The other day I had to make phone call to what I assumed was a homegrown Maine business. All I wanted to do was ask what I assumed were a few routine questions. How could I have known that I was about to enter a telephone chamber of horrors?

My whole awful experience has left permanent scars on my psyche, as well as several ugly calluses on both ear lobes.

It all began so innocently.

I picked up the phone one morning to call a business. After dialing the number I heard a few rings and then a recorded voice answered, saying: “You have reached the offices of Annoying Enterprises. Your call is important to us.”

Let me stop here for a minute to say something that is probably obvious to all, but I’ll repeat it for emphasis: When a company has the gall, the chutzpah to use a sterile, non-breathing recording device to answer their phone and that recording device begins with the sinister phrase, “Your call is important to us,” you know you’re in for a long, ugly siege and you’re not going “have a nice day.”

Important, indeed.

One of the worst features of these systems is that, rather than trying to make them more user-friendly, their designers do everything possible to make them even more tedious and time-consuming and destructive.

A while back some of us clever callers learned that, when confronted with an impersonal telephone recording, we could cut the message off at the pass by quickly hitting 0 and getting transferred to an operator – a real live person who can actually fog a mirror. Of course, the person you were transferred to was most often a temp or a trainee who was lucky to know where he or she was working that day, let alone having any useful information that would help you with your “routine” question. But as useless as these people may be, it’s still nice to get a live human being all the same. Well, this serious design flaw in the gizmo was soon detected by the system designers and quickly corrected so as to put an end to that that “flaw.”

Callers, it was felt, should be forced to endure the entire menu of choices – a menu that is often so long and complex that by the end you have forgotten most of your choices and must punch a number to begin the whole process again.

Now, if you should, in desperation, hit 0 during this menu reading, you are told that you have entered a wrong number and should just sit and wait until the machine gets to the end of its long, complicated list of choices. Then and only then will you be allowed to make your choice.

The more elitist systems will make you feel more frustrated by saying something like: “If you know your party’s extension” (which you never do) “you can dial it at any time. The rest of you suckers will just have to remain trapped in here until I’m through.”

Other systems sometimes tell you that you can punch in the first few letters of your party’s last name. I’m now convinced that instruction is just something to keep us busy and distracted because I’ve never gotten anyone’s extension by punching in a few stupid letters of someone’s last name. Have you?

After what seemed like several hours of this, I was so angry and exhausted and my ear lobes were so damaged, that I hung up in disgust and decided to call a personal injury lawyer. In fact, I’m on hold right now waiting to talk to one of the firm’s associates.

It shouldn’t be too long now, because the woman on the tape said my call is important to them. It’s nice to finally feel important.

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine, including “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information.” Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.

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