Had this experience yesterday: my wife and I had free tickets for our kids to go to Elitch Garden’s amusement park, but didn’t know if we could use them on a holiday. My wife called them up and got their automated voice system.

Now she needed an actual person to talk to, but as is par for the course, this phone tree was trying to prevent her getting one easily. And yep, they succeeded in that goal.

“Press 0 if you’d like to speak to an operator.” She did, heard a beep, then got disconnected. She tried this five more times, and each time the system hung up on her.

We didn’t want to make the 30-minute drive with three hyped-up kids only to find out at the gates that our tickets weren’t valid, so she kept calling. At this point, the phone number stopped working altogether: “We’re sorry, we cannot connect you to that number…” My guess is that their phone system wasn’t able to handle the holiday call volume.

Double-fail. Sorry, but at this point, I was willing to change all our plans just because I couldn’t talk to someone on their end. Hopefully someone from Elitch Gardens will read this and get a phone system that doesn’t lose them business.