A number of years ago I took out a tiny mortgage to help my mother buy her present house. Today I got a statement which showed that it is coming to the end of its term (huzzah!). It reminded me that had I not taken out the mortgage I would never have got to meet the world’s most stupid man.
Because the mortgage was very very small I was able to offset the whole amount with money that I had saved to meet emergencies. This meant that I earned no interest on my savings and in return (and subject to a wrinkle that I am about to explain) paid no interest on the money I had borrowed. The wrinkle is that interest is charged each month on the money borrowed on a different day to that on which it is paid on savings. This meant that over the course of last year I paid a whopping 7 pence interest.
I had to call the mortgage company to get a tax statement. The man in the call centre had one of those annoying scripts that requires him to talk to you as if you have been mates since nursery school and to try to sell you things. This, as best as I can recollect it, is our conversation:
Idiot: Whilst you’re on do you want me to see if I can get a better deal for you on your mortgage?
Moobs: No thank you, I’m happy with my existing deal.
I: We’ve managed to help many of our valued customers make real savings by looking at alternative mortgage arrangements.
M: Thanks but as I only paid 7 pence interest this year I don’t really see you beating that deal.
I: I’d be very happy to try
M: You want to see if you can reduce my monthly mortgage payments to less than a penny a month?
I: Sure do.
M: OOOOOOOk, by all means try.
I: Will you hold a moment?
M: No
I: Er .. it will just take 5 minutes, can’t I pop u on hold?
M: No
I: May I ask why?
M: Because putting me on hold for 5 minutes will cost me more than 7 pence so it will make the whole thing a waste of time.
I: Oh, I see, do you want me to call you back?
M: Won’t that cost you more than 7 pence?
I: Leave it with me.
Bless his little empty head, he did call me back with the bombshell that no they couldn’t do better than 7 pence interest a year. I can’t work out whether this is the best customer service I have ever received or the worst.
Hmm… not sufficiently empowered to ‘take a view’ on deviating from his script?
But outside of this conversation – have a bottle of pop on me at reaching the lovely milestone of cancelling a debt. 🙂
Call centres are like human battery farms. He may have had a working brain at the start of the employment but the relentless calls will have cost him the use of any grey matter. Hearing those scripts is bad enough, imagine having to deliver them over and over again. And using your own initiative is definitely discouraged. Poor guy.
I think (as undercovercookie has hinted) that the Call Centre is the new National Service. In the old days we’d send young men like him to bayonet sacks of hay in the wilds of the English Countryside before (if he was really unlucky) sending him off so some foreign land to get shot at with real bullets.
As much as I hate war and the waste of human life, it certainly seperated the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
Sorry you had to deal with that but I’m glad you did – it makes a great story – in a car-crash TV sort of way.
Out of interest…was it a UK-based call centre? If so, you have to be grateful for small mercies.
He totally wins the prize.
I think he did a great customer service job. Unfortunately he was dumb as a bag of rocks which is probably not his fault.
Thigh-slappingly funny.
Maybe he had his trip to Austria on the mind?
Hi – I’ve popped over from Open Grove Claudia. This post is howlingly funny.
“I: We’ve managed to help many of our valued customers make real savings by looking at alternative mortgage arrangements.
M: Thanks but as I only paid 7 pence interest this year I don’t really see you beating that deal.”
When the writer’s strike is over in North America, you should consider giving that a try.
Julia – even though Claudia is inclined to blame me for everything (including her belly piercing), she the best.
That poor guy. Dulled down to to a state of actual non-thinking.
This is quite possibly the funniest of your posts I’ve ever read. People like that give the rest of us fabulous stories to tell … thus, what an amazing contribution they make to the world!
I’d love to see the inside of that man’s brain.
laughed out loud when I ead this… but the real point of this comment is to tell you that while I was reading in front of Celebrity Weakest Link (answering the questions under my breath) Anne Robinson asked the question ‘What does Moobs stand for?’ and I couldn’t hepl but laugh.
Whole family staring at me thinking I had gone crazy. Nothing like a bit of free advertising!
Hey, you’re an oldest child you should be used to all the blaming! 🙂
I know you hate these, but I gave you an actual blog award today. Don’t fall over – it’s true.
Just love you Moobzy
Wow. He’s not also an American political figure, is he?
Just wondering.