CONVERSATION PIECE

So, what exactly are we going to talk about today? Given that it was a most phenomenally uninspiring weekend, I've found that I'm heading into this latest week with very little to say about anything very much. Granted, Saturday did involve a very slight amount of work being done on the decorating in the bathroom, meaning that it has inched slightly further towards completion, and the Eurovision Song Contest killed off another Saturday evening reasonably painlessly, but I've already explained all about that in another posting.

Weirdly, and on a not unrelated note, Saturday was also the day when this very blog had its first ever "1000 plus" day when about a dozen people, I imagine, managed between them to create 1272 lovely page-views.

Huzzah!

Mind you, given that at least 1050 of which were to look at the scorecard, presumably whilst they were being guided towards a more "official" version, and very few of them were drawn here in order to read any of the words that I've been writing over these past few years, it hardly marks any kind of significant breakthrough.

Sunday was a rainy, dreary day, and I spent a lot of it reading or, perhaps surprisingly, sleeping, so that's hardly inspirational, either. My reading did dredge up an interesting Charlie Brooker description which was, at least, new to me, about football - he refers to it as "Twenty-two millionaires ruining a lawn" which I quite liked - which seemed somewhat appropriate as the news media gushed over the topic on a grey and miserable Monday morning.

Interestingly, the radio burbled on about automation which was, at least, enough to trigger at least one vaguely interesting train of thought for me. It was going to be a piece on artificial intelligence but basically became about shopping and banking as the hapless reporter interviewed various shoppers as they used the "self-service" tills in supermarkets which do not, apparently, take jobs, but "free up the staff to help the customers more…"

Yeah, right…

Unhappily, these dreadful machines (which I will still try to avoid as much as possible, despite being guided there on several occasions by the "helpful" former checkout assistants), are going to double in number over the next several years and, it seems, that despite my own personal dislike of them, and their many infuriating glitches which require a human being to intervene anyway, there's nothing that I can do to stop this apart from pointing out to an unfeeling and unnoticing world that won't be coming here in their thousands to read about it, that I'd really rather not use them and deal with a genuine human being every time.

An old-fashioned point of view, I'm sure, but given that the jolly banter I had with the assistant serving on the till as I stopped to buy the milk on the way to the office that morning quite lifted my mood out of the doldrums, it is one, I believe, that is still worth bearing in mind for the bean-counters running our retail organisations.

Meanwhile, the topic shifted to those automated receptionists so popular these days when you have to ring, oh, just about anyone, really. This, again, apparently "frees up time" although the amount of time it waits for the poor schmo who has to sit there pressing buttons and listening to droning irrelevances is not, I imagine, taken into the equation when they calculate the bottom line.

My mother worked as a receptionist for several years back in the day, presumably until her job was replaced by a silicon chip somewhere, and I have a relative who takes orders for fast food in the kind of kiosk which is now apparently also under threat from the increasing influx of artificial presences which are, apparently, far better than real people at picking up the mood of the customer, according to the scientists in California.

This may be true but, given that my own mood whenever I have to deal with an automated call receiver is basically one of being thoroughly pissed off, I don't imagine that it's quite as great a technological leap as they are trying to claim it is.

You see, despite the fact that I'm terribly poor at dealing with real people in my social interactions, when it comes to retail and business transactions, I'd rather have to deal with an actual person and not waste ridiculous amounts of time listening to some some "Call-Me-Kenneth" or "Robby the Robot" any day, no matter how technologically "impressive" they might be, simply because I can interrupt and explain what I actually am calling about instead of having to wade through a list of options, none of which meet my actual, human needs at that particular time.

Power, as they say, to the people.