will have to call them each month, they say. I tell them I can’t navigate their system.
This is why I go there in person twice a month; once to tell them I want the medication and then another time to actually pick it up.
I can do this because I live very near this pharmacy. That’s not a practical thing to do with every business I need to speak to. Half the time it’s literally impossible because the people I call are not even on my continent.
Chatbots are cheap
Chatbots will talk in a loop to the end of time and never expect a paycheck. I have never gotten any information I need from a chatbot, so now I just immediately begin asking for a human. Sometimes that eventually works. Nobody likes this system, except business owners, presumably.
I seethe when forced to repeatedly listen to those recorded messages that tell me how much they value their customers and how important my call is to them. If they truly valued their customers, they’d hire some actual humans to take our calls.
But it is cheaper to make us wait and wait. They know we will either give up and just deal with the problem ourselves or, if it’s a vital matter, grimly wait forever for their one harried human to pick up our call and then almost immediately transfer us to another circle of voicemail hell or drop the call so we have to start over.
Advertisements aren’t the sacred truth some people think they are
It’s cheaper to advertise how wonderful your product is than to spend money increasing the quality of your goods or services. Apparently a lot of people unquestionably believe advertising, which explains a lot about politics.
Maybe these gullible people truly believe the recorded message that tells them how important their call is.
Much more medical care is on your own
People used to stay in the hospital several days for things they are now told to handle at home. You will probably be sent home about an hour after undergoing surgery with general anesthesia.
I had to give intravenous antibiotics to my husband at home multiple times per day for weeks and clean and dress a pretty gnarly infected wound. I have no medical training so that was super fun and definitely didn’t scare me.
The drugstore is full of test kits you can buy to find out what disease you might have without seeing your doctor; which is good, because your doctor doesn’t have time to see you.
So many wellness and/or medical companies exist online. You can get a prescription for all kinds of things via an online doctor’s one-minute assessment. I get the appeal, because it takes forever to get an appointment with your real doctor.
You might be surprised by how many people order sketchy medications from sketchier online services based in China. You can buy things like bacteriostatic water to mix them with and syringes to inject them with on Amazon. All these things will be marked as “not intended for human use.”
That’s right. They’re just for research. We all think we can do our own research now, so why not?
I wonder how much longer it will be before all non-wealthy people provide most of our medical care for ourselves. We’ll get kits through the mail with links to explanatory YouTube videos. We will decide what drugs and supplements we want to take. We’ll get them from sketchy online sources that are cheaper and easier to deal with than our pharmacy.
Maybe we’ll deal with certain minor surgeries this way, too: “Hey, boss, I won’t be coming into work today. My DIY appendectomy kit came in.”
There’s nobody to complain to
I don’t know if I actually have an anxiety problem or if it’s just dealing with all this irritating stuff that raises my frustration levels. And there’s nothing and nobody to which you can direct your ire. You cannot complain to a human because you can’t get to one.
People used to occasionally tweet about especially bad service and add the offending company’s hashtag and get some kind of satisfaction, but then Twitter was replaced by a white supremacy appreciation app and now we can’t even do that.
Once we’re well and truly burnt out and depressed, at least there’s AI therapy. Yes, that’s a thing now. Instead of seeing a human therapist who will insist on a paycheck, some people tell ChatGPT all their problems for free. This horrifies me more than all the rest of it.
The only thing worse than using AI for your mental health is using it for a relationship.
The AI girlfriend or, less often, the AI boyfriend is the natural progression but come on, people. That’s both pathetic and insane. You need more real human interaction in your life, not more fakery.
But it’s not very surprising that so many lonely people have decided to settle for faux humanity rather than to insist on the real thing.
We’ve trained them to think that way.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
Parents owned country grocery store and gas station on the highway out of town. I remember Mobil regular priced at $0.19 gallon. Parents made $0.03 gallon. Curators stayed in their cars, I pumped the gas, checked the oil, aired the tires and cleaned the windshield for fill-ups. 20 gallons was about average; around $0.60 profit. Maybe they buy something else, have a Coke, peanuts and gossip…
I go out of my way to make sure I have a human involved in certain transactions and situations. Here’s a fun one: the IRS! Especially earlier this year to ask questions about estate returns, etc. No way was I going to be happy with the info on the website- it was vague and not specific to my situation.
If there’s a question about my meds- I will wait to speak to a live human being, preferably one with pharmacist in the title. I once avoided a terrible situation where I was given the wrong dosages and my allergy to certain meds was completely ignored by my then doctor. I could have had ended up hospitalized or worse.
Luckily I had an excellent pharmacist call the doctor’s office and explain. She then went in to tell me that particular practice was notorious for terrible prescription errors!
Now imagine people with severe mental illness or a chronic illness who rely on medication to keep them functioning in a better place- and dealing with AI generated menus, customer service bots and health insurance companies in general, etc. I saw my mother start to go thru it a few years ago with lupus and needing anti depressants. She passed away in 2019, and my father go thru the VA maze, plus his supplemental insurance on top of his Medicare. He spent a lot of time on the phone for blood thinners and glaucoma meds. By the time he got to an actual human sometimes he was pretty spicy to deal with by then, understandably.
When my Dad died last October I had a lot of phone calls to notify not just family or friends, but the VA, his former doctors, his car and home insurance, his bank, etc etc
It was a mix of lovely humans who were kind and sympathetic and efficient and AI generated menus and CSA’s that were confusing and annoying. The funeral home luckily was human beings. That will be the last straw- when you have to speak to a bot about a family death. Then we are fully in the dystopian timeline.