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Taking it personally: Does faceless communication make you feel less human?

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Does faceless communication make you feel less than human? Peter Sherwood gets incensed trying to get things done in an impersonal world.

Most of my work is  madness mild and measured. But today I feel a booming offensive coming on. A shrieking diatribe on a faceless corporate and bureaucratic world, and a society in which the only direct – and sane – conversation available is with my dog.

I need to chat to someone about my travel insurance, anyone with a real name would do. Better still, the bank’s insurance division that flogged me the policy, but they don’t have a phone number. Why would they? Customers might bother them.

I’d go to their office but, predictably, they don’t have anything as low- tech and banal as a physical presence listed on their high-tech website. After all, why would they risk a nut-job like me showing up on their carpeted doorstep and making dopey enquiries? An hour’s swearing at the wall finally produced a number and there followed a circular journey – a psychotic labyrinth through numbers and options in a system designed by a kindergarten class – which ultimately hurled me back in tears to my apoplectic self.

This brings me to the juvenile delinquents who run credit card operations. After slamming in numbers as ordered by a recording that sounds like Darth Vader on amphetamines, I’m told, with a certainty that only loan- shark bankers who charge 28% interest can muster, that I am unfamiliar with my own name. I’m incandescent. I want to gouge   the throat out of the techno-voice,but the digital interface has no opinion; it does not care, which is its raison d’être.

Humans need not apply

Until recently we could sort things out with a bloke in person. I had a bank manager. I used to take dim sum with him, a courteous chap who was always delighted to see me and was once even naively generous enough to lend me a little money. And the Consul General, a genially effective sort, who arranged my new passport over tea in his office. (Actually it wasn’t really tea, but pretty decent 10-year-old Scotch in a flowery Chinese pot. How else was he supposed to get through his terminally tedious day?)

Now it’s a bit different. You’re greeted at the embassy by a body-and-bag search and scripted personnel behind bullet-proof glass. Each and every one of them is trained to find minor errors in your documentation, like a heat- seeking missile locking on to a Taliban cave. No more devious  mid-morning drinking. Just animal bellowing through the barrier and muted, asinine responses only a maverick IBM mainframe could generate.

Seriously: “On your birth certificate your mother’s maiden name is spelt with an ‘e’. Our computer says it’s wrong.” (Forget spelling, why do I need a birth certificate to get my sixth passport?) Then change it. “Oh, we can’t do that.” OK, so what do you suggest? “You will need to bring a gas or electricity bill from your present address in Hong Kong.” You what?! Like I said, it’s impossible to invent this drivel.


Peter Sherwood has lived in DB for 18 years. The former head of an international public relations firm, Peter is the author of 15 books and has written around 400 satirical columns for the South China Morning Post.

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