Press one and lotsa luck

	James Hilston, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image.

Some of us are old enough to remember those golden days back in the 20th century when you called a business and a human being answered. Nowadays, our call is important to them and, in fact, may be monitored for quality assurance. (Wouldn't that quality-assurer be more useful just picking up the phone?) But often we're reduced to intensely pounding the zero button in a laughable attempt to rouse a humanoid. Which constitutes, as the good folks of the automated phone-service industry call it, "a negative call-center experience." Expect more of the same.

The Christian Science Monitor has the cold, hard facts: An in-house receptionist costs $4.25 per transaction -- compared with $1.80 for an overseas receptionist and $1.85 for voice mail. But there is another relatively new option: outsourcing in-country. You get a real human being who speaks impeccable American and has intimate, computer-fed knowledge of each company.

At least a dozen businesses in the U.S. provide a full range of receptionist services. One, Ruby Receptions of Portland, Ore., has nine receptionists handling calls for 225 clients. However, they might not be effective if a bird gets in your building

Journalists do care

In the Post-Gazette newsroom, people like Kathy Samudovsky answer the phone LIVE and on site. But she was dealing with an internal matter with this e-mail Sunday afternoon:

There is a small bird that got into the second floor of the building and is occasionally flying around in a panic. If you see it....

1) Watch out for droppings.

2) Please call or e-mail me; a few of us caring souls are trying to guide it toward open windows.

3) Suggestions? (I called security and one of the guards said don't worry about it -- it will either find its way out or die.)

You talking to me?

Writer Nicols Fox, in The New York Times, called voice mail "the greatest labor transfer" of modern times. "It began with the invention of the touch-tone phone and the subsequent, tauntingly named 'voice mail' system, in which a voice is the thing precisely never heard. Consumers became the unpaid receptionists for business everywhere, traversing the unfamiliar and mysterious territory of multiple inappropriate choices as their time slipped away and their blood pressure mounted. Now we have robots that promise to listen closely, and to which we find ourselves speaking slowly and carefully in third-grade sentences only to hear: 'I couldn't understand you. Will you repeat the message?' What on earth are we doing and who's making us do it? I can't be the only one who feels like a fool talking to a machine."

Power bloggers

From the AP
• Man Buys Smoker, Finds Human Leg Inside • Coach Stops Runaway Horse by Biting Ear • Man Allegedly Tries to Use 'Blurry' $100 • Police Break Up Brawl at Chuck E. Cheese • Suggestive Card Ruffles Farmer's Feathers • Nerds to Auction Themselves to Women • Toilet to Tap? San Jose Probes Plan • Seattle to Allow Pygmy Goats As Pets • Yankees Rookies Dress Up in Oz Costumes

Less frustrating than talking to a machine is writing for one. The Internet rage known as blogging allows just about anybody to put his or her personal thoughts in cyberspace. Media critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post nicely stereotypes the blogger as "the one-man band, the big mouth in the basement, the pajama-clad pontificator taking on the media establishment." Now we have the blog collective, hosted by somewhat famous person Arianna Huffington for 300 famous, mostly liberal friends, who will write regularly on huffingtonpost.com. Some of the names who weighed in for yesterday's debut: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Cusack, David Mamet -- if I have to explain who these people are, you're in the wrong item -- Ellen DeGeneres and Mike Nichols.

Bolton for U.N.

Larry David, "Seinfeld" co-inventor and HBO curber of enthusiasm, in his Huffington opener: "I know this may not sound politically correct, but as someone who has abused and tormented employees and underlings for years, I am dismayed by all of this yammering directed at John Bolton. Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it's like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.

"You stupid ignoramus," I screamed, doing all I could to restrain myself from tossing the luke-warm liquid in her face. "There's too much freaking (I didn't say freaking) milk in here! What the freak is wrong with you?!"

"This, of course, brought on the requisite tears. Meanwhile, I'm the one who had to go into the kitchen and make my own coffee! There is one thing, though, I'll guarantee: That will be the last time she puts in too much milk. So get to work, Bolton. Show these other countries who's the boss."

New word

Pajama-clad pontificators? The American Dialect Society choice for this year's most creative new word: Pajamahadeen, n., bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media. See more at www.americandialect.org.

Say what you mean!

"One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace."

-- Blaise Cronin, Indiana University professor of information science.

Bird update

The Morning File will go to any lengths to get the story as long as it doesn't involve leaving the building. Here's the very latest from our Kathy Samudovsky: "I'm telling people unless we see co-workers walking around with mysterious white lumps on their shoulders, we'll think positively and assume the bird got out through the windows we left open for it last evening."