My mobile phone over here is on Rogers Wireless, and to add money to your account, check your balance, or pretty much anything else, you have to go through an automated system which uses voice recognition rather than key presses. So you phone up and you end up having a conversation like this:<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Welcome to Rogers pay as you go, self care customer line. (fanfare<\/i>) Si vous désirez entendre ce message en français, dites français maintenant. (pause<\/i>) Sign up for the evenings and weekends plan and enjoy rates as low as five cents a minute. For more information, or to sign up, say ‘account changes’, and then ‘price plan’ at the main menu. (pause<\/i>) I’m Melanie, and I’m here to help you with your pay as you go account. I’m going to be asking you some questions, and whenever you know the answer you can just interrupt me, so… Can I help you add money to your account today?<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Yes<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> I didn’t get that. Would you like to add money to your account? Please say ‘yes’, or ‘no’.<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Yes<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Sorry, I still didn’t understand. If you’d like to add money to your pay as you go account, say ‘yes’, otherwise, say ‘no.<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Yes<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Did you want to… add money to your account?<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Yes<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> All right then, how can I help you?<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Add money to my account<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> I didn’t get that. If you need help, just say help.<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> Just let me add money to my account, you stupid talking computer!<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Ok, what’s your password?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve found a much faster way of adding money to my account now. It goes like this:<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Welcome to…<\/p>\n
Me:<\/b> (interrupts<\/i>) Blah blah blah<\/p>\n
Melanie:<\/b> Ok, what’s your password?<\/p>\n
I also find that if I say ‘français’ and go through the French menus it understands me better, although if the order of the menus changes I can’t do it because I can’t understand her, so I just say what I think is the right thing at the right time.<\/p>\n
I also discovered today that it is possible to add money to other people’s accounts. You just enter the wrong password, and then Melanie asks you for the phone number as well as the password. So today I was able to top up Naomi’s account without having her phone.<\/p>\n
Virgin mobile are advertising over here about their great new innovation for customer support – it’s called having humans answer the phone. I think I like that idea.<\/p>\n
On an unrelated note: The British High Commission phoned today to say that our credit card had been declined (which is odd, because it has a balance of zero at the moment), so we gave them a different card number, and they said that they’re just starting to process the application. So please pray that they approve it, and soon! We both want to get back to England to see everyone again. And to Scotland to go to Andrew’s wedding. And we’re expecting snow here at the weekend, so it’ll be nice to have British weather for the winter!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mobile phone over here is on Rogers Wireless, and to add money to your account, check your balance, or pretty much anything else, you have to go through an automated system which uses voice recognition rather than key presses. So you phone up and you end up having a conversation like this: Melanie: Welcome …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesots.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}