For Irritation, Press @!#!

Telephone machines are getting entirely out of hand, and they don’t even have any.

Much loved by the business-school types that can proudly point to the cost savings of replacing telephone call center humans with machines, the widgets now handle both incoming and outgoing calls that demand answers.

Our health plan’s machine calls regularly demanding that the person who answers the phone answer “yes” or “no” when asked if they are my wife. It may be looking for a date, but I suspect it’s trying to get us to switch our meds from the local pharmacy to some mail-order scheme that gives the health plan a bigger cut.

It’s only a suspicion, of course. The widget on the other end stubbornly refuses to listen to anything except the questions it has asked and demands answers like a TV defense lawyer on cross examination.

Machine politics has also taken on new meaning with robo calls from politicians seeking to be elected, re-elected or just to confirm that they actually did hike the Appalachian trail. Oddly enough, the pols that wrote the Do Not Call law forgot to include calls from themselves, or in this case, their machines.

Polling firms are right behind the politicians in machines that politely ask for a few minutes of your time and are unruffled when you suggest an input port for survey shoving.

It gets worse when you are calling some tech company because the service or gizmo they provide isn’t working. Their repair-service usually isn’t either. All phones in the house lost dial tone this afternoon, so the phone company’s repair service was dialed from a cell phone.

In order, the widget that answered had to be convinced that I spoke English and that although it was being called from my mobile number, the problem was main home number. Then the machine spent some minutes testing and assured me that everything was fine. And it was –on the mobile phone. The regular phones were still DOA but the machine had disconnected. The next attempt followed the same multiple minutes of frustration but this time convinced the machine that perhaps a human ought to be involved. It must have had second thoughts, because the human conversation was then disconnected.

A third attempt to connect with a human was successful, with the problem identified and resolved. Total time slugging it out with the machines, thirty minutes. Time fixing it with the human, about two.

They’ll probably fire that human tomorrow.

He’ll get the call from a machine.

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