MY GRANDMOTHER always taught me to be polite.
Not only is it the right thing to do, but it doesn’t cost anything.
I often think of granny’s words and I try, I really do, to treat others the way I would like to be treated. But, alas, granny wouldn’t have been happy with me last week.
I haven’t been in the office much since the new year started, because I’ve had the flu and have given it to three people that I know of. Feeling like Typhoid Mary, I’ve tried to avoid human contact as much as possible.
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On one of my rare forays into the office last week, I was especially busy trying to get caught up on paperwork and answer the pages of phone messages which were waiting for me.
In the middle of the afternoon, I received a call from a gentleman asking for 10 minutes of my time to do an office machines survey. Sighing, I said OK, but one question into the survey, I knew this was concerned with a firm I don’t do business with, and don’t intend to do business with, and I had told that to the last people who called me. When he got into philosophical questions about why saving the environment is good which couldn’t possibly be answered in under 25 words, and demanded some thought which my addled brain wasn’t capable of at that time, I ended the call with less finesse than, in hindsight, I might have wished.
At home that evening, we had two calls from firms doing surveys on cropping and other farm practices.
I’m tired of phone surveys; I consider them the junk mail of the telephone.
I’m also tired of phoning certain companies and government offices, only to be asked by a disembodied voice to “press one for English, two for French” and then being invited to press other digits for other options until, at the end of a long list, the voice informs me that if I stay on the phone a real person will talk to me.
A while back, during a visit to Thunder Bay, I rang a certain government office to ask a simple question. We went through a litany of numbers and computer responses, none of which were germane to my question, and there was no human option at the end.
Considering all that, I was delighted to read in my daily paper recently that some businesses are finding it cost effective to hire – wait for it – live humans to answer their telephones.
Once again we go back to the future.
And not before time.
