when you interact with a service online or by phone there may be software in action that mediates how you experience the service: by sorting you. Live in a high income postcode? Get routed to a sales person more quickly than if your IP address makes you look as if you come from a less promising area. On record as an awkward customer or "time-waster"? Then wait in the queue.
A perceptive article by the man who founded Project Gutenberg, invented the "e-book" and is a leading light in the open source and open content movement, Michael Hart. Read it ans simultaneously weep and rejoice.