-by Frank Macdonald
“Your call will be recorded for quality purposes.”
Suddenly you are immersed in push button communications.
I occasionally need to place a phone call to a site where my call is important but all their operators are busy, too busy to speak to me it seems, so, I’m sitting there listening to horrible music interspersed by a voice who keeps urging me to go to the company’s website where I can type in my question and not be a bother to any of the busy-on-their-coffee-break operators, one of whom I hope will eventually answer me, maybe even answer my question.
“Your call will be recorded for quality purposes.”
I have been hearing this assurance from companies ever since the origin of “If you wish to speak to....then Press 1. If you wish to speak to....then Press 2...” and so on all the way down the numerical menu, and when and if someone answers my waiting call, it is comforting to know that my call will be recorded, monitored, eavesdropped upon, so that the company can be assured that I am being treated with quality service.
Less patient people are more suspicious.
They think that because they have been sitting, waiting for many minutes that stretch into infinity, that they are being taken for granted and their blood begins to boil, and they begin screaming at the disembodied voice that continues to assure them that their call is important, but not as important as everyone else’s call.
When, miraculously, some human voice actually asks how can I help you, the temptation is to shout out the outraged message you’ve been practising on those god-awful electronic voices, hoping that the real voice’s supervisor gets to hear it. And he or she will because you know that the whole customer service pitch about your call being recorded for quality purposes is really just one more corporate lie. The recording of your voice is intended to capture your irate tirade about this slack, meanspirited, soulless service that “try men’s souls,” common sense would be lost of all involved.
Meanwhile, by using this evidence against you, the company can then disconnect your service or delete your credit card or worse because of your abusive outburst.
Or the corporation could turn the tape over to the RCMP which, I suspect, might not get them much satisfaction because RCMP officers are humans too, men and women who have also tried to discuss a power bill or a phone bill with the incommunicado corporation. Police or not, they have heard the dire warnings telling them to behave because their call will be recorded for quality purposes. Badge and gun and authority weigh little against a telephone or computer or power corporation’s determination not to take your call.
So the least of my worries is that my personal outburst, recorded for quality purposes, will be sent to the RCMP so that I can be arrested for misuse of what would otherwise be a quality recording. I think that on the spectrum of what the RCMP have to deal with every day, obscene phone calls to corporations fall way, way down the list from, say, obscene phone calls made by perverts to harass real live human beings.
So you sit there listening with the kind mindless compliance that major corporations train their consumers to assume, the same kind of mindless compliance corporations want us to practice in the aisles of their outlets. That way, the corporation knows you will buy your child a $2.50 cent bit of clothing without wondering how it could possibly be made in a factory, then make it all the way from Asia via container ship a west coast port city, be transferred to an 18-wheeler and wheeled across the continent, unpacked and priced and hung on the rack and still be sold at a hefty corporate profit even on an irresistible price of $2.50. Someone, you begin to think, must be getting starvation wages in order for that price to work its economic magic.
Spookily, no sooner does your mind begin to wander in that direction, asking these uncomfortable, if imaginary, questions of the very corporation that so values your quality call, than an operator answers, one with a real voice. Still, something in the accent can justify a suspicion that this person isn’t located in any of the scores of call centres across the Maritimes that have been shut down ever since the government bribes that brought them here had run out.
Maybe this person is answering my call from a far away place thanks to technology, and is probably earning not nearly enough money to take advantage of the $2.50 garment that his sister or niece probably had a hand in making.
But he’s a real person with a real voice just trying to earn a real living, not some corporate exploiter, just another of the exploited, so you talk in a civilized manner about the problem that has pinned you to your chair for twenty five minutes or so, and he does what he can to fix the problem or at least appease the caller.
Now the important-to-the-corporation and “recorded for quality purposes” call is over. Or at least it is over for a while, over until the next time you hear, “You call is important to us...”
