19/11/99

Alexander Graham Hell

The only thing lacking in communications these days is, well, communication.

    Remember the good old days?
    "Hello?"
    "ALLO!"
    "Can you hear me?"
    "Can't hear! Speak louder!"
    You shout. She hears.
    "Nu! So talk!"
    You ask for the bookkeeper. The WHAT? she says. THE BOOKKEEPER. She hears.
    She mutters something rude. You hear. Offended, you respond with an earful, which she hears but she couldn't care less and puts you on eternal hold.
    Ah, the good old days. Then, at least, you could reach out and be shouted at by someone.
    Now?
    "Hello," says the voice, loud and clear and friendly.
    "Hello," you say, "I'd like to --"
    But it's a voice. There's no ear. You feel like an idiot for having said hello to a tape recording. Not that it cares.
    "You have reached the offices of Cohen, Cohen, Cohen and Cohen. If you would like to speak to Cohen, press 1 now. If you would like to speak to Cohen, press 2 now. If you would ..."
    But it's Kohn you want, or at least, you think that's his name. He has a South African accent, you're sure of that, but the recording doesn't provide that information as a dialing option.
    Of course, by now, most people are used to this and figure they can skip the droning details by just pressing 0, which is supposed to connect you to a person specially hired to deal with automatophobic nebishes like you. Heh-heh. It doesn't always work like that.
    So you press 0.
    You should not have pressed 0, because that brings you back to:
    "You have reached the offices of Cohen, Cohen, Cohen and Cohen..."
    This time you have to listen to the whole bloody message, all the while holding back the urge to do the normal thing, that is, to talk.
    And, my mother points out, what if you got a wrong number? There's no one to tell you. If you leave a message? You'll never know what happened to it.
    I mention my mother because she brought up the whole subject to me of automatic telephone answerers. She worked in an office in Tel Aviv, so she came across this irritating menace all the time.
    "Don't you just hate it?" she said.
    "Yeah, like anytime I try to call you at the office." (This is the same mother who wonders why I never call.)
    "Oh," she said. "Just press 6."
    Will somebody tell me: Where have all the people gone? Where are all those gum-chomping receptionists, those graceless yahoos who used to answer our calls with half a brain, which is at least half a brain more than we get now?
    It might not be so bad being connected to a fully automated recepter if I was a fully automated sender. Y'know, something like: "This is the automatic speaker of Sam Orbaum. If you are in, press 1 now. If you are out, press 2 now. If you can call back later, press 3 later. If you wish to put me on hold, play music now. When you can find some goddam human being to actually speak to me, just pick up the goddam phone and say something, fer chrissakes, now. If I got fed up waiting, I will press 1 then. If..."
    I once got a small measure of revenge against an old fashioned answering machine, the kind that used to offer just one option: "please leave your name and number and I'll call back."
    I'd spoken into this infernal machine plenty, and I was more than a mite fed up with it. 
    One day, I taught it a lesson.
    "H'lllllowwww," began my message, in a painfully torpid, atonal drawl that sounded like I was playing a 45 rpm record at 33. "Th'ssssss isss Sssssaaaammmm spikkkkingggg..."
    And then I called back. Like a 33 playing at 45: high-pitched, squeaky, super-speedy. "Thzsmspkng..."
    Its alarmed owner bashed it a few times, replayed my messages and, hearing no improvement, sank into a blue funk, wondering how much it was going to cost to fix the damn thing. Fortunately, she called me back before calling the repairman, and I told her the truth. 
    I must shamefully admit that I too impose this sort of demon on people who try to call me, but it's not my fault. Everyone at the Post -- like everyone everywhere else, it seems -- has this thing they call voice mail.
    I don't know, maybe we got a good discount on this system, but as an instrument of irritation, it's a double whammy: for any of a number of reasons, I don't get the message, so they don't get called back.
    When I'm about to listen to the queue of messages, I first shut off the air conditioner, close my office door, shush anyone in the room, tensely grip my pen, take a deep breath and finally press the buttons that will start the recording.
    "Bzzup." That's the first message. Then, "Ding!," and I am given a series of options: to save, press this, to erase, press that. By now I should remember what to press for what, but too often I hit the wrong button and -- "Bzzup." Replay.
    My next important message is "Zmmmug." That is followed by a long background conversation by two people who are not aware they are speaking into my voice mail, who had no intention of calling me, and who I have no interest in listening to. But because of this cockamamie system we have, I can't cut off the message in mid-blather; I have to wait for the "Ding!"
    Another exciting feature of our system is that it plays music to me. When it can't find the "Ding!" on cue, it goes "Dum-dum-te-dum, dum-dum-te-dum" until it does find the "Ding!" Sometimes, and I'm not exaggerating, it'll play an entire concerto, and then continue with a few minutes of dead air, before finally ding!ing me. (I have found that, if I get impatient and hang up, I have to listen to the whole thing all over again the next time I tap into my voice mail.)
    After a few more Bzzups and Zmmmugs, a couple of scratchy, unhearable messages, many clicks, some unwanted cross-wire yakkety-yaks and the full gamut of electronic hiccupry, finally, A Voice!
    "Uh. Hello? Uh. I, uh, is that, uh, this is, uh, wait a minute, oh hell, who'm I calling, uh..."
    I am still gripping my pen, and I'm sweating now, not because the AC is shut off, but because I'm worried I might miss something vital. And don't think I don't get important messages with vital information in them. But no pen has yet been invented that writes fast enough to get it all down:
    "On your way home pick up breadmilkeggsflourvanillaCokeandtwochickens. Bye. Click. Ding!" Or, "Please call Dr. Rothenberg URGENTLY at sixninesixfourfourninesix. Click. Ding!"
     The obvious thing to do is hit the Replay button. I do:
    "nillaCokeandtwochickens. Bye. Click. Ding!" Or, "ixfourfourninesix. Click. Ding!"
    Does this happen only to me?

THE PROBLEM with progress is that it's not always progressive. You just can't communicate through communications anymore.
    Some years ago, a terrorist group phoned The Jerusalem Post to claim responsibililty for some dastardly act. The terrorist spokesman did not, however, call the direct hotline to the Editor-in-Chief. He got through to the Books Department, where some poor pup answered his phone and got the shock of his life. All aquiver, he transferred the call, the terrorist repeated his evil message, got put on hold while someone else got the shock of her life, got transferred again, and -- well, in the end, he did manage to relay his message to someone in the Editorial Department.
    The point is, he got to speak into human ears. He knew that, even if he was getting bounced around our phone system, he was being dealt with. Not long after that, we proudly installed an automated, person-free telephone-call processor, and I suppose the terrorists got frustrated because we never heard from them again.