Blog Minx

I was doing some online banking this morning when I hit a glitch. I’d filled in a form and it would not complete – it kept asking me to tick a box that I’d already ticked. “I’ve already ticked it!” I shouted at the computer, but it ignored my banking rage. Perhaps the problem was caused by my working on a Mac, but I tried both Firefox and Safari browsers and surely in this day and age websites should cater for Mac users?

So I was forced to pick up the phone and speak to a real person. They were friendly enough, but it took much longer over the phone because they had to ask me 20 inane security questions and then put me on hold to crap music while they checked whether they could do what I wanted, and then they had to try and “upsell” me with combos and supersized fries, or the banking equivalent.

It just reinforced my dislike of telephones. My bank is trying to be very touchy-feely at the moment by having “real” people answer the phones, but that doesn’t necessarily improve the experience. Robots remain calm; people get flustered. With robots, I can just press buttons and not have to string entire sentences together. You know where you are with robots, whereas with people the conversation can go in any direction. And in a battle of people vs robots, robots are most likely to win. So why are we trying to oppress them? Now I’m nervous about an uprising.