119 Million Unanswered Calls

A while back I recounted my woeful experience attempting to call the Inland Revenue...

Whilst there are 100,000 bureaucrats, few seem to have mastered answering the phone.

For three days I encountered nothing but engaged tones, at all times of the day, on three separate numbers.

Well, it appears I wasn't the only one coming up against woefully managed government services.

The Register reports...

More than a third of calls to UK Government helplines fail to connect, according to information obtained by the Liberal Democrats.

It shows that since the beginning of 2003, more than 119m calls to Government departments about pensions, taxes and benefits ended in failure with callers either getting an engaged tone or abandoning the call because they had to wait too long. The worst offenders were the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HM Revenue and Customs.

The latter is of course the Government service we all know and love hate as the Inland Revenue.

The Department for Work and Pensions? Well, whoever named it obviously had a sense of humour.