BELGRADE, THURSDAY

NEW DATA from the privately funded New Ways of Dying Institute has confirmed what many have suspected for some time: pressing the button on your phone for customer service can seriously damage your health.

The numbers of people whose deaths have been caused by waiting hours for customer service has leapt tenfold in recent years; while those who die while being led a merry dance by an automated response or a voice they just cannot understand had increased by a factor of twenty. It is now number five in causes of death in the western world.

Suicide prompted by customer service calls is also at epidemic levels. Ambulance services in Europe and America report numerous cases of people found gripping their phone so tight that it has to be removed using cutting implements.

And it’s getting worse. The more automated customer assistance becomes the more deaths are predicted. Experts are saying that by the middle of the century customer service calls may well become the biggest cause of all deaths in the western world, including old age.

Calls for inquiries have immediately run into difficulty, as politicians and lawyers who have tried to organize the investigations, have consistently found themselves hanging on the end of phones, listening to electronic instructions, as they attempt to contact various institutions to give evidence.