This weekend I had a home emergency that got me thinking about the possibilities of technologies like IVR in our daily lives. Specifically, I pictured a future where nearly everything is automated.
In Japan, apartments and homes are becoming “smart,” much more so than in North America. Evidently, toilets are really big over there. They’re electric now with a variety of features including heated seats, built-in bidets and hot-air driers.
I know, right? On House Hunters International, a guy was looking at apartments in Tokyo, and there was automation in places I wouldn’t have thought, including the crazy Swiss Army knife toilet.
So this weekend…
I was making dinner and a pipe basically blew under my kitchen sink. The water stop (the valve that shuts off the water from the pipe sticking out of the wall) broke off from the pipe.
Scalding hot water came rushing out of the pipe like a garden hose, immediately flooding my kitchen and part of my living room. (It also went down to the apartments below me. In fact, most of the water went down on the really nice lady below me.)
I was instantly thrust into a crisis. I had to stop the water with no way to stop it other than shoving a ball of grocery bags into the scalding spout and holding it there while I called the maintenance people. (My phone got wet and barely worked. I kept having to yell which apartment I was in.)
Not gonna lie, it was a nightmare. I was soaked, my apartment was flooding, I was getting burned by the water, it was hard to hold the water back (it kept leaking out no matter what I did). Ugh.
Anyway, I called the emergency maintenance number, which is a beeper. One of the maintenance guys called me back in like ten minutes. I yelled at him over the noise of the water to shut the water off in the entire building. He called someone in the building to run down and turn the water off. Five or ten minutes later the water stopped.
All things considering, it was a quick process getting the water shut off. I was maybe holding it back for like half an hour. But I can’t help thinking it’ll be quicker in the future.
Here’s what I picture: I call an IVR and tell it what was happening, the IVR immediately calls the onsite guy with a message (it could even be my message), the onsite guy shuts the water off via his smartphone over a cloud-based system that monitors and controls the building’s water, heat, electricity, et cetera.
I’m not complaining about how things went. I’m just idly daydreaming about the future when nearly everything is automated.
