I Hate Robots

I bought a refrigerator Monday, half off at the Sears Outlet. Last night, Tuesday, while driving towards a shopping mall, I was called by an 800 number. The voice wanted to verify my delivery window. I think it said between two and four "tomorrow" (today), as I whipped into a nearly full left-turn lane and came to a rapid halt. It said to press 1 to conform or 2 for Spanish, I don't know, I was driving, and the USB power cord was wrapped around the stick shift and the phone couldn't quite reach my ear. I hit the keypad button and pressed a key, very possibly the 2, or maybe my cheek or jaw touched it, but as I turned across oncoming traffic into the side street the voice said my delivery had been moved to the nineteenth. What? When's that? Is that tomorrow? The voice continued its attempts to verify its plans, its nefarious little plans, but kept having to stop and tell me in unctuous tones that it "didn't get that, let's try again," or "let's try something else," or some other polite damn thing, continuously murmuring polite damn things that stopped abruptly when the system detected an increasingly agitated voice at my end of the line. "Yes! A person! Get me a god damn person!" was the gist of the my-end voice. I found a space behind Panda Express and met a new voice, a scripted but real-live person whose Hispanic accent had been mangled by the speech training class for dealing with middle-class white Americans. Most of it was standard Mexican or Central American, but a few vowels had clearly been reprogrammed by the middle-class white American speech class and I could hear, nay feel, his jaw making movements unnatural for him and all understanding was lost. The point I was trying to make was that my delivery had been rescheduled just five minutes ago, can you not just put it back on the truck that hasn't actually been loaded yet? He did the "vairy bast he code" but was sincerely and apologetically unable to fulfill my request, and eventually I dug through the morass of corporate customer service verbosity to learn I would be getting a call between six and nine tonight to inform me of my delivery window tomorrow. Well, I understand now, that's clear enough, but when they call I will either be taking my mom out to dinner or escorting her to a concert at the big cathedral downtown and there's no certainty my cheekbone won't again hit the 2 at just the wrong moment and defer the delivery yet again. I get that customer service will increasingly be roboticized but when an automated system can make a change that a human cannot correct we are in for a readjustment of our expectations as to who is in charge around here.