Traditionally, the robots of the future communicate with extreme politeness.

Sample conversation:

Me: “R2D2, please fetch my coffee.”

R2D2: “I’m sorry, Terence, but you have not been suffi- ciently specific. Do you have some coffee in a cup or mug you wish me to fetch, or do you wish me to supply a fresh cup or mug of coffee?”

Me: “The latter.”

R2D2: “Is that coffee in a mug or a cup?”

Me: “A mug.”

R2D2: “Do you wish me to remember this as one of your preferences?”

Me: “Which?”

R2D2: “Coffee in a mug.”

Me: “Yes.”

R2D2: “Thank you, Terence.” You get the picture?

For some reason, this politeness is fiction. The people who write computer programs are incredibly rude and large corporations increasingly robotic and unfriendly. Let me explain – let us say you have to enter personal data on a computer on one of those numerous occasions. You forget to put in the province you come from. An error message occurs. It does not say: “Please fill out the name of your province.” It says: “Province incorrect!” At the same time, the computer gives a startling bleeeep.

I fail to see why this is necessary. It is surely not necessary to inflict Pavlov-like training on us. Why the exclamation marks? Are they meant to add the message that you are a blasted fool for not entering your province? No. It’s all to do with the computer programmer trying to show godlike superiority.

But it gets worse. The large firms have become robots. For example, a major local telecommunications group has three separate addresses for me. Its records also indicate that I am female.

I have sent tens of emails and faxes, had telephone calls with the company and complained on Hellopeter – and I get a reference number and the company does nothing at all. In four months, nothing has changed. The automatic answering service, when you call, chants: “All our operators are (gosh) still busy. Please be patient.”

What they should be saying is: “Our customer care is run by a person who is a control freak and a budget slave. We could easily have more than enough staff to sort out your problems. This costs money and takes profit off our bottom line. So shuddup and wait, geek head.”

The telecommunications company is not alone. A well-known car hire company has different addresses for me and Tim Tanzer, our lead engineer. It has somehow cross-linked credit card information, so sometimes I am resident at Tim’s place and sometimes he is living in the office. Similarly, another car hire company has linked me to our computer technology technician through his driving licence. They look at my driving licence, which has my name on it and say, thank you, Mr Attwood. Which, if they looked at my licence, is not me.

The City of Cape Town made a mistake on its valuation of my house by an amount of R10-million. It kept sending me rates bills that I could not pay – of the order of R5 000 a month. I paid the first two bills and then phoned them up. Oh, they said, we cannot change it now – keep on paying and we will process your request. You will be advised if the valuation changes. It finally did – four months later.

I regularly get a call from a firm of lawyers. The message says: “Your South African Bureau of Standards licence account is overdue. You owe R5 342. Please pay to avoid prosecution.” However, I have a valid licence. I faxed it off to them. Nothing happens.

What has happened is that all these organisations have seconded their customer care to call centres paying minimum wages that could not care if the data base is correct.

The call centres claim: “Ninety per cent of callers are satisfied.” In fact, it is 90% of the 20% whose calls are finally answered.

Oh, for the polite robots. Or not too polite. The computer HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, locks astronaut Dave out of the spaceship. Dave asks him to open the pod bay doors. HAL replies: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”, thereby condemning Dave to death in space. More politeness than you need . . . from a robot.