“Remoted - Hybrid” – Day 554 (Tuesday)

It feels summer is being heralded out and autumn welcomed by the resurgence of the unwelcome, annoying, robotic machine calls. One came in today while I was at work, and I swiped to reject the call. Then the phone was set face down on the desk to trigger privacy mode for a while.

After work, an Emergency Notification text came in about a missing child. This made me sad. There is a likely frantic family a few neighborhoods away. A few minutes after the alert text, there was the sound of a helicopter, and then sirens, but there was no way to know if they were related. The missed incoming call symbol was also showing on the phone screen and the recent calls listing included a call from Emergency Notifications. 

The Voice Mailbox also included a couple other missed calls. That’s when the annoying messages started to roll in. It had been a while since receiving any scammy robocalls and the peace and quiet was most pleasant.

One message featured the very precise robotic voice of “Jessica Nixon” calling about my “incomplete loan forbearance application.” Robot Jessica provided a phone number in the 202 area code and an approval code to use to speak to my “dedicated counselor.” Robot Jessica leaves a great message – well paced, clearly spoken, and it doesn’t suddenly speed up when leaving the callback number. The callback number was even repeated. I wish the actual humans leaving voice mails at work would follow the example of Robot Jessica, without the scammy phishing intent, of course. And nope, I won’t be calling back.

The next message was an urgent call about renewing my auto warranty. Over the summer I received a half dozen post cards about my auto warranty, which are easy to ignore, but now it seems we’re back to a fresh season of annoying phone calls. In terms of delivery, the urgent auto warranty call was not as polished and well produced as the call from Robot Jessica. Maybe I should call the warranty people and recommend they contact the Robot Jessica people for some message delivery, pacing, and production tips.