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This question came in a while back but it’s been on hold as I was experiencing a particularly high volume of questions. But happily it stayed on the line until an operator was available.
But it is a tricky one. I mean, who are you gonna call? And if you do call, what are the chances of anyone being there? Sure, you can call your family or close friend, though it’s always better to text first, of course. I mean, who the hell just calls on spec these days?
The “actually” is my addition. Originally, the wording was just “who you gonna call?” which, as you know, comes from the Ghostbusters theme. The opening question being “if there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call?”. I suspect the reader who put this to me was being facetious, as they also asked “War, what is it good for?” (I’m still waiting for the request for directions to San Jose). But the more I’ve thought about it, the more intriguing the question seems. After all, if there’s something strange in your neighbourhood — who are you going to call? Apart perhaps from your mate Steve, who’s always had an interest in the paranormal and knows his wraiths from his revenants.
Once upon a time, you might have called the police on a non-emergency number. Local police stations used to have a number you could phone. But now local police stations are far less common, and they don’t want the public bothering them. There is a single non-emergency number, 101, which is supposedly staffed at all times, but on at least one occasion I was left hanging until I gave up.
Last weekend came an example of the dilemma. A nearby busy road had temporary traffic lights that had failed and cars were steaming blindly towards each other over a hill. It seemed like an accident waiting to happen. Did that count as a 999 emergency? Eventually we found a Met Police web page that confirmed that dangerous road conditions met the bill for the Old Bill, and happily no one had slammed into each other while we were scrolling.
Real emergencies at least offer a clear protocol. It is everything less than that where confidence is lower. Maybe you can fill in an online form or tweet at the police on X. But “who you gonna tweet?” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
And then there are all those other instances, banks, utilities, shops, hotels, customer complaints. Want your bank? You will be required to negotiate an obstacle course of automated demands before you can be given access to a human. And just before you are put through comes the warning that they will hang up if you betray a sliver of irritation at the 14 or 15 steps necessary to reach them.
A transcript of my wife’s recent efforts to get an answer to a single straightforward question from a digital assistant at another bank shows a conversation lasting 21 minutes with multiple misdirections whenever she mentioned a keyword, resolved only when a human was dug up from the cellar.
Utilities are little better, retail chains immeasurably worse, each driving you towards a chatbot armed with a multiple choice of unwanted options. So yeah, who are you gonna call?
And when you do call, will it help? Those humans allowed on the other end are increasingly required to stick to a script and given less discretion to solve your issue. I wonder if there is a skills training centre that teaches people to say “I’m sorry you feel that way” or “I can only apologise for that”. (Actually, I was hoping to speak to someone who can do more than apologise.)
Meanwhile, we are raising generations who struggle to talk on the phone to people they don’t know. Technology has erased all those awkward situations you once had to manage, getting past the parents of a girl you wanted to ask out, being friendly to a receptionist, persuading a shop assistant to check if the item you wanted was in stock.
So it’s not just who you gonna call? It’s also how you gonna call? Is anyone here to take the call, and is it actually worth bothering with the call? If there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, just get a picture, stick it on Instagram and hope someone else sorts it out. If there’s something weird and it don’t look good, please stay on the line, your call is important to us. It’s not much of a solution. It’s not much of a theme tune either, come to think of it.
Email Robert at [email protected]
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