Sneezing in Morse

The above phrase was coined by the late Benny Green in one of his columns in the magazine Punch, to ridicule management-speak, I think, claiming that sneezing in Morse code would be a more effective means of communication. I recalled it this morning, when I had occasion to ring 1004, which here in Madrid is the toll-free number you ring when you want to talk to Telefónica, Spain’s national phone company.

I suspected it was time to pay the bill, and as I spend a lot of time on the Internet, I don’t want to be cut off, even for the one day they do it should you be late with your bill. I was fairly certain that 31 October was the final date for the current payment to be made, and after some frantic shuffling of papers (I am not very tidy when it comes to filing) I discovered the bill, together with its long sequence of numbers, which you need to key into the cashcard machine. I placed it on the edge of my desk, and made a mental note to take it with me later when I go to work, and pay it on the way. But then a thought struck me. Didn’t I, in a fit of unwonted efficiency, pay the thing already? It didn’t really look like it as the bill was clean and not in any way crumpled, as it would have been if I’d shoved it in my pocket and toddled off to the cashpoint. But best to make sure; if I end up paying it twice it will be the devil’s own job to get the money back again. So I dialled 1004.

You get through more or less immediately, and a recorded female voice welcomes you, as they do, and tells you that you have reached Telefónica’s personal attention line, which you are not all that amazed to hear, since you dialled the thing in the first place. You are then encouraged to ring a 118 number (yes we have them too) if you want to make a directory enquiry, which of course you don't, or you'd have rung a 118 number to start with. Then you hear some irritating rock music for a few seconds, and this is followed by an abrupt silence, and the distant sound of another bit of apparatus kicking in.

"¿En qué le podemos ayudar?", (How can we help you?) asks another female voice. It still isn’t a real person, but some sort of voice recognition system. The idea is that you tell it what you want, and it will put you through to the right person. I hate this "how can we help you?" business. It nearly always means that they aren’t in fact interested in helping you at all. I never thought it would be adopted by the upfront Spanish, but international business practice has dictated that this very un-Spanish phrase is now heard whenever you ring a large entity.

I sighed and asked it, in Spanish of course, whether I had paid my bill yet. Naturally I didn’t expect that it would tell me yes or no right off, though as there is such a thing as incoming call identification, I’m sure it could be arranged. There was a silence, then some more apparatus kicked in. The gist of what it said that was that it needed me, in order to help me more completely, to tell it my full telephone number. I did so. Another silence, and then it announced that it would put me through to a real live operator.

How much better, I thought, in this brave new world, than the old days, when the number would ring for about 20 seconds, and then you’d start to talk to a real live operator without all this interaction with a machine.

The operator swiftly appeared (it was about 9 a.m., after all, when few people are ringing the phone company), and told me her name, as they do, which you don’t catch properly, as you don’t, and started to ask me en qué me podía ayud... but I cut her off by demanding to know if my current bill had been paid yet. She responded to this quite well. "Dígame el número" (tell me the number), she said. Though not one whit surprised by this, I nonetheless protested that I had just quoted my full number, digit by digit, at some recording machine as a precondition of being now able to talk to her. "Oh", she said, "that thing doesn’t work". Not a big shock, either.

Anyway, I told her my number. She asked me my name. I told her that. She asked for my national identity document number. I gave her that. She seemed relieved. "So have I paid the bill or not?" I wondered.

"You have a current bill of €165.19, which we sent to you on 1 October", she replied.

I sighed again. I told her that I had the bill in front of me, with the amount, and the closing date for payment, and the date when it was issued. But had I paid it?

"No", she replied, "you have till 1 November".

"That", I answered, "some 6½ minutes after first dialling 1004, "is all I wanted to know."

I feel sure that Benny Green would have recommended sneezing in Morse to Telefónica as a more effective way of exchanging information with their long-suffering customers, despite their claim to be professionals in communications.