India Calling
Typical Monday morning at work today. feeling tired, trying to get my mind in gear and working after a weekend of chilling and relaxing when I get a phone call. Now the guy on the other end didn't say he was in India. Not once throughout the whole ten minute conversation that followed did he say where he was. However after the first twenty seconds or so of conversation it was obvious that English wasn't his first language and that he was reading from a prepared script. So obviously some guy in a call centre which from the accent was in India.
It seems strange that companies would pay someone in India to phone or take calls from people in the UK to either be customer support or try and sell you stuff but they do. Not because they are better or worse than call centres in this country on the whole but because it is a whole lot cheaper to pay somewhere there to do the job than someone here. Most of the time you don't even know that the person on the other end is in India. They are hired and trained because they speak good English. They even get training in how to appear English and get English names assigned to them to further this subterfuge.
This guy must have missed that part of the training. In fact he must have missed a whole lot of the training because he was terrible. I could barely understand him, he could barely understand me and the whole point of the call was, so far as I could tell, to gather as much information about me or the company I was working for in return for a renewing a subscription to a free computing magazine which someone once suscribed to but has long since left. A magazine that just gets binned as soon as it arrives.
Now normally I would have just told him to cancel it and hung up. Or if they had called my home just said 'Not interested' and hung up. I don't buy anything from cold callers or give out personal information to someone who just calls up out of the blue. But I was bored, I was tired and I was down. So I played along by giving some totally obvious false and contradicting information to see how far I could push it before he twigged I was talking out of my arse. He didn't. Or if he did he didn't seem to care. It was just a case for him of going through that script as fast as possible and getting some, any answer.
So I upped my salary by 20K, told him I drove a porsche, gave my name as Robbie Williams, made the company out to be virtually a multi-national and he never said anything. Just threw more questions my way which I made up answers to off the top of my head. Fun for a while but by the end of it I was wishing I had just hung up as he just kept on coming with the questions. Did he really believe that i was Diesctor of sales, Head of Security and the Chief programmer and computer buyer? Or was he just at the end of his shift nd trying to keep on target as regards to his calls. God knows or cares.