That's brilliant. Sometimes talking to real humans is great.

It reminds me of two things. When I was a child I was given a postage stamp and wrote a letter to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and posted it. Remarkably, I got a reply from Aardman Animations with a card signed by Nick Park himself. Someone at Royal Mail obviously understood and looked up the real address of the studio.

Later as a teen I noticed the clock on our oven displayed "24:00" at midnight instead of the more conventional "0:00"[0]. I wrote to the manufacturer (Neff) on a support channel and it actually got forwarded through several departments before I received a reply from an engineer quoting ISO8601 and how it doesn't actually specify that midnight has to be 0:00 (although, sadly, I never received a positive reason for why someone made the oven clock like this).

For those of us who remember such interactions it's even more frustrating when you find there's a dumb robot at the end of the line. Even if it's LLM powered. I actually asked ChatGPT what it would do with the Wallace and Gromit letter and it couldn't find the same solution. We lost a lot with Google-style faceless companies.

As for the time, in the UK we had (have?) "The Talking Clock" which you could get to by dialling 123. This was well enough known in 2001 to be a key part of this scene from The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBCFV6qa3A&t=146

[0] I just looked this up again and, funnily enough, John Ward showed a similar oven on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_oLT7lWQ44

When I was about 10 I wrote a letter to Microsoft and they sent me back a package of Visual Studio (real licensed edition that didn't display a dialog box every time you ran a compiled program!) and, on two CDs and in HTML Help format, MSDN Library.

My GE microwave has a whole damn button the same size as the start button for AM/PM. Has to be one of the dumbest design wastes I have seen. I have always wished the 24 hr clock had taken off in the US. I use it on any clock that supports it.

I like that both 0:00 and 24:00 exist. If you say "midnight, August 12", do you mean at the start or the end of the day? There might be a convention, but I don't know it so others probably don't either. With 0:00 and 24:00 and a date, you can disambiguate a time precisely.