Part of my job used to be answering the telephone (I work for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) and I always took care to be as polite and courteous as I could be - it is easy to slip into 'speedspeak' when reciting the same information many times an hour, but I would try to listen to the person on the phone and if I realised they were having trouble keeping up, would slow down and engage them in conversation, rather than just talk at them and steamroller them. When you're in a large office with 20 other people all on the phone as well, it's almost impossible to do that. Consequently, voices get raised, tempers get raised, no-one listens and customer service goes through the roof. We have been told to deal with rude callers with a declaration that we do not have to be verbally abused and that the call will be terminated. Chances are, when the customer calls back, 9 times out of 10, they have calmed down and seen the idiocy of their actions or get another caller who may be able to tolerate them better.

The ones that really, really, REALLY get up my nose are those who try to insist that they are in the same country as you are, or anglicise themselves in order to make it sound that way - one example is an engineer I had to call up (digital TV box wasn't working properly) who introduced himself as 'Kevin'with an accent straight out of Mumbai. A conversation ensued during which I could not make him understand the problem so I asked for his name so I could speak to his supervisor, whereupon he mumbled that he had to call himself Kevin on the phone but his real name was Kavinder and his supervisor was away, in England. I have no problem (other than the ethics of outsourcing for cheap labour) with call centres elsewhere in the world, but to make the poor chap deny his own heritage by getting him to call himself by an anglicised name was just terrible.

Anyway.... I always try to be polite to call centre staff but ignorance will put my back up every time.... and at home I have an answerphone. People who really need to speak to me will leave a message, automated dialers (such as telemarketers use) who manage to get through to our unlisted, registered as 'do not call' number, will hang up as soon as they hear the answerphone lady - and we use the default setting of some generic woman saying 'this is an answering service', which gives the impression that it is a business not a private address.

LTS