I know for sure that blind rage is not what most people experience when they call customer service. I do. I have taken great care in lumping all of my unsatisfactory call center experiences into two broad categories; lazy and the unhelpful.
Lazy, arrogant ass wipes can usually be found in call centers here in the US of A. They are the ones that ask me to speak slowly and calm down. They are also the ones that put me hold for 30 minutes and hang-up. They are the ones where I can spend the better half of a day “putting things right” with the call center supervisor. These people often play a song in my head (a fav of mine by Kevin Wilson). It goes like this,
“I said… Stick that fuckin fone, up yor fuckin arse
You're supposed to fuckin help, not make it fuckin hard
I only want to make a call and you keep acting smart
So you can stick that fuckin fone up yor fuckin arse”
My other unsatisfactory call center experiences come from offshore call centers. These people are usually very polite and genuinely try not to be as helpful as a fart in an elevator. I especially hate a lady named Helen Smith from Mumbai that asked me to speak “rational English” or she “would be forced to disconnect from this conversation”. Rational English? WTF? And why pick a fake name like Helen Smith when you could have Jenna Jameson? See? No sense of service AND no sense of humor.
My modem didn’t work that day I met Helen. She suggested that I turn it off and on again. I pretended that I did since I knew that the problem was with some obscure public key encryption setting. I continued to show her how little she knew by lecturing her on the finer points of transport protocols, bandwidth and DHCP. She continued to expound the obvious. I continued to ignore her.
After I accidentally hung up by repeatedly hitting my forehead with the phone, I decided to power down the surge protector. It was then that I noticed that the modem was actually unplugged. OK, OK, I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong because, well, um, Helen is a stupid name anyway…
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2 comments:
Dude! You didn't!
Reminds me of the call center tech who convinced a lady that her printer wasn't working because she had a kink in the cable. I tried this several times during my radio days with newbies. They'd call me frantically saying they couldn't get the weather site to come up on the web. So I'd tell them to check the cable. They'd set the phone down, I'd hear rumbling noises, and they'd come back on the line to hear me laughing my butt off.
You need to call Helen back and apologize . . .
Perhaps I should have called Helen back! D'ya know, it never even occurred to me before today that I could do that... But will I? No.
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