You think you know, but you really don't.

1/15/2009

Automated Sales Calls.

All right,
I get irritated when machine generated voices call me from obscure numbers telling me that my automobile insurance has expired for a car that I do not actually own. Or when I get machine voiced calls in Spanish. For crying out loud, isn’t half the point of a cell phone that unsolicited marketing calls are illegal?
So today, I decided out of curiosity to call back one of these foreign language-auto dialing-humanity life sucking machines just to see what it had to say on the receiving end. This time, the message I got was concise. It went something like “This is a travel related call. Press ‘1′ to be removed from our database”. The voice is in perfectly understandable English. It is also perfectly non-life sucking.
Of course, this got me thinking a bit. Why would a machine call in an obnoxious gibberish language, yet have a recording in English? I came up with the following possible reasons:
The Analysis
-Out of all the people who would ever get your phone call, it's the angry Americans that you’re most afraid of having to deal with. Speaking in English with an apology of sorts is the most fail safe way to deal with people who will invade in the Middle East for no reason and will complain to the end of time about gas prices but do absolutely nothing about them.
-Most of the call recipients in the world are going to speak English. Especially the people that understood gibberish whatever language and want to call back for more information. Everyone knows that the entire world speaks, reads, and writes English fluently, right? I mean gosh, even American tourists have that one figured out.
For some reason, none of these explanations quite satisfied me. So, like any curious citizen in the information age, I figured the answer would probably be one Google Search away. Masquerading as Blue in Blues Clues, I proceeded to jump through a magical doorway to unlock the answer to the puzzle. Actually, what I found was a bit surprising.
NOTHING.
I never did get the answer I was looking for, and now I feel as though my mind will not be at rest.
*sigh*

Carl

1 comment:

Chelsey said...

You're all over the place in this blog.
Are you mad? Annoyed? Amused? Being sarcastic?
I guess you're probably all of the above.
I get calls like this at work ALL the time. Do you now understand why I hate sitting on the phone, or even answering it?