That's true. They want to make sure that when you get thrown over to a never answered voicemail, at least you have the right department that's ignoring you. 

I get why stations wouldn’t want to bother with some callers. I used to get weird calls all the time, from people wanting to know “what time will it start to rain?” to questions about sports scores. One guy wanted to know when the next Meatloaf LP was coming out.
 
They can be annoying, especially when you have a ton of other work to do. And then there are the crank callers, who deliberately try and waste your time. Which brings up a story that happened when I was at CKEY in the late 70s, and one of our sportscasters got his revenge on an absolute jackass.
 
It started when the station’s news tip line began receiving some very confusing obscene phone calls. A guy would constantly call up in the days before call display and call trace, and spew the following nonsense: (Excuse the language, but this is what he said.)
 
“Fuck off with your Joe Clark cocksucker wipeout, fuck in, fuck out.”
 
And then he’d hang up, only to call again with the exact same rant a few hours or minutes later.
 
No one knew exactly what it was he was trying to say – except that he was apparently upset with Canada’s then-Prime Minister - or why he’d chosen CKEY. But the same messages persisted for weeks and weeks. Because it was on a hotline that was answered live in case of a breaking news story, we were forced to answer the phone – even if we thought it was him. Too often, it was.
 
Finally, after trying everything else, the newsroom reported him to Bell Canada, which promised to take care of it the next time he called. Sure enough, the phone rang the next day and it started again.   
 
“Fuck off with your Joe Clark cocksucker wipeout, fuck in, fuck out.” CLICK!
 
But this time was different. Bell had managed to force the guy to stay connected to the line he’d called and he was unable to hang up. With a tape rolling in the newsroom, we heard the guy pick the receiver back up and try and dial out.
 
“What the fuck???” we heard him say in utter frustration, as he continued in vain to try and dial another number – or perhaps, redial the newsroom.
 
For nearly six hours, this drama went on, with the guy on the other end of the phone frantically trying to call out and being unable to get so much as a dial tone. By this time, Bell technicians had traced his number and authorities were dispatched.
 
The caller was charged by police with making the annoying and obscene calls and in the end, he was fined and threatened that his service would be disconnected if he ever committed a similar sin. He promised he wouldn’t and we never heard from him again.
 
But that didn’t mean he didn’t hear from us.
 
A few months passed and the case came to court. It actually made one of those small articles in the newspaper and that’s when we learned the guy’s name for the very first time – which may have been something like John Doe.
 
One of our sports guys, whose name I won’t use, had been one of the people taking a lot of this jerk’s calls and decided the punishment – a small fine and a warning - didn’t fit the crime. So he plotted his own revenge.
 
He looked up the man’s name in the phone book, found his number and dialled the seven digits.
 
The phone rang.
 
“Hello?” a familiar voice answered.
 
“Is this John Doe?” the sportsman asked in a voice tinged with sweetness and light.
 
“Yes,” came the reply. “Who’s this?”
 
Our guy ignored the question and kept right on going. 
 
“I have something I’ve been meaning to say to you. ‘Fuck off with your Joe Clark cocksucker wipeout, fuck in, fuck out!’” he screamed into the phone, before hanging up on the idiot for good.
 
I’ve always wondered what the guy made of that call and if he ever figured out how the person on the other end could have known what he’d said in all his own illicit contacts.
 
The entire thing was recorded and that’s how our sportsman became something of a folk hero in the newsroom and to anyone who’s ever had to endure an attack by telephone.

When I used to work overnights at CHML back in the 90's (when they were still playing music), there was a guy that would phone in every night, without fail, and request Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

Sometimes he'd phone more than once a night and would request it again, even after we'd played it. Ron Funnell, who also used to work overnights at the time, can verify this as true.

Then, there was a little old lady that used to phone up and chastise me for not playing Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey" in its entirety, even though I played every godawful 3:55 of it. The song has a weird fade at the end, so I think that may have led her to believe that. She would be on the phone within about twenty seconds of the song ending, like clockwork, to give me a piece of her mind.
"How could you fade out of such a beautiful song?", she used to ask.  


PJ

Corus does, too, as I just found out. But there are way too many that greet you with voicemail when you call and an often exhausting and frustrating menu of options that don't usually answer your questions. It's a delicate balance between serving the bottom line and serving the public. You know which one of those wins in most cases!