I don't like to admit that I sometimes read Miss Manners but this headline caught my eye. "Cursing works (but please don't do it)" So I read the article and found out the tip of the century. Read on gentle readers, read on ......
Dear Miss Manners: A friend who is a most genteel man revealed that in a frustrated moment, after being in an hour-long loop of voice recognition commands for — I use this term advisedly — "customer service" of a major airline, he shouted the most vulgar expression in the English language into the telephone. To his surprise, he was immediately connected with a supervisor who solved his problem instantly.
Last week, after a bout with a telephone answering service that did not recognize the words "help," "operator," "live body" and the like, I too looked around to be sure my children were out of hearing and shouted an obscenity into the telephone. To my shock, this phrase worked with my health insurer.
I feel the practice of American corporations programming obscene phrases into their lexicon of recognized words, and the fact that this brings the fastest results, is truly demeaning to our culture. Would you please use your bully pulpit to request a universal, clean phrase to replace the current magic words?
How about "Customer service, please"? No doubt this is programmed to produce a recorded laugh.
Miss Manners is not so naive as to expect the argument of civility or human dignity to be effective in appealing to airlines, let alone health insurers. But she will ask them this:
Which customer would you prefer to have aboard? The one who quietly goes to another airline when yours doesn't respond satisfactorily, or the one who turns vicious when encountering a delay?
Note to Gentle Readers: Please do not use the information contained in the question as a tip. Please?
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Not a chance Miss Manners, not a F#$&*%g chance in hell.
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2 comments:
I have gone back and re-read The Divine Comedy several times, looking to see if there isn't someplace in the lowest circle of hell for the %$&! who invented the voice-"recognition" system that everyone now uses to keep from having to talk to you. It's bad enough for me, but for my wife - who has a pretty respectable German accent - it's horrendous. And then, by the time you finally get to talk to a real person, they're in India or China somewhere. I try not to curse at the drones, but it's mighty hard sometimes not to.
I've also in the past gotten to a service rep by mumbling uninteligibal garbage. A little 'umbff gugjt whstic' several times in a row can get you a service rep also.
(fixed typo)
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