Have Your Robot Call My Robot

It’s a brave new world when I can hop on a jet and travel to practically any place on the globe in a day. Evolution is accelerating at blinding speed. New potentials and new toys are emerging faster than you can keep track of them, and I am enjoying it.

At no time previously in history could I have possibly had the capability of traveling as much as I have in the current era. But not everything is evolving along with this grand movement. Some things unfortunately must be left by the wayside. For example my landline.

The trouble is, the thing won’t go away.

I’m sitting in my office trying to get some writing done and I hear the phone blurt out its little electronic ring, then a click and the robotic voice on my answering machine: “No one is available to take your call…” etc.

The voice simulator croaks out the words in a halting, unnatural rhythm, sounding choked up the way someone might talk if someone were holding a gun to his head. Then I hear a click and dead silence. There goes another call.

I barely notice. I cock an ear to see if it might be anything important. It almost never is. It's almost never anyone who wants to leave a message. Almost all of the people who call my land line know I don’t want to talk to them.

I say “people” but the callers are not people as such. They are call centers.

They know that if I knew what they were calling about I wouldn't call them back, and they’re right. By leaving a message they might alert me to their impending approach and it would blow the element of surprise. So rather than leave a message, they’ll wait and try to call back again, in hopes that some time they’ll get lucky and catch me live and in person. Then they can unload their pitch on me, try to overwhelm my sensory capacities and clutch onto me tenaciously enough that eventually I might buy what they are selling just to get rid of them.

Some of these call mills call back over and over every day for months, years. I never answer and they never stop calling. I don’t pay much attention. It’s just happening all the time in the background.

All day long, as well as in the evenings and on weekends, I get calls from all sorts of companies or organizations trying to wrangle money out of me for some urgency or other. On my land line, I rarely get any real calls anymore. Anything of importance will come in via my cell. The land line has been relegated to a neutral zone on the sidelines of life.

Some of the callers do leave messages, but they are not people. They are robocalls, automatically generated phone calls to my answering machine, which answers and records the incoming recording.

My land line is now almost entirely devoted to conversations between robots, interactions between respective automated voice simulators, inanimate circuits talking about something no one cares about, not me and certainly not them.

I have no reason to have the land line anymore. It is a residual organ of my office communications system. I only have it because it comes as part of the package by which I get the Internet.

The land line has become obsolete. It does not function in any meaningful way anymore. It’s just there by inertia.

I’ve signed no-call lists, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The phone just receives calls all day long every day, day after day … for nothing.

One could imagine a situation where human life is wiped off the earth, and these machines, powered by atomic batteries, could still be talking to each other centuries after human beings have disappeared.

When some intelligent species discovers the earth some years hence, long after the extinction of organic life on the planet, they might still hear a voice reminding them of our presence on earth once upon a time.

“Sorry, no one is available to take your call…."

Follow @CogswellTravelP