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Dear Friends
Do you get fed up with making telephone calls to banks, companies, suppliers of gas, electricity and water etc. and being unable to speak to a real person ? I must confess that I find it extremely irritating. There is always that pre-recorded voice offering options sometimes too numerous to remember which never quite match the issue you wish to discuss. Eventually you are told you can hang-on and speak to an agent/ advisor/consultant or some other elaborately designated functionary but, sorry, they are all busy at present ! Then comes the music interspersed with inane apologies for making you hold-on for ages. At last, a voice says, “Thank you for calling N, my name is Tracey, can I help yowooo ?” After a range of security-based questions to establish that you are who you say you are and are not a front for al-Qaeda, Tracey relaxes enough to inform you that she doesn’t know the answer to your question and will have to ask her collayeg. On her return you are told that your account is paid up to date, you don’t owe them any money and there is no need to shoot yourself, unless, of course, it is your chosen way of dealing with accumulated frustration !
It seems symptomatic of our technological age that simple things are made more complex than necessary. You would think that computers, E-Mails, Internet banking, mobile phones, satellite navigation systems etc. would make life simpler and facilitate easier and more efficient transfers of information. This is far from the case. Many times I have sent an E-Mail and then have been asked to put the same information in an old-fashioned letter ! There is, of course, the Inland Revenue, who ask you to repeat the contents of your letter on their official Form.
Human contact is actually reduced by modern technology. If mobile phones were vision-phones, as they soon will be, where the parties can see each other, there will be little necessity for human beings to meet face to face at all. Care of the elderly and housebound could all be organised
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