Par Avion: Digital Deluge

Ok, I know this is hardly an original observation or complaint but …

What is it that retailers, corporations, businesses big and small still don’t get it when it comes to spamming their customers with texts and emails. The moment you divulge your email address or mobile number to anyone you find your inbox exploding with cluster bombs of digital shrapnel.

Everything from beseeching requests for likes on a dishwasher detergent’s Facebook page or invitations to an Instagram feed on changing toilet paper rolls, to testimonials for the bloke who came round to remove your own personal fat berg from your drain last week.

This pathetic pleading for approval reeks of insecurity on a global scale, why does the post office want to know how it was for me and will I still respect them in the morning after my last parcel delivery? It was a bit like, well, a parcel delivery. Somebody in a white van pulled up in the driveway and brought a cardboard box to the door just as Amazon or my wine supplier requested and paid for. Nothing much to report really, if it had been delivered by a bloke dressed as Wonder Woman riding a white horse with saddle bags made of cane toad skin then it might be worth commenting on but it was just a delivery.

Then when these constant requests for feedback are ignored, they are followed up with warnings that you may be about to miss out on the latest solicitation for a testimonial from your bank inquiring after your most recent withdrawal experience at an ATM.

It occurs to me every time I see one of these requests that if anyone on the receiving end ever bothered to read the responses then the phone company wouldn’t still get their website so wrong or the bank would answer their phone or the unsubscribe button would actually be functional in the future. Can’t imagine why they even bother to continue to plead for ‘feedback’ while already bloated with enough to clog a mainframe for the next decade.

This data mining really should only be allowed after a corporation has bought a licence and staked a claim to an exclusive territory so that only one annoying, cloying supplier can bug an individual at any given time.

The way this information is gathered is so transparently specious. For example, when buying online and using your PayPal account which has an address and payment details embedded there is absolutely no reason for a retailer to redirect you back to their site to provide your personal information again just so they know how to fill your inbox with thirty offers a day until you simply unsubscribe, or your eyeballs haemorrhage all over your keyboard.

Then there’s the instore ‘loyalty card’ offer. You pick up a pair of undies at your local supplier of cheap slave-labour produced goods and who can resist a flattering offer to become a member of said establishment and in future receive exclusive offers of discounts on an hourly basis.

There are some smarter marketers who offer the option of receiving emails on a cycle of your choice which means rather than simply consigning everything to the junk folder or trash you can opt for a weekly summary of amazing offers on pet food or oven cleaning products or whatever your particular kink is – thinly sliced cooked potatoes seem to be having a moment on Facebook!

But if all else fails and still nobody answers your phone calls there’s always the ever-helpful chat bot, they’re always called Sage or Mandy or Minerva and while their AI masters have anticipated many of the stock five questions you may have, poor old Mandy just doesn’t get it sometimes – ‘Hmmm… I’m still not quite sure what you mean. Try saying it another way.’ So, you have go in Finnish. Or ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Maybe try rephrasing your question?’ WTF didn’t you quite catch? and finally in answer to ‘Sorry Mandy but you’re not up to it when it comes to ‘chatting’. Bye’, you get: ‘Okay. And just to be sure, is this about missing points?’ It sure is, many points have been missed completely.

If you are really persistent you may choose to waste a few days actually writing original emails to those companies that courageously publish an address for correspondence, in these cases the bromidic, robotic responses which never appear to have been written by a human even in pre-AI days are signed off improbably by Nathan, coffee ambassador, or Stefano, customer resolutions officer, or Charlotte narrative projects coordinator or Erica, e-commerce evangelist.

It may all be down to me, maybe I’m just neuro non-typical or lacking in lived experience of bot chatting or just indulging in another of my increasingly regular jeremiads where I rage against the machine and howl at the moon. I think in computer-speak it may be I’m lacking the heuristic instinct employed by the children who code these sites on behalf of the adults who pay them large amounts to be digitally up to date, or just that I’m using the beta version and in a few years’ time Sage will have perfected her ability to understand ‘cease and desist’.