Spoken like a true android

I’m a little obsessed by women with elec­tronic voices at the moment. But not in any sort of erotic way. Really, no.

First, there are the new announce­ments on Lon­don Underground’s Cent­ral Line trains. I don’t know what pos­sessed the man­age­ment to replace the lovely voice of Emma Clarke, which had such a sooth­ing feel about it — a sim­ilar timbre to a late-night Radio 4 con­tinu­ity announ­cer — but I do know that, up until this change, I had found her rev­el­a­tion that I was approach­ing Eal­ing Broad­way (where this train will ter­min­ate) to be won­der­fully calm­ing and reassuring.

The new voice artist, how­ever, seems to be going through some kind of trau­matic epis­ode, requir­ing her to over-compensate with an awful ‘sing-song’ tone, bizarre changes of inflec­tion and a sense of forced jol­lity about announ­cing the train’s arrival at Not­ting Hill Gate. I first heard her unmis­take­able voice dur­ing a late-night jour­ney home a few weeks ago, when I was slightly worse for wear because of alco­hol. I’m sure you can ima­gine the sense of drunken hor­ror that ensued.

Then there’s the woman whose voice graces the IVR for South­ern Elec­tric. I’ve been listen­ing to her a lot just recently, as she reels through the vari­ous but­tons that I should press for dif­fer­ent ser­vices (before I finally get the rare chance to speak to a real human being and attempt to dis­cover when the big hole in the street dir­ectly out­side my front door is going to be filled in; it’s a long story, so don’t ask). Something’s not right about this par­tic­u­lar IVR woman, though. To put it bluntly, it’s the fact that she’s Scot­tish. An upper-class Edin­burgh accent, I reckon. Now there’s noth­ing inher­ently wrong with this — after all, I love the vari­ants of the Scots’ accent. It’s just that when I call South­ern Elec­tric I rather hope to hear a Lon­don accent, or per­haps even a grat­ing example of Estu­ary Eng­lish. But not a dis­tinct Scot­tish lilt. It’s just wrong, some­how.

Finally, of course, there’s my old — the mys­ter­i­ous woman behind BT’s 1571 answer­ing ser­vice. Good heav­ens, but she’s got mean recently, hasn’t she? So maybe she doesn’t like the colder weather and the nights draw­ing in, but that still doesn’t excuse the unfor­giv­ing and, at times, down­right rude edge in her voice that I’ve had the immense dis­pleas­ure of hear­ing over the past couple of weeks. The other day, expect­ing an import­ant call, I tele­phoned her on two occa­sions only a few hours apart, and I could have sworn that she soun­ded monu­ment­ally pissed off when she had to inform me for the second time that I had no new mes­sages. I’m begin­ning to won­der whether I’m pay­ing an extra premium for mes­sage retrieval with fuck­ing attitude.

That’s it. I’m off to soothe my frayed nerves with the sop­or­ific tones of the ship­ping fore­cast. Do not disturb.