Confirmation messages

Two things today made me think about how nice a confirmation message is. First was activating a new credit card. You get this in the mail: And call. Welcome to the Commerce Bank Card Activation Line. Please enter your sixteen-digit account number...

Beep, beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Beep.

To confirm, please enter the last four digits of the primary account holder's Social Security number...

Beep, beep, beep, beep.

Thank you for calling. Goodbye. What? What happened? Is it activated, or is that a fatal error? It sounds like an IVR with a fatal error. And they really did hang up. I had to call in to a person to make sure I had a payment method as I wandered town this Saturday. Turns out, yes, it activated, so aside from my dissatisfaction, they are loosing money on live call handling over a simple lack of an IVR message. Second, I am ripping in a whole bunch of the wife's CDs we never got around to, using iTunes. Not too painful as I have determined that it can handle multiple disks in queue, so both my drives are loaded at once. They cannot both be ripping, but it still saves me time OTOH, I cannot tell if its done without walking in and looking, fairly carefully, at the computer. I have some other processes (a manual cleanup thingy, some CD burning software) that defaults to beeping when its done. When those are running, I just crank the volume, an only wander back in when it beeps "complete." iTunes doesn't even have a complete strip or anything like gmail. You just have to notice that everything is green and checked, and nothing is orange and animated.