Dogs Prevent Owner From Reaching Bank Customer Service Department
Dog prepares to bark at phone
LOS ANGELES, CA – Nate Orndorff has a problem with his bank’s automated telephone system. It seems the system only recognizes voice responses insead of keypad entries. For most people this would not be a problem, but for Nate it is almost impossible to reach customer service. You see, Nate has four dogs.
As Mr. Orndorff explains, “My dogs always bark whenever I’m on the phone. They’re not necessarily barking at me, it just so happens that they bark a lot. Outside, it’s squirrels, airplanes or just plain air. Inside, the cat, sounds on the television or noises from outside drive them crazy. So, they bark.”
You can see where this is going. When the bank’s voice system asks for his account number, the dogs bark. The system replies, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please repeat your account number.”
Sometimes Nate gets lucky and is able to go through several questions without the dogs barking, but he is never able to reach a live person.
“The dogs seem to know just when I’m about to make a breakthrough and then one of them barks softly at the last question. The system just kicks me out and I have to start all over again,” he said.
So far, Nate’s solution has been to drive to the bank to take care of his business. He has made numerous complaints about the voice-only system, but the bank has ignored his requests for help. “They simply don’t seem to care that I can’t call them,” said Mr. Orndorff. “They just said to use my cell phone from another location where there aren’t any dogs. I can’t afford to use up my minutes on my cell phone and the cost of gas to drive to the bank is draining me dry.”
Requests for comment to the bank went unanswered. And Nate is thinking of changing banks. “I’ll be sure to check on what kind of telephone system they have first,” he declared.
October 30, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Instead of going through all that, why does he not simply spend the day or two it would take to teach the dogs not to bark? How does it become the bank’s problem that he is an irresponsible dog owner?
Nate there is getting exactly what he deserves. I do feel sorry for the dogs though.
October 31, 2008 at 12:20 am
Hi, Rooker. Thanks for your comment. You make a good point. This actually did happen a couple of times, but the story was written tongue-in-cheek just to illustrate the potential inconveniences posed by some customer service answering systems that don’t offer the option of keypad entry. The background noise just happened to be dogs, but it could have been a baby crying, an airplane flying over or the spin cycle on the washing machine.
The dogs are doing just fine and were not harmed during the writing of this story (or at anytime before or after). They still bark, though.