A week of robots

On the loss of talking to each other

I woke up this morning with the foggy feeling that I owed somebody something; before I made my coffee, I felt a pang of guilt – I hadn’t replied to a friend’s text from the day before about her dissertation defense. 

It isn’t weird for me to reply a day (or so) late, as is the case for many busy people my age. This instance stood out to me, however, because it was an important text, and because I really couldn’t remember why I didn’t reply. I’d had a packed day, but I wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t be interrupted to send a quick acknowledgment.

Then I remembered the hour I spent on the phone shortly after she texted me: I was wandering the maze of automated prompts to desperately try to speak to a person about an insurance claim.

“0-1-” I’d start to reply, and the robot would cut me off in an offensively cheerful voice and say “Sorry, I didn’t hear that. Would you like to try again? Please clearly say your date of birth, using two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and four digits for the year.” Enunciating, I say “0-1–” “ – Sorry, I didn’t hear that. Would you like to try again? Please clearly say your date of birth, using two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and four digits for the year.” “0-1–” “ – Sorry, I didn’t hear that. Would you like to try again? Please clearly say your date of birth, using two digits for the month, two digits for the day, and four digits for the year.” “OHHH – ONE —” “ – Sorry –” before the automated voice can continue, I start punching 0 repeatedly in the faint hope that it will take me to a person.

This was just one of several similar calls and artificial interactions I had to deal with this week. Insurance hold lines, pharmacy hold lines, student loan lender hold lines, chatbots, automated “do not reply” emails, texts from campaigns with “stop2quit” at the end. A startling amount of communication and interactions this week were not actually with people.

This observation isn’t exactly revelatory. From self-checkout lines to asynchronous online education, we’ve long been discussing the evaporation of human interaction in our day-to-day lives. But I’m writing about it today because it’s been so heightened this week that I can feel it: the few times I saw coworkers or friends this week, I could feel myself having to push to respond to an organic, changing, living being, a sharp contrast to the numbing or frustrating routine of computer interactions.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I find myself on a different end of this when I host at a restaurant down the street. Guests will book reservations on OpenTable, a site that lets you make online restaurant reservations in advance by selecting from a menu of dates and available time slots. It’s very rare that anyone calls to make a reservation; most are booked online.

OpenTable operates by quantity: the number of available tables, the estimated time a party will be seated, the fixed number of guests at each table and in each party. 

Human diners, however, do not operate within a fixed set of anything. We camp out at our table and order another round of mimosas, laughing and chatting well past a website’s cold estimate of an hour and a half. We forget to mention in advance that we actually need a high chair or that we prefer a booth. Somebody in our party doesn’t show up on time, or somebody shows up unexpectedly – and unless you’ve worked in a restaurant, you might not know just how much the words “we said we were going to be four, but we’re actually going to be five” can throw a host’s entire night of carefully-planned reservations out the window.

From a diner’s perspective, OpenTable is an authority; it’s one of the many technologies we assume is operating with full and accurate information. As a result, people sometimes react poorly when I tell them that just because they booked something through OpenTable doesn’t mean I am able to honor their booking.

And I totally understand that frustration. You’re showing up to a restaurant believing you have a table waiting for you. Maybe you’re so excited to try the short rib mac and cheese you saw on Instagram, maybe you haven’t had anything to eat since that granola bar at breakfast and you’re feeling cranky, maybe you’re nervous about your Bumble date and can’t wait to have a glass of pinot noir to calm your nerves. Maybe it’s just been a long day in a string of long days. Maybe you need a win. Maybe you’ve been waiting to celebrate something for a long time. 

The last thing you want is to be told that, once again, something in your life is not going to go as planned. 

Unfortunately, when things don’t go the way that OpenTable promised, the ire gets directed at me, the host – the person navigating the rich fluidity and unpredictability of human diners – rather than the automated system that made guarantees based on numbers, not on life. 

Nearly 100% of reservation conflicts I’ve dealt with as a host could’ve been avoided if we just talked to each other on the phone.

And yet, I’m a full participant in this. Even knowing the flaws of OpenTable, I’ll rarely call a restaurant to make a reservation if I have the option to do it online. I stand in line at the CVS self checkout when cashiers are open and head to kiosks at airports to check in. For every three forced interactions I have with technology, there’s probably four that I opt into.

But I wonder how different my life would be if I just talked to real people more often. Who might I have met if I said hi to the cashier at Stop & Shop instead of making a beeline for self checkout? How attentive would I be to my texts and emails if I wasn’t swatting away a constant flock of spam? What could I have done with those hours I spent reciting personal information to robots on the phone? How much nicer might we be to one another, host and customer, if we spoke to each other about our desires and restrictions rather than having a website flatten us both to numbers on a screen? How much more social might I have felt at work last night, zoning out around my coworkers instead of making any attempt at small talk, if I wasn’t so depleted from hours navigating insurance claim issues through chatbots and crackling hold music?

Is this the best we can do?

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