Political consultants seem to think that having a robot call me on the phone to play an untrained, robotic-sounding voice reading a one-sided, uninteresting, and poorly written conversation is a good way to influence my opinion on their behalf.
It is almost as if the angels of comedy are trying to find out how low our democracy can go. They must consider us an audience with an incredible affinity for the absurd. After all, they broke through the "Vote [yes/no] on [some number]" threshold some years back and now have added robot conversations to their joke arsenal.
Anybody influenced by this kind of time-wasting, inhuman experience ought not to have the right to vote. Anybody practicing this kind of grassroots avoidance probably doesn't have much chance of gaining political capital by the practice.
I wonder if marketers even demand to know what percentage of their message is heard before hangup. I expect not or somebody would have these things stop calling me because my hello-to-hangup is blazingly fast.
There is a way, though, to one-up those comedy angels and it is this. Let your answering machine talk to the robot, perhaps even updating your message for the political season.
May I suggest, "Hello. If you are a robot please leave a message. I'm so lonely for robot conversation and I do love talking politics."
At least then you will have the last laugh.
1 comment:
In England we have the telephone preference service = no junk calls, and the mail preference service = no junk mail. I thought America had caught up with us in this respect?
Al-yrpal
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