Humans are struggling to get the basics right - we must keep our wits about us - Stephen Jardine

Even getting someone’s name correct seems to be a trial, writes Stephen Jardine

In a back street somewhere, there must be an employment agency that specialises in matching jobs with people who are supremely unqualified.

How else can you explain the Edinburgh Airport tannoy announcers who manage to make every departure sound like a bad idea being explained underwater? Presumably they also supply the staff to a restaurant I called last week to check a reservation.

I had to spell my name six times but eventually gave up in the face of the woman at the other end’s insistence there was no booking for a Mr Harden. How hard can this be? I even

Immigration controls at Ellis Island where the names of 12 million people were written down.A few notable errors were made but today we struggle with the most basic of human tasks, writes Stephen Jardine. PIC: CC.

tried the ‘sounds like sardine’ but that cut no ice.

It’s not as if my name is that difficult to decipher. Spare a thought for actors Chiwetel Ejiofor or Chloe Sevigny. I’m amazed they are able to star in anything given how much time they must spend spelling things out to British Gas and Virgin Media.

In time, we might hope artificial intelligence will wipe out the need for human involvement and any errors but so far, the signs don’t look good.

Anyone who has asked Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to play BBC Radio 4 and ended up receiving BBC Radio 1XTRA, or on particularly bad days Belgian National Jazz Radio, will know the limitations of voice assistants.

I always believed Scottish accents were the problem but having watched the new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm on TV, that’s clearly not the case given Larry David ends up calling his voice activated satnav the worst possible swear word.

Initially I assumed this is yet another issue we can blame on technology. Gone are the days when the person on the door at a restaurant had to have their wits about them and a sharp pencil and eraser to juggle all the bookings on the sheet. Now they just have to click a mouse on an online reservation and try not to lose your coat in the cloakroom….until some pesky customer breaks the system by trying to speak to them on the phone.

Similarly predictive text fills out most names before you have to even attempt to spell them.

The end result is a society much less used to deploying comprehension.

However, dig deeper and you find some people have just always been terrible when it comes to dealing with names.

From 1892 to 1954, nearly 12 million immigrants were processed on arrival in the United States at Ellis Island in New York. The records show a bewildering variety of spellings from the sublime to the ridiculous as staff attempted to decipher what they were being told. My distant relative William Jardine made it onto the page with his name unscathed but his place of birth changed from Kirkudbright to Kirkendbright.

That flexibility with the facts did come with benefits. Feivish Schnee arrived on a boat from the Ukraine and presented himself to officials as Phillip Snow and that was how his name was recorded.

He probably thought that would give him a better chance of a fresh start in the land of opportunity. Or maybe he had multiple attempts to try to get them to write down Feivish Schnee then eventually just gave up.