Mechanical voice systems drive me up the wall

There ought to be a law against using mechanical voice operated machines for information or assistance for service companies. You no doubt have had an experience with this. My latest came yesterday while trying to fix a problem with my Internet. I called AT&T and got the usual mandated instruction from the human machine.

First of course is whether it is in English or not. Then from there it goes on and on with many unrelated questions about the problem. Of all people, the phone company seems to be the worst, although I had an experience recently with the social security line that almost drove me up the wall.

After answering questions and hearing the answering machine say, “I don’t understand, please repeat, several times, after 15 minutes I reached a live person. That person asked many of the same questions that I had already answered and put me on hold for ten minutes after which the mechanical voice reappeared and it started through the same questions.

By the time my patience ran out I had wasted about 40 minutes and didn’t have an answer to my problem. I hung up and started again, but this time with another number listed in the directory. Again, the same questions. I yelled at the phone several times, but the machine only repeated, “I don’t understand.” Finally, a man named Leo came on the phone and helped me. Although I had a hard time understanding his accent he was nice and patient with me.

At this point I don’t know whether or not my problem has been resolved. I was told that my order for increased Internet speed would be available on Jan. 2nd. but when I called yesterday both representatives of AT&T said they had not received an order.

It is not the confusion about the order that bothers me as much as those mechanical voices that waste your time and are of no help. Like I said, there ought to be a law against those things. I had much rather get a busy signal than to talk to a machine.

*Soon we will know the results of the survey by an organization calling for smoke-free restaurants in Corbin. There have been several newspaper articles recently about this subject.

One that attracted my interest last Thursday was an Associated Press story about a major drop in heart attacks that followed a city’s ban on lighting up. It concerned the ban in Pueblo, Colorado. The study, a three year research project and the longest-running of its kind, showed the rate of hospitalized cases dropped 41 percent after workplace smoking was banned there. Significant was that there was no such drop in two neighboring areas without bans.

Eight other earlier studies have linked smoking bans to decreased heart attacks, but none ran as long as three years. Dr. Michael Thun, a researcher with the American Cancer Society called the study, “Very dramatic.”

Thun was not associated with the three year study which was conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Whether you believe the huge percentage drop or not, all studies have shown that secondhand smoke might be a cause of heart attacks deaths and smoke-free laws are one of the most effective ways to reduce heart attacks.

Some opponents to the ban in Pueblo pointed out, there could have been other factors associated with the drop in heart attacks there and the study did not measure which heart attack patients were smokers and which were not.

But statistics do reveal that secondhand smoke causes an estimated 46,000 heart disease deaths and 3,000 lung cancer deaths among non-smokers each year. So regardless of what the local survey reveals these are hard facts that must be considered.