But those problems are not what urged me to write. What did urge me to write is the recorded voice. The usability of the recorded voices is, at one level, clearly superior to that of the live train operator, which, as you'll know if you've ever taken the subway in New York city, are pretty much inaudible. Something magical seems to happen inside people's head when their voices are recorded for these purposes. A complete transformation takes place.
People start to talk funny .
They exaggerate the pronunciation to the extreme. Think about it for a second. Somewhere at the MTA headquarters, sits the person responsible for overseeing the recordings of these announcements. Let's say his name is Chris. Chris is a person, a real human being.