Is there any annoyance that quite achieves the level of automated phone menus?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes: the constant wah-wah-wah-wah of the busy signal tone.

Combine the two and you have a recipe for disaster: multiple busy signals, trying to get through to the insurance company, for days on end. Then, on day five, EUREKA! Somehow, you get through to the automated menu.

Now we're cooking. A few pecks of the phone keys and we'll be on our way to solving this problem. A little annoying hold music, I can stand that. I'm "in line" for someone to help me out.

Then there's the occasional, "Our customer service representatives are helping other people. Thank you for continuing to wait," message. Fifteen minutes on hold, but I'm not complaining. I'm still in line!

Then, the ringing tone sounds. In Pavlovian response, I just knew I was about to talk to a human being. They're forwarding my call! Here comes the help I need! And it's not even 3 p.m. yet!

Instead I got another voice recording: "The hours of this office are Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

"Due to extenuating circumstances, our customer service representative can not help you today. Please try your call again later."

And then, the unthinkable: "Click!" The computer hangs up on me!

AAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHHHH!

If AT&T really let me reach out and touch someone, I'd dial up the fools who came up with this idea and backhand them across the face. Because in essence, that's exactly what they just did to me.

What company can get away with such tomfoolery? Sadly, this is not an experience with the private sector: it is a real, actual phone call placed to a state government agency.

Specifically, this experience is with the Georgia Department of Public Health, which controls my family's health insurance because my wife is a public servant, a school teacher.

Thanks to some bureaucratic snafu, my son and I have joined the ranks of the uninsured, though hopefully on a temporary basis. All because they fumbled the package which my wife sent to fulfill their request: records that prove I am her husband and our son is her son.

Can you imagine the avalanche of paperwork this must have wrought upon the Department of Public Health? Since my wife was foolish enough to send the wedding and birth certificates weeks in advance of the deadline, our package is likely on the bottom of the pile.

Meanwhile, my medical situation hasn't been the best for the past year. A weird electrical pattern in my heart pops up every now and then, and I've had quite a few ER visits and several hospitalizations. The hospital stays usually end with my heart getting zapped back into regular rhythm, which I thankfully don't remember due to the fantastic amnesia drugs they shoot in my IV just before throwing the switch.

This condition of mine, called atrial fibrillation, can come and go at anytime. I first noticed it after sitting up from a nap and began breathing like I just ran a marathon. Then, lying down to read my son's night-night story, I could barely get the words out of my mouth.

My cardiologist, Dr. Nimish Dhruva, suggests I need a surgery to correct the electrical malfunction. They're gonna snake two catheters into my heart while it's still beating, zap a few holes in my heart to show the electricity where to go and, hopefully, there will be some relief. Sounds pretty freaky but eventually I'll get over that, I suppose.

I don't have it near as bad as so many other people out there. Atrial fibrillation isn't a death sentence. I'm on a blood thinner to make sure I don't have a stroke, and another pill helps keep my heart beating on time.

But I'm in my early 30s and I already have a cardiologist, which is stressful enough on its own. That pales in comparison with trying to get satisfaction from a phone system operated by the state bureaucrats. I doubt we'll have success soon, but I feel pretty confident we're not the only family whose insurance has been canned because the state didn't do its job.

Just a little polite customer service from a courteous human being. That's all I ask.