Life I received some amazing customer service, and by amazing I mean in the sense of being rubbish. The envelope my latest dvd from LoveFilm came in also included a voucher offering what looked like forty pound's worth of merchandise from Virgin Wines. There was a website and telephone number and since I wasn't near a computer I decided to call them to find out what the catch was.
Suspiciously I got straight through and found myself talking to a salesman who seemed to be auditioning for a slot on BidUpTV. He was bright and cheerful in a way that human being really shouldn't be at that time of the morning. He explained that it was a wine club, that you have to pay about eighty pounds up front and then you pay in so much as you wanted to a month.
I was quite happy to let the fella talk and feel like he's doing well, simply because having worked in call centres I know that you yearn for the easy customers and for all I knew his last caller had rung up to complain about the quality of the last bottle of Pinot they'd been sent. It was all going fine in fact until he directed me to the website and said:
"Well you can go to our website - now look it's a bit technical but in layman's terms...."
Am I wrong to find that deeply offensive, particularly in this day and age? I wanted to say -- "I've got two degrees and have been using the web for fifteen years you patronising cock." But then it occurred to me that it didn't seem like something which he'd improvised too, it sounded like part of the script he'd been given to work from -- the patter which is supposed to seem natural but is written on a screen or laminate near his computer.
He explained that you give them thirty pounds and then they add an extra tenner to your account. Which is fine -- expensive and not something I'd necessarily be interested in -- but sounds like a fair deal for someone who wants to stay at home and pretend they're in the film Sideways. But I was certainly less disposed after the representative from the company I was calling assumed I must be an idiot and they had to spell everything out to me.
Me? sensitive?
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