> Related to this, I've had to call an airline and get told the queue is too long and to try calling back later. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea to implement because the queue will always be super long.

It's 100% internal metrics.

When I was in the military, there was some metric that the clinic was graded on - I think it was number of days between when an appointment was made and when the visit happened. So the clinics just didn't allow unimportant people to make appointments more than 2 weeks out.