Ukrainian Humor: Energy Operator’s Sarcastic Chatbot Mimics Soviet Utility Worker

YASNO, a Ukrainian energy company, offered locals a nostalgic blast from the past via a chatbot that mimicked old utility workers as an April Fools’ joke.

The chatbot personified utility workers from the Soviet era when bureaucracy reigned supreme, a period when workers deemed the reading of electric meters – for which they were paid – as not a job but a favor for the customers, laced with sarcastic comments.

“Meet Albina Gavrilivna, a chatbot that embodies the legendary archetype of utility workers of the past. She is a bit sarcastic, sometimes cheeky, and gives the impression that the client is interfering with her life, but there is nowhere to go – she will have to endure him. The character is fictional, but she had her own prototype,” Mykhailo Vasylenko, YASNO’s head of marketing, said in a Facebook post promoting the bot.

The computer-generated worker first warns the user in its welcoming message that Gavrilivna can be “difficult to work with,” and subsequent interactions will take place if the caller responds correctly to the options being offered.

The interaction consists of a series of questions and answers, and any off-script answers are met with a sarcastic response telling the user to click the buttons.

“Can you write me a whole piece here? I won’t read it anyway. Press the buttons or is it that difficult?” the bot said in one instance.

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At some point it tells the user the system is down, so she will go to make tea instead.

Then Gavrilivna warns of errors in the system but refuses to elaborate, saying she is not the tech department, and that if the user wants to file a complaint he or she should come to the office instead.

“To file a complaint, you need to come to our office, write everything by hand, and take the paper to window #7. If, of course, you can stand in line,” the bot says.

If the user is unhappy, the bot simply tells the user it does not care for their feelings, but they can fill out a form because that is part of the process.

Then the interaction ends with the caller being told they can try again, with slightly different answers on offer – if the user persists in his or her efforts to report the reading, it impatiently asks for the user details.

“Do you have a personal account number? Do you think I have telepathic abilities?” it says.

If the user says it has the account number, the bot say sit is a waste of time since it found it somewhere in the system anyway, and the interaction continues with slightly different but equally impatient answers.

The bot is active until April 3, according to YASNO’s announcement.

Those who are interested but do not speak Ukrainian can experiment with the chatbot using Telegram’s built-in translation function.