Call-Centers, The Final Frontier For Stretched Nerves.

A lesson in elocution and patience.

Throughout this morning I've had the privilege of phoning a call center. A call center with a technological edge...a computerized receptionist. Is there anything worse?

" Please state what your problem is in as little words as possible. "

Enough to make one break out in sweat and try one's hardest to pronounce with efficiency and neutrality. How do the elderly sans gnashes get by? Oh my, what happened to the good old fashioned punching in the correct number? So much easier indeed and far less stressful. One would imagine that the folks manning a call center would take away any and all frills designed to make the customer more irate than he already is....Well, not so today.

I bravely pronounced my way through four sets of phone calls as to add insult to injury, one put me on hold never to return, the other just put down her phone and left me with a heart-stopping engaged signal and the other transferred me endlessly and I felt like saying:

" Kids, look there's Big Ben. "

The last one had me a bit more alert as I demanded to have his full name before he finished saying:

" Just a moment while I check with someone else. "

At one point I was literally holding on for fifteen minutes ( without any calming elevator music ) before the phone was put down but I thought to myself that in the big scheme of things, it didn't matter. Relax and count to ten...

The trouble with reporting trouble is that one spill one's guts to the operator, seasoned with a nice peppering of irateness and being hard done bye only to have to re-dial, re-pronounce, re-state and re-hash...perhaps that is by design as after talking it over so often, the air is let out of the anger bubble

All along, I would have purred like a kitten if one of them had just said:

" We are so sorry for what has happened and we will sort it out for you as soon as we can. "

Oh well, let's hope that was my call center episode for this year.

Biggi