THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 11, 1995 TAG: 9502130223
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
Hate to say it, but the pace is picking up in the stampede to install push-button systems for handling questions from the public. The intent is efficiency, I presume, but the results are too often something else.
On a couple of occasions lately, I bogged down in the dial-an-answer swamp more hopelessly than in any of the earlier cases of frustration I have grumbled about.
First example: One night last month, I was jolted awake by a loud crashing noise, along with a flash in the sky that lit my room. Then, total darkness. A nearby street light had gone out and I soon found that there was no response from any switch in the house.
The phone was OK, and with a flashlight I could see to dial. However, the only information or emergency number I could find for the power company had me pondering, in short order, which Touch-Tone buttons I should press. The recorded voice specified a number for ``outages,'' and this did yield some momentary assurance: When I punched in our phone number, I got a mechanical confirmation that the system knew where I lived and I was advised the breakdown would be looked into.
When a couple of hours had brought no relief from the blackness nor any phone report back to me, I called again. Several times, in fact. I listened to all the number options over and over again, and never found a chance to try for a living, breathing spokesperson. So I couldn't even find out if my or any other automated reports had actually gotten through to the repair managers.
It turned out that a vehicle accident nearby had caused the power loss. The repair folks had plunged right in and worked as fast as they could. But I, and I assume many others, were kept in the dark in more ways than one.
My second unhappy button encounter was an attempt to find out about the charge, under the new postal-rate schedule, for an overseas letter weighing between a half-ounce and an ounce. I hadn't memorized all the new fees when the newspaper reported the changes. So I tried the postal-information number, only to discover that the buttonization virus had spread into one more sector.
Resigned to progress, I took my quest down every likely telephone lane the postal recording suggested (a time-consuming process, among other irritations). But no number that I pushed gave me an answer.
Finally, I tried an end run around the machine-talk and secured the information I needed from a kindly worker on a ZIP-code-help line.
But except for that last: push-button madness. And it gets more maddening every day. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB