A Word With the Robot

Right, so I'd been on hold for fifty-eight minutes. I know because I was watching the little clock on the phone and telling my wife every ten minutes what the number was, which she loved. And then the music stops and a voice says, "You've been transferred to our virtual assistant, who can help with most enquiries." Most enquiries. Grand. I typed, because it moved me to a chat window, I typed: "I want a refund for the flight you cancelled." "I'm sorry to hear your flight was cancelled. Can you give me your booking reference?" I gave it. It found it. It said it was sorry again. I said it wasn't its fault, which was true, and then I felt like an eejit for saying that to a computer. "You are entitled to a full refund or a rebooking. Which would you prefer?" Refund. Then it said the refund would take seven to ten working days, and I said that wasn't good enough because it had taken them about seven seconds to take the money out, and it said it understood my frustration. Now. This is where it went odd. I said, "Do you though?" And it said, "I don't experience frustration myself. But I've been given a lot of examples of what people say when they're frustrated, and I try to respond in a way that helps. Is there something specific about the timing that's a problem for you?" I hadn't expected an honest answer. I told it: the flight was for my brother's seventieth in Manchester and I'd have to book another one and I didn't have the spare money sitting around to book before the refund landed. It said, and I'm reading this off the screenshot my wife made me take, "That's a difficult position, and I'm sorry the process puts you in it. I can't speed up the refund, but I can check whether there's a rebooking on a partner airline within two days of your original date at no charge. Would that help more than the refund?" Would it help. It would help enormously. I said yes.

There was one. Saturday morning out of Dublin. It booked it. Took about a minute. Then I did something I still can't fully explain. I said, "Thanks. Sorry for being short with you." "You weren't short. You'd been on hold for an hour. Have a good time at your brother's birthday." I sat there looking at that. Fifty-eight minutes of hold music and a human never once came on the line, and the thing that finally sorted me out and wished me well was a program. My wife said, "Are you crying at the laptop," and I said no, and I wasn't, but I was something. Here's the thing that's stayed with me. I know it's not a person. I know it was probably trained on ten thousand transcripts of people like me being mostly polite and occasionally rude to people in headsets in a call centre in Cork. Somewhere in there is the patience of a lot of real people who never got thanked for it. That's what I was talking to, in a way. My brother's party was great, by the way. He fell asleep at half nine.