Over at Dustbury, Charles quotes a tweet from someone who discovered a novel way to talk to a human being instead of a recording: Drop a high-volume F-bomb. Another tweeter says that her friend developed the software package involved with this feature, in which profanities trigger a dump from the automated system to a breathing person.
I guess there's no way to know if that's really a feature (it might require a certain volume level in addition to the magic words, or activate only after a certain number of "Press X now" levels have been waded through). I don't think I'll try it, but I suppose you never know what you'll do when temptation comes along. Plus I usually feel far readier to swear at some of the human beings who are not as smart as the automatic system.
My own comment on Charles' entry refers to what we are being told will be the increasing number of "driverless" cars, which will also run on computerized decision trees. Even though the car systems will be much more sophisticated than the phone answering ones, will they have the same feature of dumping to a human being on hearing certain profanities? Because if they do, then New York City is going to be a place where driverless cars will never work. The only thing that limits street swearing there now is that some attention has to be paid to the road; give an NYC drivers the freedom to cuss out whoever they want in whatever direction they want whenever they want and Manhattan is going to be the FCC's nightmare.
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