At first it started as small signs surrounding certain sectors of the economy that responded centrally to some sort of epic event. Like Hurricanes affecting Homeowners Insurance Companies, that sort of thing. A recording, and then later on it starts to show up in websites as well, “Due to high call volume, your wait to talk to a representative may be very long. Please use…” and the message usually trails off to some sort of self-service arrangement or DIY resource.

Over time I started to suspect that more and more sectors, and the companies with them were all just recording this line in their automated greeting audio, put on their website, trotted out for everyone to see. Now I see it in high tech companies, and of course, the wretched guilt-ridden abominations will go unnamed here, because if I were to name them, I’d never hear the end of it, but know that they provide a bridge to nowhere and they are proud of it.

Why does it seem that everyone is encountering higher than normal call volume, obviously we have an active pandemic in play, plus the world is flying apart at the seams, so all of that makes sense, but what doesn’t really make a lot of sense is openly advertising your failures. Why are the people in short supply? Last I checked, there were seven billion people on Earth, is the labor supply that constrained and limited? So there are a few ways to paint between the lines on this proliferation of corporate excuses for a lack of human talent to perform services for the basics, and corporations are really free to point at any of these damning options:

• They are too cheap and too lazy to hire the right people to do the work. Too disorganized to have human resources on hand to address surge conditions, even if they are unusual, and perhaps the unwillingness to hire and train more people to meet the needs from their customer base.
• That people are too dull to actually do the work. How is the education system? Is it functioning properly? Are people being taught how to perform the work, and is there work ethic consistent with actually performing well in that job?
• That wages are too low to attract the proper talent. That all the financial considerations are made top-down, with CEO’s getting lovely paychecks and to meet those requirements, some sacrifices have to be made?
• That through poor planning, insufficient quarantine procedures, insufficient testing, insufficient contact tracing, and a poor handling of an active highly communicable pandemic, your labor force that otherwise would be available to meet the needs of your company are either out sick, or dead?

Obviously all of these are loaded options. There is no positive way to spin any of it. Either the company has failed, its culture is corrupt, the indigenous population is insufficient when it comes to providing a robust and brilliant source of talent, or you may find your headquarters in a country that has massively failed to address life in a pandemic.

What should be a matter of corporate shame is just another throwaway excuse to cut human labor, and raise the ambient suffering of using whatever product it is to just beneath the point where buyers remorse and professional regret at hopping into bed with such a failed and backward organization is enough to make them jump overboard and go back to swimming.

The first place where a company starts to die is the soft underbelly parts, the places where when you cut, the blood that seeps out isn’t that noticeable. Because you can hide behind your shield of the permanent excuse, high call volume. Yes, it’s high all right, and you’re doing nothing to address it. Maybe because you won’t, maybe because it’s self-inflicted wounding, maybe because the local talent supply is just not bright enough to actually do the work.