Getting your telephone call to a big business answered these days is like the weather – everyone complains about it, but nobody seems able to do anything about it.

One would think that with the telecommunications revolution, getting through to a live human being would have become easier. But if automation is seen as a way for vendors to replace employees, as all the major airlines except Southwest (usually a human operator answers after two rings) have been doing, the outcome for consumers has been to generate more and more wasting of your time and gnashing of your teeth.

This automated-answering binge opens the door to lucrative consulting firms that show companies how they can become even more humanly remote from their customers (which are their bread and butter). In the old Soviet Union, shoppers stood in long lines hoping the shelves would not be empty before they reached the counter. In our country, tens of millions of Americans are told to press a bewildering variety of numbers, for several tiers sometimes, then are put on hold, waiting, waiting, waiting.

When the periodic productivity figures come out showing how our economy is becoming more efficient, you can be sure the people staffing those indicator engines are not adding in the tens of billions of lost hours that are taken from consumers. But then productivity, like the definition of "efficiency," is determined within the corporation world, to the exclusion of the costs heaped onto the world at large.

The Wall Street Journal published an article May 8 whose headlines tells the story: "In Search of the Operator – Firms Spent Billions This Year to Make It Hard to Find One; How to Reach a Real Person." Reporter Jane Spencer writes that "U.S. companies this year are spending $7.4 billion to beef up their automated customer service" to make it harder than ever to reach a real person, even if you press zero.

Too many of you (40 percent according to one survey) are quickly punching zero to bypass the recorded voice and reach a human. So companies are having you punch in a secret code or say a magic word to reach a live voice. "It can take as many as five levels of queries to find a person at Compaq," Spencer found. Before it is changed, call 1-800-OKCOMPAQ.

To further drain away human contact, some companies, such as Wells Fargo and KeyCorp, are charging less-favored (read, less-affluent) customers $1 and $2 if they talk to an agent too many times in one month. For one bank, more than three times is too much. The computer breeds further stratification; BMW, reports the Journal, charges customers "$5 if they speak with a person to make a payment that can be made on the automated system." I wonder when friendly, long-time customers will be charged if they call a teller and ask about their ailing relative.

So if you are a persistent caller, you search for the codes, since, more and more, pressing zero takes you back to the main menu or disconnects the call. For your convenience, the Journal printed a list of 25 companies and how you can reach an operator. For instance, you can hit zero three times or press star twice (once per menu) or say "no easy escape."

Different industries have different hold times. "If you're calling a tech-support center," Spencer writes, "grab a Tolstoy novel." Forty-minute waits are common.

The latest computer-assisted devolution is to detect who you are before deciding how to treat you. "It" asks you questions, and if you turn out to be a big spender, you're given royal treatment: a human operator. Imagine your grandparents, used to the old telephone of the '40s and '50s, reading these words. Is this progress or regress?

After spending better parts of an hour on hold for U.S. Air a few years ago, I called CEO Steve Wolfe to complain. He had not known of his customers' long holding times, tried it himself over the next week, and then told me he was hiring 250 more operators. That was a rare ray of sunshine.

Now what would free-marketers say? That customers have made a rational decision. For maximizing their utility by spending time that way instead of, say, being with their children, marching in protest, or doubling up by doing aerobics while waiting.

Why do customers patronize these businesses? Because if they "go across the street" to a competitor, the same automated systems rear up. Where there is a company offering human beings with discretionary answers instead of rigid automated recordings, there should be a competitive edge. Ask Southwest Airlines or Federal Express, for example. But the trend seems to be going the other way. From bad to worse.