How to Talk to Robots

Last night, I experimented with the voice recognition native to this machine. If I were to rely on it, this is what you’d see here:

Actual speech input: I was thinking about sobriety as a forest. This works for any new, challenging endeavor, really.

Output: A high that was topped your car or a or a ha ha earning a audit and store or a stall to score I do it while George Russ grants.

The voice recognition on my phone is much better, but it also tends to think I am always talking about my car. Maybe robots think about cars an inordinate amount of time. This seems likely.

Anyhoo, after months of robot emails from Amazon about my missing kindle listing, UHOOB is back online. This is one of the many situations where I’m glad I’m not some big deal romance novelist who pays her mortgage with book sales. I’d have tapped my imaginary trust fund pretty hard after three months of no sales.

How did I get results dealing with a big robot monster, bent on ignoring its tiny typo that erased my catalog entry?

Passive aggression and patience!! My specialty!!

Hi Tyler!! These automated messages are not reassuring. How could anyone be “researching” one book listing for over two months?

While this was going on and satisfaction seemed a remote possibility, I began to think about the amount of time I spend thwarting robots in my daily life. At my office, my phone rings several times a day from robot dialers. For years now, I have muted and listened when they call. Sometimes I can hear call center gossip, which is usually about cars. Once, I heard a complete call in which a fake pharmacy sales person sold fake Viagra to a deeply depressed person in Seattle.

The problem with my approach became evident. All I could do was expand my awareness of problems I can’t solve. Is this really what the robots want?

The robots don’t want to hurt me or waste my time. They just want my money. Actually it’s not my money they want, it’s the money of some person who doesn’t understand enough about laws and commerce to dodge their calls.

Even after years of listening, they didn’t stop calling, and I had some daily offenders who were obviously never going to stop while there was a connection with no voice. So I started talking.

I may not be able to discourage robots, but I can discourage the heck outta most humans.

Hi Brittney!! I see that your company has called this number daily for the past year. Please stop. We are never going to confirm the information or provide any encouragement for future calls of any kind. Please remove this number from your list.

It is working. Not only are the humans removing me from the robot rolls, they are giving me better information on how their various machines do or do not operate. One person warned me that I would likely get three more calls. His prediction was correct. I don’t have to tell him, I’m sure he knows. Or his car knows.

Don’t let the robots get you down, and don’t let them get your wallets.

Love,
yermom