Yeah it can be frustrating. I can’t remember the amount of times I had to call an utility company just because their bill was incorrect.

I suppose most people don’t really double check these things, but if my bill is randomly 50% more, then you can expect me to ask for rectification.

Yeah, i did notice that some places when put on hold don’t have waiting music.

But what I’m talking about is usually at the beginning of a call, where you just pressed some buttons to be put in the queue. Then you have music and didn’t talk to anybody yet, so no option to ask for no music.

Ideally it would be put into law that for accessibility all these phone systems should offer the option to turn off the music at the beginning.

I’ve heard about socks for obfuscation of vpn traffic, but never understood how to configure it. Is it possible to use socks with your own wireguard server, or with some free/cheap vpn?

When I was living in Europe, I was basically using anything but phone. Usually email worked or support via the website. Now in Australia, the support via website/email is very often not functional, so I’m forced to call people.

Can’t say it’s an enjoyable experience, but I suppose it’s teaching me to try and do more via phone. I struggle a lot though.

Yeah exactly.
Usually I try online support first, but in some situations you get a person that doesn’t understand your question or doesn’t forward you to somebody with the right knowledge and you still spend way too much time on it. Calling would be better in that case, but it’s hard to know beforehand.

It also stresses me out that they have these chatboxes on websites, where (after trying to find the correct response to get a human) they will take 10-15 minutes to reply you, but then if you don’t reply within 2 minutes, they assume you are no longer there and close the chat. Why even?

Unfortunately not on iOS here, that sounds like a great feature though.
Did you ever have people hang up when using that? You just get a notification as soon as somebody starts speaking?

Sounds very similar to my experience.
Email is much better, but some services either don’t offer the option at all, or they reply to it very slowly.

Yeah, it just feels so exhausting to me every time. I definitely prefer the callback option, but I might still miss it if they call back much later and I already forgot about it. Then I have to call again and ask for a new callback.