i’m sorry for the late post this week. i have been without interwebs since last thursday at my studio, and every path i took through the tortuous maze of verizon’s “help” line menus resulted in me either being bluntly disconnected or being cheerfully told by a recording that no one could help me.
so i waited till this morning and spent the first hour and a half trying different techniques to find someone who could tell me what was going on. there were good 10-15 minute chunks of time on hold, which gave me an opportunity to read my new tenori-on manual. i like that the manual is mostly superfluous (even more than most manuals). i’ve had it for 5 days now and i’ve already written and recorded songs with it. i didn’t learn anything from the manual today that i hadn’t already been able to figure out myself from the interface directly.
anyway, all in all, i spent 2.4 hours with verizon only to find out that they’d cancelled my service and i would need to re-order. so much wasted time. i will have new service sometime after aug 26.
in the meantime, i tried to imagine a way that instead of horrible hold music, places that keep you on hold forever could have interactive games to play with the phone keypad, like the old Merlin game. remember Merlin?
i don’t know about you, but this was one of my favorite childhood toys, not unlike the tenori-on in principle. so wouldn’t it be cool if you could adapt some of the audio games to an on-line hold system so people could distract themselves from their anger and frustration by playing games?
i write these posts (apparently) so that you guys can comment to tell me how silly my ideas are. feel free. this was just a little fantasy of mine today.
that is a good idea… you’d want to give people the option, of course, but if you’re stuck waiting for something else and decide to get some business done, it could be nice.
you could actually get companies to implement this if you showed them that (a) it resulted in more compliant customers and (b) they could use customers’ progress through the games as a datamining application.
creepy but not necessarily a bad idea, especially for tech support centers.
Cant you already do this if you put your cell phone on speaker phone mode and play games/music/etc on the same phone while you wait?
I could easily go for a trivia game while on hold. I love those flights that have the trivia game included on the television on the seat back in front. It’s fun to compete with the entire plane and see your seat number at the top of the winner’s list– because you’re insanely brilliant at trivia. Ahh.
$1200 is a little too rich for my blood when it comes to buying a toy like the Tenori-on. I’d rather have moon boots and can of beans.
We were too poor for me to have a Merlin when I was a kid.
Tire swings and the skeletons of animals entertained me, and I think I played that Merlin guy once at a cousins house who had a cocaine dealin’ dad. he liked Phil Collins.
I loved Merlin. We could never keep it in batteries though.
I tell you a game I could never do is that tile game where it’s all mixed up and you have to get it in order. I will never figure those out.
Merlin, however, just the picture makes me all warm and fuzzy. That yummy red color. The comforting sharp angles. sigh.
yeah, those were the days. we couldn’t afford it either, justin – i think it was a gift. a real splurge. i don’t remember problems with the batteries, although the current one i have seems to be corroding the batteries.
have you seen the new merlin that hasbro has brought back? it doesn’t look nearly as cool. it has actual buttons instead of the presspads. what were they thinking?
also, just a note…the $1200 tenori-on pricetag is beyond me, too – this is one of the first pieces of equipment i have purchased for my new NASA sonification research, so it actually belongs to you, the taxpayer. i promise to do something novel and scientific with it so you get your money’s worth.
You’ll never give me my money’s worth.