Waaaaay back in the day, when I was an undergraduate student at The University of Akron, I worked as a student assistant in the Department of Telcommunications. My first job there was as an operator for the campus switchboard and for a while I was the only male working there. Which had an interesting side effect that my female colleagues could transfer difficult calls to me in the absence of a manager and I could throw a little extra bass in my voice to sound like someone with authority. We played to the stereotypes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later on, I got additional responsiblity and helped with scheduling and timekeeping – and eventually was more of an office manager. One task I was asked to do was to help with some recordings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the time, all of the residence halls had landline phones in each room for student use – along with voicemail. Each semester, the voicemail boxes needed to be cleared and reset – and they needed a male voice to re-record a default header for the male residence halls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For each rooms’ mailbox, I deleted any messages, reset the password, deleted any greetings, and re-recorded the header. Over and over again. And by the time I was done, there was no one faster with that system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did a good enough job with this that I was asked to record the voice-mail for the Telephone repair line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even years after I left the department, the manager insisted that they keep that recording. Including when they migrated to a new system. So that was cool and flattering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As things turned out, as I became the Assistant Director for the webteam as a full time employee, I also “inherited” the management of the switchboard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(there were a couple VP’s at the time that were shuffling things around…)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which was an interesting, though not an easy, job. I put my voice to work again occassionally\/frequently answering the calls – or handling the escalated calls like the old days. Though with actual authority this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also recorded the after hours message and after we switched to a phone tree instead of a staffed setup, I recorded the “press 1 for…press 2 for…” message as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This week, we’re making more updates to that system and it’s been decided – for more flexiblity and ease of future updates – that we’ll no longer be using a recorded voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead we’ll have a script that will be read by a generated AI voice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nI’m being replaed by a robot.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I get why we’re doing it and the voice isn’t terrible. But it does feel like the end of a 30 year long era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we switch over to the new system, I’m going to do one last recording with the full script and save the file. It’s my small way of backing up the machines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just in case they ever need a human to speak for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Waaaaay back in the day, when I was an undergraduate student at The University of Akron, I worked as a student assistant in the Department of Telcommunications. My first job there was as an operator for the campus switchboard and for a while I was the only male working there. Which had an interesting side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}