Vancouver Province
for March 3, 2000

I’m a mild mannered man. I’m also a modern 21st century man – at least I will be when it starts next January 1. I’ve been using a computer for years, valiantly ignoring all suggestions that I’m being nuked. But dammit, I’ve had it with some of the crap the Computer Age has brought us.

Now when I started surfing the Internet a few years ago, it was fun. There were strolls through the Smithsonian Institute; there were fly-fishing chat boxes; hell, there were even chat boxes for political junkies. Now there’s so much stuff – and increasing exponentially – that it’s often faster to use books.

Email haunts my every move. I can’t go to a theater or trout stream without hearing bells ring and it seems every phone call I make brings "if you would like service in English, press 1" and on ad nauseum. Now I’m all for this modern stuff. Or at least I was until a week ago today when I lost it. Completely. Hear me out.

In the morning I talked to a lady at the CBC who wanted me as a guest on a show. That afternoon at home I received a message from her – all I had was a number and "Ruth". I called the number – it was the newsroom - and got a voicemail. It was quickly returned and I was told that no one named Ruth was there and would I try the main studio? I did. And after selecting 1 for English, the fun began. There were seven initial possibilities to choose from of which any of three might have been the right selection. (My problem was compounded by the fact that I wasn’t sure whether Ruth was in TV or radio.)

After selecting one from the first group of options I was given nine more. How many possible combinations is that? 126, I think, including the French/English bit.

One of the options was to dial in the first five letters of her last name – which I didn’t know. First name yes, last name no. And what if it only had three letters? Or was one of those unpronounceable Polish ones with no vowels?

I decided that I needed a real person in the act so, recognizing a program that I had guested on, I dialed Robin’s number and got his voicemail. He was in Victoria for the day.

Now at this point you can start, with the judicious use of the # sign, to retrace your steps. That seemed too complicated so I started all over again assuming, quite wrongly as it turned out, that some option would give me a real person whose job it was to help callers in distress. No, I was back into the numbers game and, after much button pressing, I was back at Robin’s-in-Victoria-leave-a-message-at-the-tone.

I had but one remaining option - find out what program Ruth was involved with. But that meant finding a real people so again I phoned the friendly folks at the Newsroom.

"Sorry, we can’t take your call right now but if you’d leave your name blah, blah, blah". So I pondered the puzzle some more.

The answer came. Didn’t Ruth give me the name of the show? And wasn’t a list of all the shows an option?

It was. Except no show mentioned seemed to be the right one. I found out later, it’s brand new and not on the list yet. In the meantime the Newsroom got back to me. I must commend them – not only did they try to help but they were most sympathetic about the phone system. Evidently they’ve tried it themselves. Turned out that they’d never heard of Ruth and suggested that I try the switchboard. I reminded them that there was no bloody switchboard which was the problem. Elapsed time – just a shade under an hour.

Is there nothing we can do? Is there no ombudsman to turn to? Will the Supreme Court of Canada not find something of assistance in the Charter? Is picketing the answer? Can we perhaps hire a hacker to jam the system in protest– hell, if they can crack the US Defence Department buggering up CBC’s switchboard ought to be mere child’s play!

In the meantime I’m off to replace that broken window and rescue my phone from the bottom of the swimming pool.