Remember those ubiquitous “under construction” signs people put on their websites back in the ’90s? Man, those were stupid—newsflash! websites take time to build!—and annoying, especially when they were animated, which seemed inevitably to be the case. Thankfully, they went the way of the dodo, but their spirit lives on in a slightly different niche, the automated telephone menu. To wit: “Please listen to all options, as our menu items have changed.”

Who could this possibly be for? Presumably this warning is meant to prevent people from calling in, pressing “3” thinking that they’re getting, say, technical support, but actually getting sales. Oh, the horror! We’d better warn unsuspecting callers that our menu items have changed! But if you haven’t called their system in a while, there is almost no way you remember which number does what, so you’ll have to listen to the menu options anyway to find out. On the other hand, often you just listened to the menu and had to call back right away (usually because you got cut off by their incompetent system), in which case the menu has most assuredly not changed—their warning is then demonstrably false.

The beauty part is that many systems won’t register the number you press until their warning message has played, so you have to sit through it whether you like it or not. In these cases I often find myself swearing at the robotic voice (usually because I just got cut off by their incompetent system)—“Please listen to all options, as our menu items [no they haven’t you stupid fuckwad, I just called but got cut off by your incompetent system] have changed.”

In summary: much of the time the menu hasn’t changed, and when it has you don’t remember, so you don’t care. Dude, WTF?