Human IT Worker Suspended for Refusing to Stop Talking in Robot Voice
Think of the coolest, funniest, least socially alienating behavior you could exhibit at work. Something that would really give your colleagues a chuckle. Are you thinking of something? Is it bleep blorp talking in a robot voice?
"Commence Monday morning bagel processing." "This memo left my systems discombobulated." "Danger, Will Robinson, danger—someone left a class-two stinker in the men's room." Get it? If the humor does not compute, your artificial intelligence needs adjusting. (Get it?)
So you can understand why it's so crazy that Ronald Dillon, an IT worker at the New York City Department of Health, was awarded a 20-day suspension for repeatedly showing off this patently hilarious and not at all irritating skill while answering phones. From DNAinfo:
Miller's decision says that during the hearing the Health Department played a recording of Dillon speaking to a customer in a "slow, monotone and over-enunciated manner" and saying, "You have reached the Help Desk. This is Mr. Dillon. How may I help you?"
His droid imitation was apparently good enough to fool callers.
One confused customer who spoke to Dillon later called back and told another Health Department worker that she thought "there was a new automated answering system and had hung up when she heard 'the robot' answer the phone because she needed to speak to a human about her issues," the decision says.
Dillon, a human man from Brooklyn, claims he adopted the monotone because higher-ups didn't like his fast-talking outer-borough accent: "They objected to the tone of my voice so I made it atonal."
According to a written statement about the decision, his superior took issue with Dillon's assertion: "There is a difference between speaking slowly and distinctly and speaking so robotically that callers did not believe that they were speaking to a person."