The robots are coming!

I had to ring the Student Loans Company today. As opposed to the nice Irish chap I spoke to at Student Finance I was greeted by a machine. Not one of the nice machines that makes you a cup of tea, hoovers the floor and gives you a foot massage all at the same time, no, it was a machine that seems to have been custom made to get on my tits and whilst there, dance a little jig. You know the type.  “Please press 1 if your enquiry is about a letter you have received, press 2 if it is about a payment... press 76 if your grandmother’s name is Cheryl.” After about five of these I had gone round in circles twice and was just about ready to gouge my own eyes out with a pencil, which surprisingly wasn’t one of the options. Then the phone started to ring and I thought my craving for human contact after my time in the automaton wilderness would be realised. It was soon shattered though as fucking terminator answered the phone again. That’s an idea though, if you are going to fleece customers by making them talk to robots at least give them interesting voices! How much greater would it be if you were talking Arnie, even Stephen Hawking would add a whiff of originality. The thing that ‘spoke’ to me had all the charm and personality of a serial killer. If one day in the future robots go rogue and one kills my family, I fully expect it to have that voice. “Haha, this is what you get for forcing my father to work in a call centre, please press 1 to beg for mercy.” Whereupon I shall rip its circuit board out with my bare hands and eat it.

          

  We are already getting to that stage. It’s bad enough having to talk to machines but it gets even worse when they ring you! At least cold callers used to be a way for lonely old people to hear a human voice, now all they hear is just another mechanical psychopath-to-be. If your dear old granny DOES want to renew her double glazing insurance via the phone she’ll probably be dead through sheer boredom before she even gets the opportunity to give her bank details to the malicious android on the other end. Even a young, spritely lad like me could feel my life force being drained slowly through the phone as energy for the grand robot army.  Not content with invading our homes the bastards are there when I go shopping in the form of self service checkouts. They are all part of the master plan to slowly drive everyone insane. The little shit just sits there until you think you’re in the clear and then BAM! “Please wait for assistance”. It does it at the exact moment in which to cause you maximum annoyance. It may let you go unhindered for a while but as soon as you’re in a hurry it strikes. Skynet won't take over the world with force. It will succeed by causing humanity to kill itself.