This Article is From Nov 01, 2014

A City Worker Is Suspended. One Complaint: He Talked Like a Robot.

A City Worker Is Suspended. One Complaint: He Talked Like a Robot.

Representational Image

New York: Office rebellion takes many forms.

Some workers loot the supply cabinet.

Others play computer solitaire or photocopy their derrieres.

Then there is Ronald Dillon, who works on a help line for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

He answered customer-service calls like a robot. "You have reached the help desk."

And he would not stop, despite warnings from his supervisor, a judge found.

For that, and other acts of insubordination, Dillon was suspended without pay for 20 days.

His appeal of an administrative judge's decision was denied this month by the city Civil Service Commission in a case reported by DNAinfo.

Dillon, 66, has been a civil servant since 1975, mostly working in computer-related jobs for the health department. His current post entails taking calls on an information-technology line, both from the other city workers and from the public through a service called NYCMED.

For a six-month period in 2012 and 2013, the city said in court filings, Dillon abandoned service requests, improperly transferred tickets to another desk and failed to provide correct descriptions of requests.

In addition, the city wrote, he "answered the phone in an unprofessional, robotic voice."

The administrative judge, Kara J. Miller, listened to tapes and agreed.

In three recordings, she wrote, Dillon "states in a slow, monotone, and over-enunciated manner: 'You have reached the help desk. This is Dillon. How may I help you?'"

He would gradually modulate his voice to a "normal tone" as the calls progressed, but callers found the initial contact off-putting, the city said.

According to court papers, one caller "asked whether there was a new automated answering system, and had hung up when she heard 'the robot' answer the phone because she needed to speak to a human about her issue."

"This is truly getting out of hand now," the help desk supervisor wrote to Dillon's boss. "More people are calling on the daily with complaints about his telephone manner."

Dillon countered that he was being unfairly singled out and was simply speaking carefully because he has a Brooklyn accent that people sometimes have a hard time understanding, the judge wrote.
He said he had not been properly trained on answering phones ("respondent acknowledged that customer service is not one of his strengths," the judge wrote).

And Dillon said that his boss, Barry Novak, was constantly "harassing" and "belittling" him, and that he tried to minimize variation in his phone greeting so as not to give Novak reason to harass him further.

Miller was unswayed.

Dillon, she wrote, appears to be a "disgruntled employee who is acting out" in response to a change of duties and a new supervisor.
She concluded, "I find respondent guilty of answering the phone in an unprofessional, robotic voice," and declared him guilty of three other offenses.

Noting Dillon's long tenure and prior record of good service, Miller wrote, he should be capable of appropriate behavior.

"With minimal effort," she wrote, "respondent should be able to perform his job duties in accordance with his supervisor's directives." 
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
.