Terry Flanagan: Say a Prayer for the Technology Challenged

This afternoon I witnessed a horrible accident—my brother-in-law trying to order checks from the bank over the phone.

First a little background. John is getting close to 80, and he’s had diabetes for over 50 of those years. He stays with us most of the year and with his other sister in Florida over the winter.

He’s never been on the forefront of technology. He’s never worked with a computer, never had a cell phone, and never ordered anything online. He doesn’t even have a credit card to order anything online even if he wanted to. He is about as far removed from the modern man as you can possibly get. I once tried to explain "call waiting" to him. I might as well have been trying to explain particle theory to Aborigines.

John has always been very independent, though, and he still wants to handle all of his personal affairs. And that includes banking. So this afternoon, I was downstairs working on the computer, and I could hear him yelling on the phone. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, but it was difficult not to hear what was becoming a loud and repetitive conversation. I could hear him repeating his account number and asking the “person” on the other end of the call if they could understand English. Then I’d hear touch tones as he pressed numbers on the phone. Then he’d repeat a number and asked the person if they heard what he said.

I realized that he was talking to an automated attendant, but he thought he was talking to a real person, albeit a very dumb person with a limited set of responses, most of which were apparently annoying. This went on for almost half an hour. I thought about intervening, but John doesn’t want assistance unless he asks for it. In the meantime, Dorothy’s sister had been trying to call and told us that the phone just rang with no answer. That’s because I never did get John to understand call waiting.

Later, when John came down for dinner, he told us about his experience with the bank. He said the instructions he had from the bank said that ordering checks with their new system would be easy, but his experience proved otherwise. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he had been trying to carry on a conversation with a computer, and he didn’t mention it, either. I assume he eventually got through to a person and found that out. We’ve told him before that he should press zero to speak to a real person rather than deal with the automated response systems and reminded him again tonight.

As these systems get more sophisticated they sound and respond more like a real person. But they are still a long way from being intelligent. Most will let you speak to a human being if you press zero or say a word like “operator” or “representative." However, they’ll usually try to exhaust all other possibilities first.

For people like John, these systems are especially difficult. He has arthritis in his hands, so pressing the numbers on the phone keypad is not easy. He’s also had a stroke that affected his speech, but he talks slowly and tries to enunciate, and it’s not difficult to understand him. However, many of the speech-recognition systems used in these calls often have problems with anything but normal speech.

If you don’t speak at a normal rate, or say anything outside of their limited vocabulary, you are going to have trouble. They are either going to assume that you’ve completed your response or misinterpret what you said and tell you that they’re sorry they can’t understand you. You need a lot of patience to get through these calls, and you need to realize you are not dealing with a human being who understands what you are saying.

At some point, though, the software has to be smart enough to recognize when a call is going nowhere and automatically transfer the caller to a real person. It shouldn’t take half an hour to figure out that the check ordering process has gone horribly wrong. It would also help if banks and other companies had a phone number that directly connected to a human operator so callers who want to talk to a person can do so without running the automated attendant gauntlet first.

Dorothy’s brother and sister are much older than her, and they are both pretty much baffled by the new technology. We have gotten Dorothy’s sister to use a cell phone, but she still doesn’t comprehend or use voice mail. At least she does some e-mail, but she’s still not very comfortable with the computer.

Dorothy and I have both worked in the computer field for years. Otherwise, we might be in the same situation as a lot of people our age. As technology becomes more pervasive, we seem to be in danger of isolating a whole segment of the population that is unable or unwilling to adapt to that technology. Even people who are technically savvy now, may not be able to adjust as technology advances and they get older and have a harder time keeping up.

So we need to make sure that we don’t completely eliminate the human interface, although we seem to be headed in that direction.

Our friend Kim told us that she dropped her daughter off at a friend’s house and watched as her daughter stood on the front porch and texted her friend that she was outside. Kim later asked her daughter why she just didn’t ring the doorbell. Her daughter looked at Kim like she was from another planet. The doorbell is so yesterday, and besides, it means speaking to an actual person, who might not even be the person you came to see.

We seem to be communicating by proxy now. Social networks, automated voice recognition and response systems, texting, email, and tweets. All of these are fine, but we need to be able to retain some basic social skills and be able to interact person to person once in a while. For a lot of older people, this has been the only way they’ve ever known. Technology needs to accommodate people instead of people accommodating technology.

In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to ease John into the 21st century. He’s had to learn to use a health monitoring system for his diabetes along with a new insulin injection system. So there’s still hope for him yet.