Many of you loyal and long-suffering readers will remember the nice lady who asked me if I knew my first name. She was a victim of the system for which she worked. It made her look silly, but it gave me a column that month. Along those same lines…
Remember AOL’s “You’ve got mail”? Atrocious grammar and all, it now should be followed by, “But we’re not letting you have it.”
We have an expensive landline at home that is used almost exclusively as a valid telephone number for those times when I’m making an online purchase and don’t want my cellphone to blow up with ads. In filling out a web form for an account, when I come to that box with the little red asterisk requiring a telephone number, I give them the number that never gets used: our landline. That makes perfect sense to me since I’m not dumb enough to think they plan to call only on my birthday to wish me well.
Naturally, this phone has a voicemail feature with a display showing how many telemarketing calls we have received and can enthusiastically ignore. Then, with the punch of my social finger, “POOF,” they’re gone! I love that! But, recently, the dreaded system bogeyman has moved into my world again, and, as you might expect, I am not happy about it. Admit it, dear reader; you likely would not be reading this column if you thought it would be another monthly essay on things that are going really swell in Butch’s life.
Somehow, the voicemail function of our phone system has been shipped to the ether where it is no longer accessible to normal people, by which I mean those born before the Kennedy administration or even the Eisenhower administration. (Let us pray for those poor people.) Now, our fancy cordless phone no longer records voicemail messages that will play back on the plastic device on the table beside me. It relays those messages to Pluto or some newly discovered black hole where they are translated into a kind of technical gibberish that only IBM’s Watson and my 10-year-old grandtwins can decipher. Then it is encrypted and stored somewhere. Probably. But that’s only the beginning of the security for this device.
I gotta tell you that foisting this level of technology on an old guy who still owns a pair of ivory Princess phones seems dangerously close to elder abuse.
While most security systems make the protected object difficult to access through the use of complex modern technology, this message retrieval system employs a more familiar personal approach. It does that by making a person want to quit trying after just one failed attempt, sort of like never wanting to try Brussels sprouts a second time. You already know what will happen and it will be quite unpleasant, so why bother?
This loathsome system makes grown adults feel like complete imbeciles. Thriving men and women, certain of their cognitive health going into the simple task of retrieving their voicemails, soon begin to wonder if perhaps a few, or more, of their marbles may have rolled away and out of reach in their fruitless struggle to retrieve their messages.
I’ve come a long way from the time when a ringing telephone produced instant bedlam in the home, most especially if a teenage female were in residence. The crashing and banging through the house was like what you might hear if a demolition derby were held in your kitchen, where the phone was often located. I thought back on those days, remembering that simpler time and knowing that our society really flourished then. Realizing that our generation invented voicemail, I wondered if they included a way to opt out of that feature, leaving a plain, no-frills telephone with an onboard answering machine, but maybe not screwed to the wall with a curly cord attached to the handset this time. It would be great to be able to slam the phone down on someone again once in a while. All they can say is no, right?
She was a friendly ol’ girl. She works in the customer service department for the company that provides my phone and internet service. Once she was satisfied that I am who I said I am, we began talking about why an otherwise normal person would wish to abandon useful products of advanced technology created over the last half-century. I explained that in order to access my voicemail, which I do only to delete the messages, I must enter a passcode consisting of a series of upper and lowercase letters, some numbers and special symbols.
I said, “For the life of me, I don’t understand why I must enter this 13-character password every time I call. And from the same dang phone, for crying out loud! Doesn’t your phone company have caller ID?”
She asked if I had difficulties with that system, to which I said, “Not for the last few months. I screwed up the password enough times that it locked me out early last fall.”
“Good heavens,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with our system!”
“I am, too, so how about you and I opt me out of this voice recording feature while we’re thinking about it, and I’ll buy you lunch next time I’m wherever you are. Deal?”
The nice lady turned me down on the latter with some flimsy corporate policy excuse, but I’m now free of the ridiculous voicemail system that threatened what little remains of my sanity.
Call me sometime. If I don’t answer, just leave a message. If you listen closely, you can hear the cassette whirring in the background.
