Sunday, August 10, 2008

High tech call transfer

I happened to call up a friend who was staying at a guest house in Calcutta last week. I called up the reception and asked the gentleman in a calm voice, "Hello, could you please connect me to Room No. 5" and I promptly got the reply, "Yes Sir. Just a moment." After that I didn't hear any beeps or interruptions and in under a minute I heard the 'hello' from my friend. I continued my normal conversation.

Just before I could hang up, I told my friend, "I was really impressed with the line connection system at your guest house. It was so clean, I didn't hear any beeps, ringing sound, no hold tune, no auto voice response, just nothing..." and before I could complete my friend started laughing so loudly. I felt so silly about my comment, but couldn't help asking, "Pardon my ignorance, but could I know what is so funny?" and I got the reply, "The reception has a cordless telephone. So when the guy asked you to wait, he actually took the cordless phone, came up to my room and handed over the phone to me."

Hmm. I'm sure no other technology can beat this call transfer.

3 comments:

FifthBeatle said...

The beeps, hold tune, auto voice response, etc are all there for reasons. How does their presence make the system any less 'hi-tech'?

Flavin said...

That's a good comment Arnold. I think the word 'hi-tech' has different implications for different people. Hi-tech for me would be a system that is totally simple and down-to-earth, coz the more simpler and user-friendly a system appears to be, the more complex it becomes to design it under the hood. I didn't say that beeps and tones are low-tech, but I just found that the absence of them was pretty amusing :)

Its all about the mind said...

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