Eliza

Today has been influenced by artificial conversations. This morning I got a phone call at home from a recorded message from Egg. It was an automated check on transactions which I humoured for the first few seconds ("press 1 if you are Alex...") until it wanted to do a security check.

Call me paranoid but if an automatic message phones you up and starts asking for your password, mothers maiden name and the rest would you give it to it? How do I know the message is actually from Egg and not some automated telephone phishing scam? In the end I just hung up. It tried ringing my phone again this afternoon. I feel a letter to Egg coming soon.

The second Eliza moment came when readyforu111 IM'ed me on Yahoo. I was just about to go to a meeting so all I managed was a "who are you?". When I returned and apologised for my diving out of the conversation "it" repeated the initial intro, complete with the same spelling mistakes. A quick Google search later confirmed that I was in fact talking to a bot, despite its protestations to the contrary. I assume it was a spambot trying to drive hits to some adult site. Common sense did prevail however as I was pretty sure a site by the name of Cyber Fun Girls was possibly not work safe ;-)