The church I attend, Immanuel, wasted invested money in a PhoneTree machine. Of course I was annoyed that a machine would interrupt my day. I told the PhoneTree to not call me again. It disobeyed by calling me later thus violating the Second of the Three Laws of Robotics found in Isaac Asimov’s book, I, Robot.
Law #2:
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Not good. The only way around this one is to argue that the second Law doesn’t apply, that PhoneTree isn’t a robot, or that PhoneTree was only designed to call people who had opted-in. I have a feeling the latter is true. Now it isn’t really PhoneTree’s fault that someone at Immanuel put my cell number on their robot calling list. I can see some good applications for PhoneTree. I think the larger issue is that someone thinks their time is so important that they can have a machine waste other peoples’ time for them. A recording just doesn’t tell people you want their help badly enough. People want to have people call them. It’s okay for a machine to assist a human to contact humans, but replacement isn’t necessary. Next thing you know people will be so busy answering robot calls they’ll have to have a robot handle them. So that’s what I’ve done. I have set Immanuel’s number to go straight to voice mail, where PhoneTree can happily talk to my answering machine.
Doing the right thing
Then, there’s Jason and Juliet, leaders of Awana Trek, who invested their time to call each and every person in their group inviting them to Awana. That’s personal touch. It says, “You are so important, I took my personal time to call you.” Those are the sort of phone calls I don’t mind.
Comments 2
I think you have a good point. I wonder if automated calls make people mad rather than providing the information needed.
Posted 19 Sep 2006 at 9:10 pm ¶So Ben,
What you are saying is that the church should hire possible dozens of people to call every individual to provide them with some simple information. Costing the church thousands and thousands of dollars in payroll. Or purchase a machine that has a one time cost, and can be used for years. In other words use good stewardship of resources.
Keep in mind that the convayance of information is not the same as requests for assistance. If you want my help I will not give it to a machine. But I would rather have a 10 second message giving me information then a 1 minute phone call from someone to tell me there is a meeting on tuesday.
Posted 22 Sep 2006 at 9:51 pm ¶Post a Comment