Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Good old BT

Phone rings I deliver the standard spiel to no response, "Hello", sound appears, "Hello?" I ask again.
"Hello" the response comes
"Hello" I reply once more just in case.
"This is BT I'm calling as a follow-up to an email we sent you about [unintelligible]"
"About what?"
"About [unintelligible] so you can upload your contacts and [mutter] on the internet; for people to find you"
"Um no I don't think we'd be interested"
"Oh. Can I have your email address"
"No"
"Your electronic mail address?"
"No you can't have it"
click brrrrrr. Ookay then.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your post reminds me of an old colleague of mine, who was lured by price to try Vonage, the big 'phone calls over the internet' provider. He was fed up of the poor connection quality, so phoned them (from work) to cancel it, and got in response, "No, our comp____on of call qualifzzzzzzows clearly that Vonage _____ fewer dropouts and less noise than tradfzzzzzal providers." If they can't even make their call centre work reliably, what hope have the rest of us got?

As for the "Hello? ........... click Hello I'm calling from" behaviour you describe, it's almost always caused by the practice of the dialling being done by a machine, which when you pick up routes their end of the call to one of the cold-callers at their end. We can't have minimum-wage call centre employees hanging around while the phone rings, can we?

FlipC said...

Heh VoIP, we can't even get data to transfer smoothly and that doesn't care about its speed, I know let's route our voice calls over the same system ;-)


"Hello? ........... click Hello"

I figured as much, I find it interesting that the majority of such calls I receive normally result in a foreign accented person picking up.

Just had a recorded "Congratulations you have just won [...] press 9 to collect your prize"