I have trouble talking to those speech recognition voice mail things. I find it vaguely humiliating, embarassing, degrading — perhaps because it is! It is particularly irksome to do it in front of others — rather like being bladder-shy, unable to pee in front of an audience. Pushing buttons, that’s bad enough. But speaking to those things? Maybe it’s like the very early days of telephone answering machines — if you’re old enough to remember, dear reader. When they were new and rare devices, some callers felt inhibited about recording messages. They got used to it. Will I likewise get used to talking to the voice mail robot?
I’m probably not the only user of such systems to discover that you can get “please hold while I connect you to a customer service representative” by screaming fuck you at the damn thing. Apparently it has yet to evolve far enough to understand fuck you.
Meanwhile, “for quality assurance purposes your call may be monitored or recorded.” Two implicit lies are embedded right in there, to insult your intelligence: (1) recording and monitoring has some positive impact on quality; (2) quality is their objective. Customer service is exactly what they are firmly committed to avoiding. Fuck this, put the robot back on the phone.