This should really be a proper rant but I haven’t got time.
Call centres are really unfair. Now, everyone has lots of reasons why
they don’t like call centres: the staff are incompetent, you have to
wait on hold for hours and hours, they don’t have the information you
need, calling twice gives you two different answers—fill in your own
reasons. The reason I hate them, however, is that it insulates the
company from criticism. You see, the people working in the call centres
are just ordinary Joes like you and me. (Well, like me. You may not be
ordinary.) They’re doing a pretty thankless job for pitifully low wages
and with (as I understand it) appalling working conditions. So, when the
company you’ve rung decides to implement some kind of evil corporate
death-to-our-customers policy, the call centre people get to be the ones
to tell the callers, like me. But it’s just not fair to get really angry
with these call centre people—it’s not their fault, there’s nothing they
can do to fix it, and their job is hard enough without me getting irate
on the phone. So the company can do what they want and I can’t even
shout at them. I can ask to speak to a supervisor, but I always worry
that that supervisor will then mark down the person I’m talking to as
someone who can’t handle customers and probably have them flogged or
something. So I just fume until I start bleeding out of my ears but
don’t complain to the company about it. And that’s probably just the way
they like it. There’s none so blind as them as won’t listen, as Del Boy
once said.
Call centre unfairness
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