Call Centres

Imagine, if you would, walking in to a supermarket to be greeted by a member of staff who asks you the following question:

"Would you like electrical goods, groceries, home care or clothing?"

When you reply with: "Well, actually I'd like several things" the member of staff responds with "I'm sorry, would you like electrical goods, groceries, home care or clothing?"

"Well, I'll start off by getting some cheese please."

"I'm sorry, would you like electrical goods, groceries, home care or clothing?"

"Groceries you ignorant twat."

"This way sir."

At this point member of staff #1 takes you to meet member of staff #2, who happens to sound exactly the same as member of staff #1. "Would you like dairy, meat, fish, bakery or frozen produce...?" Eventually, after a series of ever refining questions and new staff members, member of staff #7 issues you with your cheese. When you then ask fro some crackers, member of staff #7 reintroduces you to member of staff #1, you asks "Would you like electrical goods, groceries, home care or clothing?", at which point presumably the last of your patience would evaporate and you would use your freshly retrieved cheese to attempt to make member of staff #1 completely air tight.

You can see where I'm going with this. Back in the days when telephony was new and exciting, you would lift the receiver of your phone and on the other end of the line would be a real human being. You would tell that human being that you wanted to talk to another human being, and they would connect you to that human being. The system worked well. Unfortunately this system didn't last, for three reasons:

1. Human beings need food and drink and stuff and so cost money

2. Machines don't

3. Businessmen are, by and large, money grabbing bastards.

So, in the modern age of telephony if you have to speak to anyone other than someone whose phone number you already have, you almost always have to speak to a machine, which operates entirely in the manner of our imaginary supermarket. I once came across an amazing exception to this rule: a few years ago I called the technical support line of a little known Welsh broadband company. It was eleven at night on a Sunday, but despite this I immediately got through to a real person. Admittedly he was French, but I was so gobsmacked by the fact that he a) existed and b) proceeded to help me with my problem I nearly offered to send him a tripe sausage and snails.

Sadly since that time the small Welsh company has been bought out by a much larger American company and my helpful Frenchman has probably been deported in favour of another fucking automated sodding machine. As soon as this happened I immediately cancelled my account.
As far as I can make out these machines don't seem to work either. I had to use one yesterday to speak to my bank; I went through no less than five menus before getting through to something with a pulse, but despite the fact that I had gone through all those menus and refined the possibilities as to why I was calling, she still didn't seem to have the first fucking clue as to why I was on the phone. I therefore had to explain everything I'd already punched in to the Borg over the previous 15 minutes.

Still, I guess I was lucky. At least in her case she spoke English with a clear and understandable accent. I'm not going to go in to the hardships of those who work in overseas call centres, if for no other reason than Rotten.com have covered the issue much better than I could. However, there are few things more soul destroying than spending fifteen minutes navigating an automated menu system and listening to Casio Keyboard Classics before being put through to a person for whom English is a ninth language.
It is a state of affairs that cannot go on. I would therefore like to propose the following methods for us all to adopt when dealing with call centres:

1. Ask them if they could arrange for a stenographer to be present at their end so you can have an accurate written record of the conversation.

2. Attempt to perform a citizen’s arrest on the call centre worker when they start wasting your time.

3. When you do eventually get through to a real person, say the following: "Press 1 followed by the hash key for my name. Press 2 followed by the star key for my address. Press 3 followed by the panda key for my waste size as a percentage of the gross domestic product of Lichtenstein. Press 4 followed by the sneeze key for advice on baking gingerbread." If they do anything other than press a key, give them four completely different options.

4. Fire up the English to Klingon Dictionary. Learn the Klingon for the words "address", "telephone", "bill", "please", "name", "understand" and "platypus". Try and use them all in the conversation.

5. Masturbate furiously.

6. Buy a whistle, the louder the better. Blow it down the phone whenever you feel the call centre worker is wasting your time.

7. When the call centre worker asks you if there's anything else they can help you with try and convince them to order your online shopping for you. This is more successful if you take a step by step approach: Ask them to go on to the Internet first, then tell them to go to the website, select each product, etc. etc. If they ask why, just say "Ah, all will become clear my fine furry friend."

And so on. I'm sure there are many others, and if you can think of some then dump them in the comments section below. With any luck those corporations that run these call centres will get the message, and give us some real people to talk to. More likely though they'll give us more complicated phone systems to talk to. The bastards.

Rant over.

Christmas

I was going to have a rant about Christmas this time, but something inspired me to write this instead. I haven't proof read it so feel free to point out my mistakes... oh, and hello Vol!

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‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. It was a big house, with thirty-eight rooms and a long, gently inclined roof. The house was built at the end of a narrow but relatively straight valley, with steep hills to either side and a sheer rock face at one end, under which the house was built. The building had, over the years since it had been built, been home to no less than five wives and nineteen children. There was now only one child left in the house, the eight year old son of the seventy-eight year old man who was working almost silently in the garden. The man who, ironically, bore the name of Nicholas. Nicholas, with care and a considerable amount of effort, slid the eight kilogram disc of solid titanium alloy in to the firing chamber of the machine erected on his lawn. His fifth and tentatively current wife, whose name Nicholas only occasionally remembered these days, was under the impression that it was an experimental satellite dish. It was a pretty lousy excuse, but in truth his wife would have accepted any explanation at all provided it didn’t jeopardise her shopping trips, the supply of gin or her increasingly frequent and decreasingly covert affairs. In fact Nicholas knew that not one of his five wives had been faithful, and had doubts about at least nine of the nineteen children he’d raised under his roof. One of them had turned out to be distinctly Mediterranean in appearance, and his wife at the time (whichever it was) had insisted the child be named Pedro. Still, the important thing was that the child was raised under the roof of this house; the house with the long, gently sloping roof. Nicholas’s most recent - and almost certainly final - child was convinced that the contraption on the lawn was, as he put it, a “space laser”. The boy would probably have been gratified to know that he was much nearer the mark than the flimsy story his mother had been given, although laser technology had quickly proven to be completely impractical for Nicholas’s objective. Current lasers take time to have an effect on their target, and Nicholas had calculated that he had a window of approximately 1/127,004th of a second to hit his target, which would be moving at a respectable fraction of the speed of light down a valley half a mile across. It was, for all intents and purposes, an impossible shot, but it was a shot that Nicholas was determined to make. Which is why he was now making the final preparations and checks on the state of the art, three-quarter-of-a-billion dollar rail gun sitting on his front lawn. The projectile he had just locked in to place would be accelerating past mach six by the time it left the barrel of the weapon, and would be knocking on the door of mach ten by the time it made contact with its target a quarter of a mile away. The weapon itself would be almost completely destroyed after the first shot, but that didn’t matter. If the first shot missed, there wouldn’t be another one. At least not for another year, and that’s assuming that the woman hadn’t told the child the “truth” about Nicholas’s nemesis by then. If the child lost faith, there would be no more chances at all. This could well be the last attempt, but Nicholas was sure he had finally got it right this time. There had been seventy-one previous attempts, and every year Nicholas had analysed, considered and refined his method for the next one. This was the year. He was certain. It had begun the year after the event; the moment in which Nicholas developed an unshakable belief in, and an all consuming hatred for, his nemesis. His jolly, fat, red suited, sleigh riding, reindeer molesting, elf slave-driving, two-faced bastard nemesis. The first year had been a distinctly low-tech affair. Nicholas had spent several months assessing all the various angles his young mind could conceive, endlessly designing and re-designing his method of attack in the tiny shared dorm at the children’s home. On Christmas Eve that first year he had waited on the roof of the children’s home all night, not moving a muscle in the freezing wind, aiming his home made catapult in the direction of most likely approach with a crowbar ready on the ground in front of him. It was the same crowbar that now hung from his belt, as he made the slow and unsteady climb to the roof of his house. His passion for vengeance had led him to study physics, mathematics and engineering to an advanced degree in his early teens. By the age of nineteen Nicholas had a Masters degree and a PhD in the study of ballistics, as well as thirteen lucrative patents in the same field. By the age of twenty-five he was the CEO of one of the fastest growing defence contractors in the world, but each year his main ambition eluded him. Revenge, it seemed, required patience. Nicholas had been patient. He had been patient for seventy one years, but now there was no more room for patience. Only success was acceptable now. Next year the boy would probably cease to believe in his hated foe, which would leave the fat one no reason to return. It had to be done tonight. Nicholas sat at one end of the roof of his house and waited, his back against the chimney, the crowbar on his lap. On either side of the valley he could just make out the nearest radar stations. There were twelve in total, located at seventy mile intervals and each one emitting ultra high frequency radiation creating an invisible web in which Nicholas would catch his fly; a web designed for a target of a specific size, moving at a specific speed. The rail gun was linked directly to the computer controlling the radar grid, and would fire automatically when it’s intended target was detected. This year, Nicholas would succeed. He had to wait for three hours on the frozen roof, and if truth be told was stirred from a light slumber when the weapon eventually fired. It happened exactly as expected. The outer radar stations detected a difference in the background radiation that the command and control computer calculated to be an object roughly the size of a minibus moving at several hundred thousand miles per hour. The by the time this calculation had been made the third set of stations had identified a trajectory for the object, using the roof of the house at the end of the valley as an assumed destination to confirm the hypothesis. By the time the final radar stations made contact the rail gun had already fired and disintegrated. The eight kilo disc of specially constructed titanium alloy accelerated to ten times the speed of sound by the time it was a quarter of a mile away where... it made contact. Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer did indeed have a very shiny nose, although recently he hadn’t been using it to guide Santa’s sleigh. That was now done by an advanced GPS system which automatically controlled the reins Rudolf and his seven colleagues. These days the Reindeer were only required for propulsion of the sleigh, and Santa had taken what the Reindeer considered to be an unhealthy interest in jet-engine technology over the previous decades. Still, at least with the GPS system Rudolf didn’t have to worry about paying too much attention, and instead could continue with his secret passion for composing Haiku’s in his head. It was for this reason, and in particular because of his inability to find a suitable synonym for “passion” to rhyme with “Beyonce”, that Rudolf never saw the white hot disc of metal that struck him square in the face, immediately detaching his bright red nose (along with a sizable chunk of his muzzle), before vaporising most of his brain tissue and deflecting off the inside of his skullcap and carrying on to skewer Dasher and castrate Blitzen before spiralling off in to the night. The whole event took less than half a second, and before Santa could react the entire sleigh, dragged down by the corpses of two suddenly dead reindeer and the agonised thrashing of a third, crash landed on the long, slightly inclined roof of Nicholas’s house. Which, up until a few seconds previously, hadn’t been covered in two-foot long barbed spikes. The house had been specifically designed for this purpose, and handled the strain of the enormous forced being brought to bare on it surprisingly well, as the sound of reindeer flesh being rended from bone as the still moving sleigh literally ploughed them through the barbed roof filled the air. Eventually the dust settled, and Nicholas stood at the end of the roof, his crowbar in his hand, his eyes full of tears, a manic grin across his lips. “I have you”, he whispered. There was a spluttering from the upended sleigh, and Santa slowly rolled in to view. His head was bleeding severely, one leg appeared to have been punctured and was also gushing with blood, and his left arm was bendy in two places. The jolly red fat man was making noises you would normally hear from the insides of slaughterhouses. Nicholas approached in a calm, careful manner.“Finally,” he whispered, “I have you.” Santa gazed in to Nicholas’s crazed eyes. “Who are you?” he whined. “Why have you done this thing to me? Me! The bringer of good cheer, and good will to all!” The jolly fat man was enraged. “WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS THING?” Nicholas casually cupped the crowbar in his hands. He gazed at the sky for a moment, before looking down on his victim. “Because you are a failure. You are fraud. You are a bringer of unfulfilled hope, and short lived delusion. You need to be taught a lesson, and I am the one who will teach you.” “You don’t know what I am.” “I know exactly what you are!” Nicholas’s own rage now bubbled to the surface. “You are the bringer of false hope! You exist one night a year, just ONE, and in that night you bring a hope to billions of people that will not last! You are a drug, a hateful icon perpetuated by the few people who genuinely profit from this disgusting and misguided festival! Every single year you are responsible for untold sadness, unmeasurable despair as the millions who are duped in to having faith in you are greeted by the cold hard truth of the real world! YOU ARE A FRAUD!” Santa was silent for a while. Eventually he spoke softly, and serenely. “What have I done to you? I cannot help being what I am. I am a creation, yes, a creation born sometimes of hope, and too often of desperation. I cannot help this. What was it you hoped for? What was it you were so desperate for?” Nicholas gripped the crowbar tightly. In a sudden movement he raised the bar to strike. Santa remained still. “How did I fail you?” he whispered. Nicholas thought for a moment, and lowered his weapon. “You could have brought me a family” he said, a tear rolling down his cheek. “When I was seven, you brought five other boys families. The five other boys in my dorm at the children’s home. We all wrote to you. We all asked you for a family. They were all with new families by Christmas. I was left alone, unwanted. Unloved. You brought me no family.” Santa looked surprised. “Alone? Unwanted? Unloved? For decades I have come to this place! For decades I have delivered good cheer and hope to nearly a score of young lives! You say you have no family and yet look around you! You have created your own good cheer! Or at least, you could have done, if you had paid them any heed. And you dare to be angry with me? You are right! I am just a symbol. I exist just this one night a year, and then I am gone. I take no responsibility for fulfilling the hopes and dreams of those who believe in me because I am departed, banished to memory and tacky decorations for another whole year. You, on the other hand, are here all year round. You can take responsibility, and you can fulfill the dreams of those around you. Do what you wish to me now; I will be back next year in any case, alive and well along with poor Rudolf and the others. We exist only because the children believe. They will still believe next year, I am sure.” Nicholas closed his eyes, and let the crowbar fall from his hands. For a while he pondered everything that had gone before, the many children he had brought in to the world to satisfy his vendetta, and to whom he had been no real father. He thought of the women he had married, the women he had used to bring those children in to the world. The women he had neglected. “I am sorry” he said. “You are ri...” He had opened his eyes. The roof was empty; devoid of the broken corpses of reindeer and lacking in crumpled sleigh. Only the barbed spikes remained. Nicholas made his way back to the ladder. As he climbed back down from the roof, he resolved to pay extra attention to his wife (Margaret! That was it!) and the boy for Christmas day, and to try and arrange to have all nineteen of the children home for Christmas the following year. As he reached the foot of the ladder, just before he went inside, Nicholas thought he heard the sound of sleigh bells, and the contented laughter of a jolly red fat man, accelerating in to the night.

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Merry Christmas.

Rant over.

Facebook

If hypocrisy was an Olympic event then I would come in at a solid fourth.

Gold would go to the US State Department for hounding an Australian who runs a website in Sweden, and all because he let slip that Uncle Sam's Ambassador to Russia thinks that one time KGB officer and never ending Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin is a bit of a shady character. Quelle surprise; his name's Vlad for fuck's sake. The focus on Wikileaks and Mr. Assenge has certainly taken the heat off whichever colossal fuckwit in the US government allowed more than a decade's worth of private communiques from all over the world to wind up on a single USB stick for the cleaner to wander off with. Thank God that nasty Assenge man has been accused of - and now arrested for - a totally unrelated crime that the media can prattle on about. Otherwise the whole world would be asking who at the White House let the work experience gibbon draw up the data security plans.

The surprise Silver medallist in the hypocrisy race is nappy manufacturer Pampers, for their "One Pack = 1 Vaccine" program. I'm all for charity, but this campaign isn't charity. What it is is pretty blatant emotional blackmail. The Clear English translation for the campaign is as follows: "Make your baby shit in our product because if it shits in someone else's product then another baby somewhere else won't be shitting in anyone's product because it'll be DEAD you selfish bastard so buy our product and make your baby shit more." A quick bit of research shows that a tetanus shot costs about £1.20 if bought in a pack of ten, so orders of magnitude less if you're buying by the thousand. The average price of a pack of Pampers is upwards of £10. The nappies themselves probably cost pennies to make, so instead of indulging in this cynical scheme why not buy the sprog some own-brand nappies and post a cheque to UNICEF? In fact, post the cheque to UNICEF and post your kid's fresh turds to Pampers.

Bronze goes to the unbidden love-child of Anneka Rice and Skeletor, a.k.a "Dr" Gillian McKeith, the self styled nutritionist* and 'health guru' who appeared on "I'm A Celebrity" looking so gaunt that the Vegan Society sent her a veal and black pudding food parcel out of sympathy. Normally I wouldn't watch "reality" TV shows, but the idea of watching McKieth get tortured on a regular basis was too good to pass up. In fact that particular (not very) guilty pleasure was probably what set me on the road to the much larger hypocrisy I am guilty of now...

Which brings us to my fourth place effort, the plucky Brit falling just short of the top spots but giving it his best: Recently I have started using Facebook again, a technical and social phenomenon that I have spent literally days of my life decrying. Thanks to some questionable life choices, the internal combustion engine and the M5 / M6 corridor I have developed a group of friends at both ends of the country. A few years ago this would have been absolutely fine; there were things like telephones, text messaging and email: All forms of communication that require a certain level of personal interaction. Now there's fucking Facebook.

Signing up to Facetwat is the digital equivalent of volunteering for a smack habit: it's fun at first but quickly you realise that it's starting to screw with your whole life. It forces you to make decisions you normally wouldn't have to make, like publicly declaring who your friends are. It changes your brain chemistry via prolonged periods of anxiety over whether or not any of your 'friends' actually care about whatever benign activity it is you're doing, whilst subtly reminding you that whatever it is you are doing is uninteresting enough for you to decide to stop doing it and take the time to tell all your 'friends' that you're doing it. At this point I can already hear people pointing out that not everyone gets so personally invested in their Faceturd status. My response is simply: "Why not?" When you change your status on Faceminge you are imparting information to dozens or even hundreds of people about how your life is going at that moment. If you don't care if those people have any interest in your status then for whose benefit are you posting it?

'Friends'. It seems to me that Facedick is ruining the concept of friendship forever: I get 'Friend' requests from a lot of people that, whilst wishing no ill will to any of them, I would not class as 'Friends'. A friend is someone you would trust to have your back; someone that you know relatively well and, in turn, knows you. I do not consider someone that I've said a total of nine words to in my entire life as a 'friend', with all the social etiquettes and mutual expectations of trust that such a relationship demands. If I did I would be a sociopath, or at least suffer from some other condition with a name ending in 'path'.

I guess it's this black and white approach to friendship that annoys me most about Facefuck. There is no middle ground: You are either friends with someone or you are not. Facejizz doesn't cater for people who, for example, you would invite to your wedding but would never consider to be godparent material, even if it was your fifth child. I want to be able to say that 'I've met this person a couple of times and didn't immediately want to hit them' without having to commit to being 'friends' with them. That way I can impart real, personal information that really matters to my close friends without planting it in front of almost total strangers. I want to get to know people, and I want people to be able to get to know me. You just can't do that with throw away comments and drunken photos on a website. The important bit is being there to make the drunken photos in the first place; everything else is just protracted escapism.

And yet... I am using it. I am on fucking Facebook, because not being on it makes me feel strange and alienated from those people who are. Like smack, once you've started it's hard to stop. I want to know what my friends are doing every day, especially as many of them are now a long way away. A few years ago craving that kind of information would have been considered stalking, but now it's the closest thing a lot of people come to social concern.

But if the day comes when I realise that I have been using Facebook as a surrogate for spending real time with the people I am close to, I'll close my Facebook account in a heartbeat and without regret. And then I'll find out who my real friends are.

Rant over.

*Note: The protected term is "dietitian". Dietitians have to go to medical school and do proper exams and can be held accountable for their actions. Nutritionists don't have to have any qualifications at all and can feasibly gain all of their knowledge from the backs of cereal packets.