33 and a Third

Ah, well, the day has come. I knew it would, just thought I had a little longer.

It seems I am the shortest person in my family. Ronnie has surpassed me. I refused to believe it at first, but perhaps I should resign myself to it. We noticed during the weekend when we had a small get together in honour of friends Andrew and Jenny, who were visiting from California. I made Reid take repeated pictures to prove it to me. Ronnie is happy as a lark. A friend Tom helpfully suggested we have another child so I don’t have to be the shortest. I’ll take it up with Reid.

I’ve been working at Bell for a little over a year now (well, except for 3 months off), but no more. Lots of turmoil as they restructure, and most contracts were ended. They were more than fair to me, giving me a month notice. Very nice group of people and I hope I get to work there again one day.

I worked for the IVR group - that would be the automated answering system that takes your call and directs you to the right agent, or, lets you serve yourself. Being in IT for so long, I found it wild working on a phone system. Whenever I had to test the system, I had to use the phone rather than a computer. It was a hoot. And I have to admit, it’s a lot simpler to test a phone system than an application in most cases (not all!!)

I really enjoyed learning how their voice recognition works. I found we would anthropomorphise - referring to the system as “she”. Very easy to do when you’ve given the system a female name and when you’re talking to “her” all the time during analysis and testing.

Now I have a better appreciation of how deal with voice recognition IVRs as a customer (and boy, do I get pissed when they don’t work well!) I’ve heard a few people complain about Bell’s system, but I can attest to the fact that they work very, very hard to get it to work as smoothly as possible.

Not in too big a hurry to find another job. Hey, it’s August!