Are You There, Matt?
by John Weckerle
This morning, our Qwest DSL service was out for a few hours. After a brief chat with technical support, we were informed that there was an outage in the area and Qwest’s engineers were working on the problem. They were unable to project the duration of the outage, but said that we’d get a call letting us know when it was over.
After a while, the service came back on, and some time later we received a phone message from Qwest. The message began with “Hi, this is Matt with Qwest…” and proceeded to tell us that the service was back up. The only thing was, it seemed pretty likely to us that this was a computer generated message. Now, we’ll apologize in advance to Matt if we’re wrong, but the little breaks and stops seemed pretty symptomatic of the standard electronic notification method – suggesting that, at best, “Matt” is just somebody whose voice is used as the basis for the e-speaker. If that’s the case, then we’d advise Qwest that most of us don’t need to pretend that the digital voice at the other end of the line is actually a person, and we’re impressed enough that the system is sophisticated enough to call us up and keep us posted on its own.
Of course, there might have been a Matt that actually called – and if there is, we’d just like to say: Matt, you sound a bit like a computer. Throw in a joke or something next time!