Friday Frivolity: Sid DeLong on Fatal Ambiguities

“Press One” “Area Closed” and Other Fatal Ambiguities

Sidney DeLong

Recently I made a call to a credit card company and, wishing to speak to a real person, found myself routed to an answer bot, who (“that”?) told me, 

As I had no wish to listen to pointless noise for 38 minutes, I pressed “1” on my phone’s numeric keyboard. But when nothing happened for a few seconds, I also pressed “#”, because on several occasions when I have been instructed to enter a number, I am told to press the pound or hashtag button to indicate that I am done.

Almost immediately, I received a repeat of the earlier message 

Mildly irked that the process had not worked, perhaps because I had been too slow to press the number, once again I pressed “1 #”. And once again got the same message. 

GRRRRR!

Then, as they say, the penny dropped. I realized that my problem must have been adding the pound sign (#). The bot just said “press 1” not “press 1 and #”. 

So I pressed “1” and waited. Nothing happened. So, for emphasis, I pressed “1” again. . . >. . 

This time the message was different:

ARRRGGG! After three failed attempts, I had lost the call-back option, I had pressed “1, 1” instead of “1.”

I now had 38 minutes of an infinitely-repeated, increasingly irritating little tune during which I reflected on my errors, trying vainly to blame the bot for the ambiguity inherent in “Press one.”  Where had I gone wrong? It was difficult not to construe this as a personal failing, a shameful error. How much more education did I need to understand the language of phone bots? Was my misunderstanding a moral failing? Did I over-complicate the simple parts of life? Did I suffer from an old man’s uncertainty borne of subconscious fear of technology I did not fully understand? 

Then the irony meter kicked in. This was nothing more mysterious than karma. 

I had fallen victim to the infinite play of meaning I used to celebrate when reading Derrida and Stanley Fish about 30 years ago. I remembered with guilty shame, the glee I felt when Stanley Fish pilloried his victims for mistakenly thinking they could control interpretation, that they could force meaning without taking into account the relevant interpretive communities. I have now become one of those innocent lambs, befuddled by the illusion of plain meaning. For I had failed to follow an instruction that would have been clear to a first-grader. Was “Press one” really uninterpretable? 

Yesterday, while reflecting on the problem of ambiguity I was walking down a forest trail and encountered a printed sign posted near the trail:

What exactly did this mean? Was the trail closed at this point? Was I supposed to turn around and go back? The signpost was not standing in the center of the trail, nor at the edge of the trail facing back toward me. It sat at the edge of the trail facing across it. After giving it some serious thought, I interpreted it as prohibiting me from leaving the trail and wandering off into the adjacent “area.” But not without considerable reflection.

My confusion at the “Area Closed” sign coincidentally remind me of an all-too-common problem I have faced as a driver when I encounter traffic signs demanding instantaneous interpretation that I have been unable to decipher, or rather, that I deciphered in multiple inconsistent ways. 

And this is not just an academic problem. As an aging Boomer, I begin to understand how people of my age sometimes end up in disastrous head-on collisions under ideal driving conditions. With me, it would not be a defect in perception or physical ability or even generalized confusion associated with senility. Not yet anyway. It would be interpretive confusion. 

As a final irony, these sad observations also impeach my recent posting about interpretation as a forensic, rhetorical activity where I maintained that interpretation was argument, not discernment. Being able to frame multiple, contradictory lawyerly arguments about the meaning of a road sign is not a useful survival skill that drivers need. In everyday matters of life and death. Plain meaning and The One Right Answer are all that matters.

OTOH, it might furnish the material for a particularly ironic obituary: Cause of Death: Stage 4 Postmodernism.