“hello and welcome to corporation XYZ, please select from the following options to help us help you”..

“push one to talk to someone about a product, press two to talk to someone about a complaint, press three for all other querys”

The Nasal tones squirt from telephone to ear in disembodied voice, impersonal , just like the corporation you are fighting to make your way through. It’s only a small thing you want to complain about, just to get a reassurance that you’re not mad, but there’s this drilling down through the menus to get to a real person, and of course it’s always the last option…Why not make it first. When you do get a real person at the other end who may or may not be in a call center in Bangalore or some-such place, then it’s a case of doling out your security number or your mothers maiden name to confirm you are who you really am, and your date of birth. You sit there chewing away at a conversation that will probably not go anywhere – like when I lost my mobile phone , but didn’t report it ’til the next day, thinking some good Samaritan would hand it in, but no three hundred and fifty bucks of downloads later, they’d cleaned me out. Hours of waiting on static filled lines while the customer service representative fulfilled the corporate policy which meant I could get a fifteen dollar reduction, but “I should have called straight away’ . In future I will.

Even in person, walking into a foyer of a corporation that reaches right up to tomorrow, you meet some Johnny-come-lately at reception who makes a call with a shrug of shoulders as if there’s really nothing up there in the sky, just hot ideas driving the balloon of corporate profits, nothing up there, but reputations and ideas of vacations in the Bahamas or the yacht and property down on the beach and making profits for the shareholders, nothing major . Board rooms with long oaken tables that spill in light from 23rd floor views affirm that ‘the customer is the most important thing’ but that doesn’t filter down to ground level, where most of us are met with apathy or you need to fill in ‘this’ form to get what you want. Some corporations are just too big for their own good and the ‘customer’ is forgotten and trodden underfoot. while the corporate coffers grow and salaries continue their unjustified blow out