Look, it�s a bit of a toss up. Is �service provider� or �customer service� the greatest contradiction in terms in the English language?
Both are clearly oxymoronic. Let us start with the company which removes a not untidy sum from the monthly account in order to provide broadband "services" and technical "support". Or not.
All the numbers offered to you under "contact us" engage in an endless game of pass the parcel with you as the luckless package in question. Except the Muzak does not stop to let you to rest your weary query on a live person.
The choice is merely being sent witless by tinny classical or tedious pop. When you move abode, even though using the same telephone number at the same exchange, you find yourself obliged to take out a new annual contract. This will apparently take 10-12 working days to fire up. Unless, of course, you bung them another £175 in which case, miraculously, the transfer can be done in three. Or not.
I will not detain you with the many and varied conversations that transpired with the relevant call centre in Mumbai except to say that few resulted in mutual comprehension. Apparently, I would have to change my e-mail address temporarily, ensuring that anyone who mailed me would have their missive bounced straight back.
Irritating for friends. Deadly for information pertaining to paid employment. Many days and expletive undeleted evenings went by. I am still, three weeks later, chained to my desk since the new router they sent and insisted I used is apparently not powerful enough to employ wirelessly. So the mobile laptop and I can now move effortlessly from the left-hand side of the desk to the right. Flexible working or what?
This is how to become unhinged on account of being unplugged. But reconnecting with the virtual world turns out to be a Fortnum's picnic compared with dealing with any of the utility companies, all of which routinely subject their customers to the tyranny of the automated telephone response.
This is like being trapped in an electronic maze on another planet where the chances of finding (a) another human being or (b) an exit strategy involving an answer to your original quest become ever more remote the more desperately you respond to the prompts. "Welcome to our helpline. In order to improve our service levels your call may be recorded." (And you just hope the operative charged with checking the records is not of a delicate disposition.) "You now have seven options." And, strangely, not one of them bears any resemblance to the dilemma you had hoped to discuss with a living, breathing soul.
So you select an option at random. "Thank you. You now have four options." (One of which is losing the will to live.) The more refined practitioners of this push-button torture allow themselves some cute variations on the theme.
It goes like this. You try every known permutation of their options and finally you hear a ring tone. Hallelujah. But it is picked up by another sub-section of the electronic mafia which metallically advises you of your immense value to the company. You bet. You have just spent 14 minutes of telephone charges in order not to speak to them; merely chuck money in their direction.
Sometimes, not often, you accidentally find yourself speaking to a person. By now you can hardly gibber out your question but it doesn't matter. Whatever you wanted to know, this is not the right department; you need to call this number instead.
Vainly, you whine that is the number which set you off on the trail of the lonesome pillock in the first place. They are pleasant but firm. They cannot help you. In fact, do you know, nobody can help you - with the possible exception of a bereavement counsellor skilled in dispensing therapeutic attention to the growing army of consumers mourning the loss of the entire human race.
The combination of automated telephone responses and outsourced call centres is slowly - make that swiftly - driving customers demented trying to get any kind of coherent service from the department of the same name.
The more "sophisticated" the systems for interacting with clients become, the greater yawns the gulf between service providers and the poor bloody consuming infantry mortgaging half their lives and most of their sanity trying to get someone, somewhere, to hear their increasingly plaintive cris de coeurs.
One more set of multiple choice options from Demon, BT or ScottishPower and I'll advise them fairly precisely where to stick their star key.
I'm more or less at the stage of ordering the wrap-around jacket, but the chances of selecting the right number for the fast-track option are pretty slim.
