You know when you call a company, and have to go through various menus, pressing numbers corresponding to the topic of your enquiry? Those are awesome. If you just responded “Err, what?”, I presume you’ve never tried to call a company that uses voice recognition rather than number pressing and refuses to recognise your voice.
10 hours earlier: I was somehow silly enough to leave my mobile phone in the back of a taxi1. Anyway, the next morning I called up the taxi company (for 2AM would’ve been a useless time to call), only to take far longer to get through than what is tolerable, due to poor voice recognition software2. After that ordeal, I get a message telling me to call their reception number instead, where I found out I would have to file a police report.
Off to the police station I went, and where I was told something along the lines of “You look nervous. Do you realise it’s a federal offence to report this if your phone is just broken, do you want to continue?” I don’t know, maybe I was nervous to be in a police station for the first time. I don’t even know whether I had it insured so filing a false report would be pretty useless, not to mention the fact that my phone is somewhat old and I imagine not worth much, either.
Six days later, and no word, so I shall probably get a new one. Oh, and isn’t it inevitable that once you lose a phone, a lot of people will text you? I’ve been asked various times whether I received people’s text messages.
- I had been storing, keys, money, and phone in one of my jeans pockets (my wallet lives alone in the left pocket, while other accessories have to share the right when I am sans bag), but transferred my phone to my jacket pocket to sort out payment, and it must’ve fallen out. My jacket pockets are rather large and have a big opening, after all. [↩]
- I was required to say things like “yes”, “no”, and “lost” (for lost property), and I know at times I can have the tendency to mumble a bit, but I spoke extremely clearly, and it even reverted me to the first menu when it couldn’t understand “lost”. Yep, sigh. [↩]
