Oh, for the sound of a human voice | Manawatu-Wanganui News | Local News in Manawatu-Wanganui

You could be waiting with a phone glued to your ear for 45 minutes when calling a customer service centre - but not in Wanganui.

Call your local district council and the response is immediate. And surprisingly - in an age where automated messages outnumber people - they have a person on the other line.

If a random, unscientific survey by the Wanganui Chronicle is representative, reaching an automated machine message is the norm when calling large organisations such as the Inland Revenue Department, Accident Compensation Corporation, and big telecommunications or energy companies. And it's not uncommon to be put on hold for the best part of an hour.

According to our survey, IRD was the worst culprit - disconnecting our caller twice due to "overloading" before finally admitting, via a robotic automated message, the hold time would be longer than 45 minutes.

But all five local councils and the local district health board responded in less than a minute, with a human, not a machine, on the line.

Wanganui resident Marie Edwards has been a victim of IRD's lengthy call waiting times and remembers giving up before reaching an actual human.

"I rang up IRD and it said the expected wait was more than 45 minutes, so I hung up because it was so long.

"But then you get angrier when you call back because you have to wait again."

ACC and government-run student loan organisation Studylink were not much better. Studylink took 10 minutes to respond to a student loan inquiry, and with ACC the Wanganui Chronicle's caller gave up after being on hold to for more than 10 minutes with no end in sight.