I have a little story for you today that comes from my dear friend Hamish Von Trapp. Hamish is a founding member of my Inner Circle. He is, and who we all affectionately call, our ‘eccentric’ friend. He’s smarter than 99.99% of the population and once set fire to himself with a cigarette when he fell asleep watching porn on our lounge.
Now this story will ring so true with a great many of you. The reason it hit a nerve with me is that over the past week I have had a succession of bad experiences with off-shore call centres. The worst of them resulted in me hanging up mid sentence on some poor woman inadequately trying to do her job. Hamish’s call-centre revenge is on an illegal scam so lets all get some pleasure from it. Over to Hamish Von Trapp…
For the about 10th time I've just had a phone call from someone at Microsoft/Windows in India telling me that dangerous viruses have been downloaded to my computer, but they can fix it. Normally I just hang-up, but today I was in the mood to waste as much of their time as possible. I basically played the role of a computer illiterate ‘older’ man... First up let me tell you I have a Mac, so whatever he is going to tell me is not going to be relevant, so I have to play dumb.
"Let me go to the other room and turn the computer on. I'm a bit slow on my feet so give me a minute or two... now how do I turn it on again?" (I waste 5 minutes as it is very slow computer).
"Sir, now if you go to your computer, and.."
"Yes, I'm in front of my computer"…
"No Sir, if you click on my computer…"
"I'm not going to hit my computer"….
"No Sir, if you look on the screen there should be an icon which says, my computer"…
"No there isn't".
"What do you have on your desktop?"
"I have the computer, a calculator, a couple of pens, cup of coffee…"
"No, No Mr Bowden…what is on your screen?"
"A picture of my six cats and me"
"OK, Sir, I will go through this slowly. If you press start"….
"Oh, the computer just turned off! You did say to press the start button didn't you? I'm not very good with computers" (I think that comment got him excited, waste another few minutes whilst pretending to wait for the computer to restart)
"No, if you go to the bottom left corner of the screen and click on start.”
"There's nothing there."
This went on and on for 20 minutes - before he asked me what type of computer I had. I told him I had a Mac, and he promptly hung up.
That reminds me, I need to invest in a whistle, when I'm not in the mood.
Brilliant, just brilliant! And I can 100% confirm that Hamish Von Trapp now owns a whistle. He keeps it by the phone. I sincerely pity the next tele-marketer that tries to sell him anything.
Their ears will be ringing for weeks!
