Hi there,

Someone may have already pointed this out, but chances are that the clueless customer service person from Verizon was a chatbot.

A number of companies are using these programs to cut down on customer service overhead (IKEA, for one). The problem is that they don't handle curveballs very well. In your case, they didn't seem to bother with programming in logic for dealing with continents rather than individual countries.

Google Jabberwacky and A.L.I.C.E. to play with a couple of these programs and see what I mean.

I don't know. Some people truly are morons. I remember when Atlanta hosted the '96 Olympics and they had operators transferring residents of New Mexico over to the international ticketing system because they thought New and Old Mexico were the same thing.

I made the same call for my boss saying United Arab Emirates for Dubai. I had a live person and I had to speak to three live persons to get them to look up United Arab Emirates as Dubai is not listed alone....

I have heard a story along a similar vien where in the Hour or Senate New Mexico was asking for funding and a representative from somewhere asked why they couldn't ask their own country for aid?

I always try to trip to the Human option ASAP when dealing with the bots.