EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad. In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies. Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

It’s like a CEO heard a joke or saw a comic where this happened and thought it was the best idea possible. “If we add in waiting time for no reason then some of the people will hang up and go away.” It’s the same logic as making anyone who wants to close an account (such as Netflix) jump through 3 people and a million hoops. Seriously, I moved to a town where Comcast has no Internet service, I looked it up on their online service tool. They STILL ran me through retention even after they looked it up and confirmed it internally, and I had to go through 10 extra minutes of some lady reading from a script before they’d kill my account, and then had the gall to ask if I wanted to complete a customer service survey.