27 APR 2017: Did you hear the one about the man driving down a country road? Coming the opposite way is a woman and, as their cars pass, she leans out of her window and screams “PIG!!” Distressed by this unprovoked attack, the man turns around and yells after her, “BITCH!” He then carries on around the bend and smashes into a huge pig standing in the middle of the road.

My wife loves this story. She maintains it demonstrates what she calls “The uncanny ability men have to hear without listening.” At least, I think that’s it: Maybe it’s the other way around – I never really listened.

In defense of my gender however, this quirk is by no means exclusive to the male of the species. The chronic incapacity to listen and absorb what’s being said is a cross-gender malaise and, given the tech-driven steady demise of verbal communications, it’s getting worse by the year. Unfortunately for consumers, it seems to infect people employed in service industries more than any other demographic, with hotel and airline employees among the most susceptible.

Take something as simple as checking in at the front desk of a hotel, as I did last week. As is my custom, I opened with, “Hi, I have a reservation for two nights – the name is Tait, that’s T-A-I-T, first name David”.

“Certainly sir, one moment please,” tap, tap, tap on an unseen keyboard.

“I’m sorry Mister Tat, we don’t seem to have anything under that name. Could it be under another name?”

The overwhelming urge was to say, “Yes, probably – why don’t you try mine? Which as I just took pains to tell you, is spelled T-A-I-T”. Of course, I could never be that rude, so I bit my tongue and started over.

One cold comfort in making hotel or airline bookings online is that, if your name is misspelled, at least it will be down to your own carelessness. In the days when I regularly made bookings over the phone, I swear that 50 percent of the time the res agent obviously thought I didn’t know how to spell my own name and would correct it to either Tate or Taite. I mean, Tait is a very simple four-letter name – how on earth do people with Slavic eight-consonant/one vowel names fare? Or totally vowel-free ones, like a kid named Skrlj with whom I went to school?

But for once the travel sector is (arguably) not the worst. This distinction belongs to retail catalogue call centers. Ordering from US-based catalogues for delivery in Canada almost always necessitates a phone call, primarily because alphanumeric postal codes are a mystery to most US online ordering systems. When you get to giving the Canadian address it will usually involve some hold time while the agent checks with a supervisor to see if they actually ship north of the border. But no matter where the order is destined, the complexities go much deeper. A typical call often goes like this:

Agent – Thank you for calling XYZ, how can I help you?

You – “I’d like to order two extra large men’s polo shirts in white. The item number is W-123456.”

Agent – Silence, then, “Do you have the item number?”

You – “Yes I do – that’s, ehm, how I was able to give it to you.”

Agent – “Okay, yeah, that’s the men’s polo shirt right?”

You – “Right.”

Agent – “In blue right?”

You – “Wrong. In white, like I just said.”

Agent – “Okay. Medium right?

This is the point where, in the interests of propriety, I will cut it short but you get the drift because we’ve all been there at one time or another.

Then there’s the perhaps even more frustrating combination of inhuman and human with which one is often confronted when calling insurance companies, banks and the like. Before you ever get to a humanoid you are asked (electronically) to, “Please tell us your 34 digit account number including the eight numbers after the dash.” When finally, after several reminders that, “Your business is important to us so please continue to hold,” you get through to a live agent, what’s the first question you are asked? “Can you please give me your 34 digit account number?” AAAAGH!

Why can’t the inhumane system speak to the human one? They work for the same company after all!

In 1950, Alan Turing, who’s widely considered to be the founder of Artificial Intelligence (AI) famously asked the question, “Can machines think?” Almost seven decades later, as Watson and his ‘bot’ buddies ably demonstrate, the answer is clearly in the affirmative. In the best tradition of ‘walking and chewing gum at the same time’ however, in today’s service sector the question should probably be amended to, ‘Do human beings still have the ability to listen and think at the same time?’ As AI not so gradually takes over, sadly, in a lot of places, it really doesn’t have too much human competition

Once upon a time, almost everyone seemed to regularly ask, “Did you hear the one about … ?” Now it may be one of the most endangered phrases in the language.