I Can't Hear You

It’s been a frustrating morning.

Now, I know that you people many of whom are reading this at work are thinking to yourselves, “How can someone who is not working at some dead-end, crap-laden occupation, where you have to endure a commute that is characterized by miles of tedium punctuated by moments of terror, and then a series of mind-numbing status meetings, garnished with the snide comments of a nitpicking micromanager or the bloviation of the ego-in-charge, having to eat your peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a dingy basement café in your building, listening to the inane chit-chat of your office mates whose main topic of interest is American Idol - how can such a person talk about a “frustrating morning” ?

Well, fans, the cause of my frustration is Verizon. You know them - the company that advertises a huge network of support in their TV ads. Well, just try and get some of that support when you need it.

Since the heavy rains of last week, the phone lines have been almost impossible to use. The static on the line is so noisy that you cannot have a conversation. Not only the voice line, but the DSL service is also spotty at best. So I have been isolated without decent phone service, and locked out of internet service as well.

Calling for service is one of the most frustrating exercises I have experienced since that time last year when the DSL modem went on the fritz. First of all, Verizon has cleverly shielded themselves from the public by a series of automated IVR systems. IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. You cannot get an operator by dialing “0” anymore. What you get is a menu of potential reason why you might have dialed “0”. Then you are subjected to what is commonly known as “IVR Hell” where you find yourself talking to a fairly dumb computer.

Now IVR seemed like an advanced concept back in the 70’s, when techies were all aflutter about designing computer interactions to mimic human responses. I confess that in those days I had a positive impression that this type of technology could contribute to the efficiency of business communications and free some people (operators for example) of the tedium of repetition. (May I help you? Who should I say is calling? )


I do applaud some communication technologies, such as caller id, call waiting, and, of course, voice mail. But I am seriously losing my enthusiasm for the over use of IVR as a replacement for a human on the other end of the line. I would rather talk to a live nitwit than to hold a “conversation” with an automated perky voice that is nothing more than an audio representation of a line of code.

The other day, I got a phone message from a text-to-voice system. It sounded like the computer voice from Star Trek. Thanks to caller-id I recognized the name of the caller as Asian Indian. I have worked with quite a few Indians in recent years. Many of the have come to the US to work on technology projects. They are a smart, hard-working group. Although they read, write and understand English, many of them still have a strong accent that makes them hard to understand in conversation. This enterprising recruiter had overcome the accent problem by using technology.

The designers of the Verizon IVR system are probably pleased with themselves with their cleverness and conversational tone. They have reduce the human interaction to a series of choices on a menu. They have replaced thousands of operators and created a buffer for the remaining humans so that they do not have to actually talk to the rabble. The only entertainment of the whole experience was that they actually wanted the caller to get a screwdriver and bring the phone down to the basement to run a line check. ( I did not make this up).

It was at this point that I hit the 0 key a few more times – and miraculously a person came on the line. “What seems to be the trouble?” she asked through the static.
“Sorry, I cannot hear you. I have a lot of static on the line.” I said.
“What seems to be the trouble?” she said more loudly.
I had to grin at the irony of the situation.