Hope you win!
When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”
No they don’t! They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that. “Hope you win!” Gawd.
It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”. Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.
Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint. I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same. One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches. The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render. That might fool me. Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money. Period.
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February 22nd, 2008 at 14h51
“my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information”
Wow. Just imagine the meeting where someone came up with that one!
February 26th, 2008 at 18h27
[...] I’m going to start cracking down on charities that, as discussed, do things like print your name and address in a blue “handwriting font” to make a [...]