I have a pleasant voice, so if you follow me on social media, then you know I post about how often a customer at my square job will ask during a call, "Are you a real person?" I laugh as if they're the first person to have asked me that, and I tell them I get that often. It's annoying, but I don't get upset about it.
Yet earlier this week I did get angry about it. I'm not sure why, and I've been thinking about it since. This customer did not ask if I was a person. Instead he demanded to talk to a human being. In the middle of a sales pitch in which he did not like the price, he specifically said, "I want to talk to a human being."
I said, "I am a human being." I heard an edge in my voice, which surprised me a little, so I fell back on the old ha-ha routine. I'm not sure why that pissed me off, though.
This voice didn't come from nowhere. When I was young, I listened to a lot of old radio horror shows like Quiet, Please and The Hermit's Cave, and I loved the way people's voices were back then. I started imitating them so I can do a good impression, in particular of the commercials. "Try Ironized Yeast. They're the ones with the IY on the bottle and on each tablet." "Four out of five doctors recommend Camel cigarettes." In addition to that, when I was a parts driver for the City of Elmhurst and had to drive a lot of places, I listened to a ton of morning radio shows. As such, I kind of wanted to be a radio personality for a while, so I would imitate people I heard on the radio. "It's the top of the hour, and we've got traffic coming up in ten minutes." "This is John Bruni, coming atcha LIVE from such and such arena, where Megadeth is about to take to the stage." And so on.
Which was perfect training for when I got the job at Conference Plus as a conference operator, ie. the guy who introduces calls, runs Q&A and polling sessions, etc. So a lot of training went into this voice, almost all of it nonformal.
I have only myself to blame whenever someone thinks I'm AI on the phone. So why did I get pissed at this one guy?
I have no idea. I can't afford therapy, hence me writing Goodnight, Fuckers, so do you have any suggestions? Also, if you're looking for a voice actor to pay tons of money to, drop me a line.
