Wednesday 13 October 2010

Hallelujah!


Two hours!
Two hours!
With Sunil and Saurabh and Salil
and many other anonymous men and women
in Delhi.
Many 'please hold the line' s
long, long silences on hold,
many new numbers,
wrong numbers,
many transfers,
to new departments,
supervisors,
floor managers,
line managers,
system crashes,
complete abandonments,
promises to call back,
today, tomorrow, next week,
send a form,
credit a card,
write a cheque,
Many 'Please bear with me' s.
Many reiterations of name and account number,
demented repetitions of the whole sorry story.
The telephone battery even gave out.
And that was just today.

I have been trying to get a refund
for the money that B.T took twice every month
for nine months
for our broadband account.
And today another man said,
'I'll sort this out for you.'
and I didn't believe him.
But he did.
The money is in our account,
but It has tainted this forever.

6 comments:

  1. Oh you poor thing. The agony of it. Well done in sticking with the task and you won!

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  2. Ahh the joys of call centres in foreign lands! Magical piece of music.

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  3. I feel your pain........... I have many times over the last three days had to call India (via AOL) due to our router not working. The sheer frustration has been horrendous and what seemed like a good mix of music while I did the many "waits" became more and more irritating the longer the problem was unresolved........ Glad you are "sorted" now.....

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  4. Well done, you, on managing to make your write up of such a frustrating time (empathy, empathy!) into such an engaging prose poem! Thanks for link, too, to quince lady.

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  5. It's Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik that has been ruined for ever for me. Oh, and Vivaldi's Four Seasons....

    Glad that you got a result eventually though. It's all the excessive politeness that I can't bear while things don't get sorted out at the call centre. I have learned to hate Virgin Media with a passion.

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  6. And there I was thinking we'd have to change to another provider. They are all as bad as each other aren't they?

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