Nadir, my customer service representative.

Hello All,
I was recently told that my rants were "mean" and that I needed to be more "polite" when I'm angry. So, today, I have a "nice" story. With gratuitous amounts of polite.

Today, I was politely informed that my phone was out of money. Being a student (read: impoverished) and on a pay-as-you-go plan (read: really frugal anyway), this was not a big surprise. Until I remembered that I had checked my balance yesterday and had $15 and some change kicking around in the account. So off I go to call my service provider, eager to fix the mix up. This is when I met Nadir, a very nice customer service representative, who was obviously in a large call center, possibly staffed by other people from Bangalore.

He told me, quite politely, that it was just a mix-up, and that the money had been replaced. He apologized many times, and I was ready to hang up, contented at this solution. Then Nadir hits me with the question. “Miss, do you know how you can avoid this problem in the future?” His poor English and generally friendly demeanour intrigued me, and I responded in the affirmative. Yes, I would like to know. It was a very poor idea to respond to Nadir. Very poor indeed.

He sprang into action, reciting off a list of the many things I could do, all of which involved me buying a smartphone on a multi-year contract. Every time I went to (politely) tell him that I wasn’t interested, he talked louder and louder, shouting at me over the phone about “LOW LOW PRICES ON IPHONES. MANY YOUNG LADIES LIKE IPHONES”. Feeling major guilt, because he had been so polite to me, I hung up on Nadir, then checked my balance to see that, yes, he had done his job and the balance had been fixed.

But this made me angry, because I recalled on Friday, when my current significant other went to activate a credit card, he was given to an Indian man who wanted to sell him something too! After such excellent customer service I hated to say goodbye to Nadir, but I was not pleased with this selling of products.

Long story short, without being too mean, do not sell me things over the phone. I don’t like it.

But I digress.