Asking for Information

Okay, this one is a little out of left field, but I need a good rant.

What is it with some people and the need to work towards an answer by asking a series of vaguely related questions, before finally asking the actual question they had in the first place?

It really bugs me.

An example: earlier today I had a very pleasant woman on the phone at work, and she asked me three questions. For one of the answers (which I will call [X]) I had to speak to another department. So, I dutifully call the other department, get all of the information I've been asked for, and go back to the woman.

I start reeling off the answers, and she interrupts me. "Oh, what I actually need to know is [Y]." Now, [Y] is vaguely related to [X], but wasn't part of the answer I'd obtained. So I call back to the other department, and obtain [Y], go back to her, finish relaying the information, and she says "ah, well, I was looking for the detail of all payments in and out, so we can figure out [Z]." Guess what I had to do to find all that out. Yep, put her on hold and go back to the other department again.

This is where I start to get ratty. Not with her - I'm a professional, after all - but with her behaviour. If she had asked me to find [Z] up-front, I could have got everything she needed in one go. The conversation would have been about half as long as she made it, because she didn't actually tell me what she wanted to know. For some perverse reason she thought she needed to tease it out of me, one snippet at a time.

So, my advice to anybody who contacts a company looking for information: start out with the end-point you want to get to. Chances are, they can figure out exactly what details you really need.