The hot new status symbol: phone calls

Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI

There are a lot of ways you might characterize customer-service calls: frustrating, time-consuming, annoying. Increasingly, people are using a new word to describe these interactions: fancy. In a world where navigating even the tiniest blip can turn into a consumer nightmare, the ability to speak with a real, live human being has become special.

I probably do not have to tell you how difficult, if not impossible, it is to get in touch with a customer-service representative nowadays.