Word: carded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last month Linda Hiwot, a Brooklyn junior high school teacher, got a surprise when she phoned her bank for a credit-card balance. Instead of the familiar human teller, she was answered by a computer-generated voice that told all callers with Touch-Tone phones to "press 1 now," thus beginning a series of steps that would eventually lead to her balance. When she called the IRS about an overdue tax check, another computer voice directed her to "push 9" for refunds. Even a local department store had acquired a robot operator, which like an overeager clerk insisted on taking...
...messages they select. The most powerful machines combine voice-message units with huge computer files, which enable callers to use their telephones to navigate through long lists of stock quotes or catalog items. Some units even allow a caller to order merchandise and charge it to a credit card, without ever speaking to a human...
...admiration? It can't be intimacy that ballplayers are peddling for $5, $8 and $12 a signature to children lined up at autograph marts. Almost any weekend of the year in school halls and shopping malls, casino hotels and churches, heroes are hired to lure hobbyists to baseball-card shows where memories are for sale...
...time the war was won. Whatever the rights and wrongs of either war, announcing the prospect of a battle is leadership; announcing a victory is not. Whether America will actually defend its freedom with blood and money when called upon is -- for all the martial rhetoric and credit-card defense spending of the 1980s -- unproved...
WHAT little plot Hair has centers around the question of whether head hippie Claude is more afraid of burning his draft card or of taking the path of least resistance and getting killed in Viet Nam. Meantime, the rest of his "tribe" tunes in turns on and drops out in an effort to free themselves from the hypocrisy of authority...