h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An actual call that I monitored for training purposes...

The customer service centre that I worked for (which shall remain nameless) which served a fairly large percentage of the UK population had telephones installed which showed the number that the caller was calling from*. Once you know the nummber that the customer is phoning from, it is not a huge technological leap to connect the phone to the computer to match the caller's nummber with the number on your files to trace the caller's account. This meant that the customer did not have to waste time finding account numbers etc.

Everyone that works in a call centre has at one time or another had a nuisance call, and these can either result in the operator being very upset, or worse, bored, because they have heard it all before.

So a group of schoolboys decided that they would call and try out some new words that they learned that day in the school playground. The operator listened for a few moments, before reading back to the callers their phone number and full address. This stopped the torrent of abuse in mid flow, and while the callers tried to work out if there was magic afoot, the operator suggested that she could call back at a more convenient time, for example when the parents were home. The callers ended up begging forgiveness from the operator, and asking that they didn't call the parents. Up the workers!!!

*In the UK this is sometimes known as caller display.