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We've come a long way to hear automated voice
(by Gene Newman - November 12, 2008)
I've been happily married for over a half century, so there's no chance at all I would even consider a fling, but lately I find I have a strange attraction for a female robot.
She answers every time I dial a certain big corporation in my futile efforts to straighten out the mess it's made of my account by its inexcusable bungling. She never reveals her name, but I call her “Cyberina” and she seems to understand my extreme frustration and genuinely wants to help.
“Your call is very important to us,” she says, and that's just what I want to hear after six months of unanswered letters of complaint.
I can detect a note of sympathy in her dulcet tones when she says, “We are experiencing a large number of calls today. There are 72 calls before yours. Your estimated waiting time is 84 minutes.”
And then she tries to soothe my tattered nerves by playing several of Led Zeppelin's top hits.
Cyberina coyly explains that she wants to record my voice if and when I ever get to speak with a real human being and she doesn't even warn me about profanity. How charming! After a week or two of hanging on I actually do get to speak with a real person, a woman in Calcutta who calls herself Debbie, but unfortunately she doesn't have a complete grasp of the English language so I don't get much accomplished.
I remember the first telephone our family got when I was a little kid. It was such a convenience not having to run down to the candy store to make a call and kindly old Mrs. Kushner, who owned the candy store, no longer had to run up three flights to tell us we were wanted on the phone. Poor Mrs. Kushner probably wanted to say that she didn't appreciate being our answering machine, but she was always so out of breath when she reached us that she could only gasp, “Telephone!”
When you lifted the receiver in those days there was a real woman on the line and her voice wasn't nearly as pleasant as Cyberina's. She sounded a little brisk and impatient when she said, “Number please” and if you tried to get by with a generality like “I want to talk to my friend Tommy. He lives in the blue house across the street,” she wasn't very accommodating and never offered to play music while I looked up the number.
We've come a long way.
Gene Newman is a resident of Parsippany
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