sometimes I despair for the future of humanity

So I work as a ‘linguist’ for a large US software company. The division I work in makes text-to-speech and voice recognition software. I’m not a coder, I do other stuff. My job is frequently tedious, occasionally interesting, skilled drudgery, and it’s quite difficult to explain the overall position because from month to month I will often be asked to perform very different, yet related tasks. But right now I’m doing something called ‘tagging’. This means that I have transcriptions of thousands of calls made to Client Company X by their customers, and I’m going through these transcriptions trying to figure out the caller’s intent so that our recognisers work better. (’Your call may be recorded for quality control purposes’) So, for example, if someone calls and says ‘Motherfucker, why is it always impossible to get a live person on these things, I don’t want to talk to a fucking computer’, the system will transfer the caller to ‘Operator’.

So right now, Client Company X is a large, American, software/services/ISP corporation which has provided free coasters to many a household for years. Their clientele tends to be what my workmate gently describes as ‘naïve’. These are not power users. These are bingo daubing, scrapbook making old dears who have been given a POS ‘computer’ which would be more useful as a paperweight and they want to be able to research discount cruises and exchange shocking invective and sparkle graphics with other helmet-haired mall cruisers on pomeranian discussion boards. They don’t know or care how their computers work, computers are magic boxes that plug into the wall. They don’t know or care how the internet works, it is a series of tubes which may or may not become plugged by too many cat macros.

So these clients are given a toll free number to call which starts out with our recognition system. This particular system is what is basically a ‘black box’ - the caller is not given a limited set of things that they can ask for, they’re supposed to be able state the nature of their problem any way they want and, in theory, they are routed to something resembling the correct department. As I’m sure you may be able to imagine, this works best if the calls are in regard to a limited set of problems, and, of course, if the callers have a vague clue as to what the fuck they are talking about. Needless to say, neither is the case with this particular set of callers. And as a result the calls tend to range from hilarity to incoherence to complete incomprehensibility. Which makes them difficult if not completely impossible to categorise with any hope of accuracy. I’ve been doing this all month. Deadline looms, so all weekend. Someone was stealing the fucking covers all night last night so I’m sleep deprived and entering the realm of hysteria.

Anyway, all this to introduce my current favourite caller utterance of all time: