SaneScientist

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

The Tuesday Twat(s)

No. 82. Bell Canada.

OK, Bell Canada have pissed me off.

Firstly, I am irrationally annoyed that they want to screw me for $140 to cover the cost of my cell phone subscription now that I am leaving. Now, I am the first to admit that it was my fault for signing a 12 month contract, and that they are perfectly within their rights to charge me $20/month to cover the rest of my contract. However, the buggers insisted on making me talk to a straight man. Why is that an issue, I hear you ask? Because straight Canadian men are immune to an English accent.

You see, something that I have found in the past few months is that the Canadian ladies are surprisingly susceptible to an English accent. Whether I should be thanking Hugh Grant, Prince William or every Bond actor after Connery, I don't know. Nevertheless, I have found that even my council estate drawl allows me to approach and flirt with women well out of my league and charm my way out of paying library fines or penalty fees (the lovely lady at Rogers Cable dropped the disconnection fee when I told her how I'd lost my job and was going to retrain and to work with children - similarly, I played the bumbling Brit abroad and got my astronomical library fines halved "just this once" when I convinced the librarian that I couldn't log-in to renew my books over christmas. This was partly true - I couldn't, but I then forgot to actually return the books for a week after returning to Canada after christmas). But no dice.

So I was already somewhat less than enamoured with Bell on saturday, when I missed my bus out of town and needed to check my hotmail to lookup contact numbers to tell my friends I would be late for a party. I found a public access terminal, run by Bell, in the train station that charged the outrageous sum of $2 for 10 minutes. Depositing my $2, I logged onto Hotmail. Nothing. After several attempts I gave up and decided to check www.bbc.co.uk. The odds of either site being down is miniscule. Nothing. The access terminal had no internet connection. It also had no refund button. For problems with the terminal, I was advised to call a freephone number between 9am and 5pm mon-fri or email support. How? There is no bloody internet connection!

So, having 40 minutes to kill, I decided to use a public payphone to call the engineer's repair line on 611. It is childish I know, but for the next 30 minutes I (extremely politely) harangued some poor call centre worker, demanding my two dollars back. The poor sod couldn't understand that I was a member of the public and kept on asking me my business account number or my home account number. He left me to talk to his supervisor three times. However, because I was being polite he couldn't just hang up on me for being abusive (calls are monitored - that works both ways!), furthermore, he didn't have the commonsense to tell me that I had called the wrong number. I suspect that had my bus not arrived, I could still be there now. What I should have done of course, was gently place the receiver on the side and tiptoed off to the bus. Instead I took pity on him and said that I would call back during office hours on monday.

Childish? Yes. Satisfying - oh yeah! I know that call centre wages are pretty poor, but I like to think that the time wasted on me cost more than the $2 Bell stole off me.

Labels: The Tuesday Twat(s)