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

Do get buried at sea then,quite like a cruise, maybe you'd like to circunavigate it haveing ten or so grams of ashes dropped overboard
at main meridians eqautor,greewich,capricorn ect

Hopefully not dressed as a popular cartoon character....

For those of you outside of the US, Six Flags is a very large amusement park.

http://www.sixflags.com/index.asp

Si eh viva daffy espana, qui madrid,

New zealand, especially the city where I live, Auckland, is famous for invisible or absent street name signs, Mudhooks, it's infuriating!

Not srictly retail but I'm sure you'll recognise some of these customers.

The Call-centre Customer's Charter

We, the callers, aim to:

1.Ask the most ridiculous questions we can think of, not ask for the information we actually want but drop hints in the manner of a politician avoiding a sex scandal.

2.Give only part of the information the advisor needs to resolve our query. We know advisors just love using those finely honed questioning skills.

3.We will omit post-codes,dates and specifics wherever possible.

4.Complain that it has taken 5 minutes to get through, then proceed to talk about the weather, the Mars landing or the colour of our grandchild's poo.

5.Deliberately misunderstand the first three explanations you give us for even the simplest query; we know advisors like a challange.

6.Call on behalf of our mother/neice/aunt/mother-in-law's dog etc and become annoyed when the advisor will not give us any information due to that useless bit of legislation, the Data Protection Act.

7.Treat the advisor like an imbecile, we after all are superior because we can handle difficult equations like two plus two.

8.Interrupt the advisor in the middle of their explanations and tell them what the " girl at the bank told us", even though it is blatently incorrect.

9.Make the advisor guess what we want; we know they're all telepathic really.

10.End the call by going through absolutely everything again just to make sure that the advisor wasn't lying the first time around.

add to that, if call centre customers are anything like the ones I've encountered elsewhere:

11. If we don't like the answers we get, we will call back, speak to a different person and go through the entire conversation again. We will repeat this until we have spoken to every member of staff at least once and will then claim 'but your colleague said...' while lying through our teeth.

From the customer's view of call centres:

You call with a straightforward query: Why has my daughter's motor insurance premium gone up by £150 when she has another year's no claims discount and she's a year older (22 instead of 21). You get through to a call centre in India, can hardly understand the person on the other end, and find that she doesn't know anything about insurance or how the premiums are calculated and just want's to sell you breakdown cover.

You change insurance company.

David B
Yes defnitely

Also expect us to be able to find a takeaway in their area thats open and delivers at any hour of the night, patronisingly spell simple words but expect us to know how their local Indian restaurants name is spelt when they don't, expect us to provide them with directions, cinema listings etc.

Cheerful Dragon
We're not in India (Wales actually) or selling anything but I never believed there were so many rude, abusive and stupid people amongst the British public before I worked in customer service. I'm sure you're not one of those but the rest of them try your faith in humanity.

So you wouldn't advise getting a Call Centre job then? (I have been applying for them, as a matter of fact.)
No, I thought as much...

It has its compensations, especially working nightshift, but only do it as a stopgap, if at all.

Oh, it would only be a stopgap, believe me! There seem to be a lot of such jobs around...

There's worse things than call centers.

Food service and anything in retail, I gather from here...

True, at least the customers can't assault us other than verbally

Then, again, they can give you the evil-eye without you even knowing....

That I can cope with
We do get ones who tell us how important they are ot that they work for the Daily Mail and we'll regret not being able to find them their number but nothing ever seems to come of it.

Regarding the "grave" story from around post #1102, my aunt e-mailed me the other day she's spoken to the Irish relative who knows most about the confusion and will forward to me the names and dates of all the people who are buried in this one plot, that led to the infamous jumping-up-and-down scene.

Rather than disrupt this forum any further, I'll put the story in full in my journal, just as soon as I have it.

Clive

MacLeans Magazine had an article on public rudeness. It was accompanied by readers' stories.
http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/letters/article.jsp?content=20040426_79188_79188
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/life/article.jsp?content=20040406_141057_3788
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/life/article.jsp?content=20040405_78052_78052
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/life/article.jsp?content=20040405_78050_78050

Good crikey. Some people are just EYEWATERINGLY rude.

Very interesting, but I have to disagree with the comment about people who park with two wheels on the sidewalk. Maybe this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in the US, where most of the roads are wide enough to render it unnecessary. Here in the UK there are places where it's almost compulsory. There is a law that states that there must be sufficient road-width to drive an emergency vehicle (for that read 'fire engine') down the road at any time. You wouldn't be able to do that on our road if people *didn't* park with two wheels on the 'sidewalk'.

Here's a question for you. Why do people in the UK still refer to 'pavements' when a lot of them aren't paved any more? The thought occured to me while walking Mum's dog. None of the roads near her house have old-fashioned paving slabs. It's all tarmac or concrete. I vote we switch to calling the things 'sidewalks'. I know it's an Americanism, but at least it's descriptive.