Joe Hildebrand in Stellar Magazine: This is the greatest lie in history

There have been many lies throughout history, but Joe Hildebrand says none is so bold, so blatant, so repeated, than this big, modern lie.

There have been many great lies throughout history, such as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, “I’m not a crook” and “Excuse me, Caesar, would you mind stopping by the Senate to tidy up some paperwork?”

But none is so bold, so blatant and so often repeated as “Your call is important to us.”

This is a lie I have heard perhaps 100 times over the past week as I was somehow catapulted into a Bermuda Triangle of missed payments, missed deliveries and missed opportunities — the latter having largely resulted from the first two.

The extraordinary thing about the “Your call is important to us” lie is how quintessentially universal it is. Whether it’s government or business, whether you are trying to pay money or extract it, your call could not be less important to whoever it is you happen to be calling.

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This was put into sharp relief the other day as I was trying to pay off two speeding fines my wife had historically accrued so that she would be able to settle a registration fine that she had incurred more recently. It’s fair to say it wasn’t the happiest day of our marriage.

The total ran into the thousands and yet still, after multiple attempts, I could not get through. In short, the government was explicitly telling me: “Even if you were to pay me thousands of dollars, I still do not want to take your call.”

To be fair, this is the same way I feel when my mother rings, but I expect a little bit more professionalism from the authorities.

Likewise in the private sector it is all but impossible to speak to a human even when you are trying to pay them money, let alone when you are trying to perform any other function like, say, receiving a service for money you have already paid.

The reason is always “unusually high call volumes”, which is a peculiarly passive-aggressive form of victim blaming: the company can’t speak to you because there are too many other pesky customers like you trying to call it.

Of course, what they mean to say is: “We can’t speak to you because we haven’t hired enough Filipino workers in our offshore call centre,” but that — no pun intended — doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

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The only exception to this is if you say you want to cancel whatever service you’re ringing to talk about, which is the corporate equivalent of triple-0. In this case you will be instantly transferred from a windswept Siberian Eskimo to someone with the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama and the salesmanship of Tony Robbins.

And yet I cannot bring myself to tell a lie, even to a machine. This is in part due to Catholic guilt but mostly due to self-interest. It is a well-established fact that machines will one day take over the earth and I don’t want to be on their bad side when they do.

“Who should we kill first?” they will ask, and the chief robot will no doubt respond, “Well, let’s start with the humans who lied to our voicemail and then work our way up.”

And so I just keep waiting on the line and doing what I’m told.

After all, if we’re going to be governed by drones, we might as well learn how to act like them.

Kate Langbroek on the cover of this week’s Stellar Magazine.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten and is Editor-at-large for News.com.au.

This article originally appeared in Stellar and is reproduced here with permission. Stellar is available in today’s News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Herald Sun and Sunday Mail.