I had to make phone call to what I assumed was a homegrown Maine business. All I wanted to do was ask a few routine questions. How could I have known that I was about to enter one of the most inhumane telephone torture chambers I’d ever experienced – a tele-cell of horrors so diabolical in design and execution that I later learned Saddam himself once considered using it in his palaces, but judged it too cruel?

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

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 Ignore-you Enterprises, LLC. Your call is very important to us.”

Let me stop here for a minute to say something that is probably obvious to all, but I’ll repeat it anyway so we’ll never forget it. When a company has the gall, the nerve, the chutzpah to use a sterile recording device to answer the phone, and that recording device begins with the obviously untrue phrase, “Your call is important to us,” then you know you’re in for a long, ugly siege and you’re not going have a “nice day.” Important, indeed.

One of the most evil aspects of these tele-systems is that, rather than trying to make them more user-friendly, their designers insist on doing everything possible to make them even more frustrating, tedious and draining, more diabolical, time-consuming and nerve-wracking.?

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. 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 permit helping you with your routine question. But as useless as these people may be, it’s still nice to get a living, breathing human being who is able to fog a mirror.

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 live human being foolishness. 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 enter a number to begin the whole thing 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 monotonous machine is through with its business and 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 unworthy 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 sometime 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 letters of someone’s last name. Have you??

After several hours in this voice mail prison, I was angry and exhausted and my ear lobes were severely damaged. So, I hung up in disgust and a few days later I called a personal injury lawyer. In fact, I’m on hold right now waiting to talk to an associate. It shouldn’t be too long because the woman on the recording said my call is very important to them. A lawyer wouldn’t tell an associate to say that to me if it wasn’t true. Would he?

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