Napoleon was a great leader and thinker, an inspired reformer and strategist, and one of the finest military commanders the world has ever seen.
But did he know anything about reclaiming payment protection insurance? No.
Nev Wilshire, on the other hand, is – as he pointed out to us several times on The Call Centre (BBC Three, Tuesday, 9pm) – exactly like Napoleon in every way but, not only that, he also knows everything about reclaiming payment protection insurance, or PPI. Nev knows about it because he manages a call centre in Swansea and the staff that make thousands of calls on the subject every day.
And there's more. Nev knows how to make us happy. "Happy people sell," he said. "There's a lot of unhappy people out there and it's my job to get their heads back up." Sadly, most people are unhappy because they keep getting calls about PPI, but Nev didn't seem to get this.
Nev's technique is to force his staff to be happy. He makes them stand up and sing along to Mr Bright Eyes by The Killers and whoop. The British aren't good at whooping. It's not something we're comfortable with. We prefer picking holes in things to whooping. It's the British way.
Nev, though, does not accept this. He has to make people happy because "happy people sell", so he tries relentlessly to be upbeat. The staff know it's because he wants to get the sales figures up rather than genuinely make them happy so everyone gets down while pretending to be up for the sake of their jobs. It's depression with a stick-on smile.
This weird happiness/unhappiness scenario is generated by the nature of the call centre itself and what it does. This is the kind of place that helped get us into the recession in the first place by furiously selling loans with PPI attached. Then, when the PPI scandal broke, they started furiously selling us ways to reclaim the PPI. In other words, whatever the situation, the call centre will always be there.
This is profoundly depressing for everyone, but because the place is driven by targets, the people who work there are not allowed to show it. At one point, Nev drags a woman through the call centre and asks everyone whether he should give her a job. Later, he drags another woman, who has just split up with her boyfriend, around and asks the male staff if they fancy her.
Nev can behave like this because our happy call centres reduce staff to the lowest status in a world where the highest status is accorded to how much money is being made.
The BBC Three programme may have tried to make this point by putting clips of Nev saying how brilliant he was next to clips of his staff saying how awful he is, but they should have tried harder. We want to know how call centres really work, how much profit is really made and how much the staff are really paid. But all we got was an insufferable little man called Nev.
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