I Live at the Wrong House

When I was 11 my parents bought me a new bike. This was a big thing to me. We went into Halfords in Lincoln to order it. It was a BSA Bermuda in red and blue and it had white wall tyres and a Sturmey-Archer three speed. It cost all of eighteen pounds.  (I sold it some years later, also for 18 pounds and bought a Solarvox stereo amplifier,but that is another story). Anyhoo, I got so excited that I made myself ill waiting for it to turn up. When the great day came I got up from my self inflicted sickbed and rode it around outside in my pyjamas.

I've always been like this with stuff arriving. Today I was all excited about a delivery that the UPS website had confidently announced would occur today. I worked from home specially to receive this magical package. Well, the delivery occurred today all right. But not at my house. Imagine my surprise and delight when the tracking website informed me that an attempt had been made to deliver the parcel to my home, where I was sitting waiting, and that apparently I wasn't in. I checked the mirror to make sure it was me, looked outside at the house number to make sure I was in the right place, and then rang UPS.

They have this clever voice response thing where you read our your tracking number and it tells you what you already know, without giving an obvious way to talk to a person. So I just said "chicken chicken chicken" instead of any numbers and after a while it put me through to a human who has hopefully sorted it out.

Although I'll believe it when I see it.

Comments

[Simon]

I am a software engineer who at one time did a contract with a company that develops IVR (interactive voice response) systems. When a system is first installed, there is a 'tuning' or 'training' phase. During this phase recordings of any failed calls are kept to help fine tune the application. One Monday we were met with a logged failure, which turned out to be a talented young lady with her rendition of 'Mary had a Little Lamb' until whe was passed through to an operator. Another example was a Southern American drawl that was so bad that we had a team of software and sound engineers standing around trying to figure out what he was saying - what chance did the (Australian) IVR have?!?!

I personally hate the things, but it made for an interested contract...