I used to live on the other side of the world – actually it was in the USA in the old days. Consumer protection was very weak in those days. If you telephoned the office and asked for the complaints department you could count on being put on hold for a long time. When they answered they always said “that is very surprising, sir. I will make sure that our engineers hear about it.” Really, of course they had thousands of the same complaint.

In the electronic age it has got worse. You phone what they jokingly called the “help line.” You are given six numbers to press, none of which is for complaints. You press “Customer Service” which sounds most likely, and are asked to key in the twenty-two-digit product identification code. You go to the kitchen to look for the number on the refrigerator. After twenty minutes you discover that the code is on the back two inches from the floor, and you get into a sweat pulling and pushing to see it. You return to the phone which has gone dead. You dial again and enter the twenty two digit code. Finally someone from Bangalore or Vietnam answers the phone – of course Customer Service has been “off-shored”- and you give a free English lesson as well as a complaint. When you explain that the refrigerator isn’t working the operator calls up one of those screens which tell him or her  what to say next and asks “Sir, are you sure the machine is switched on?” You scream and slam down the phone. 

That reminds me of the story about Heaven’s call center. You call God and get an answering system. “If you want Saint Peter press one.  If you want the Virgin Mary press two. If you want to confess press three.” You press three and get another message. “We apologize that all our confession lines are busy at the moment.  Please hold until a saint is available.” After three minutes another message comes. “Thank you for waiting. Unfortunately owing to the large number of sins, all our saints are still occupied. If you are calling with a deathbed confession we deeply regret that you will have to go to Hell”.

The daughter of an American friend of mine had a vacation job at the Customer Service Desk of a New York store.  I asked her “Why are the staff so annoying to complainers?” She said, “You foreigners don’t understand. We’re all students, paid nothing because the company is threatening to outsource us to India. It’s a boring job, listening to the same complaints every day, so we try to spice it up. Every week there is a competition to see which of us can make a customer angriest. Of course we have to smile a lot and stay completely polite whilst doing so. I won last week when my customer used 16 rude words in less than a minute.”

Isn’t it a strange world that we live in?