Telemarketers - Society's Scapegoats?

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Now I usually don't blog about something so trivial as this, but I feel something needs to be said. Now first off, I will start by saying that a few days ago, my laptop stopped charging and I believe it had absolutely nothing to do with the charge cord in the slightest.

My mother, thinking she was doing me a favor, decided to call HP customer support in order to get her problem fixed. The entire time, she was either bitching at the person on the other line (who happened to be from India, but I will get to that at another time) or she was bitching at me because the other person was a supposed idiot who had no idea what he was doing and he was wasting her time by being placed on hold.

After a while, she told me to deal with him and, not to my surprise, the guy wasn't the idiot that my mother claimed to be. He was just doing his job, making sure absolutely every single angle was covered to make sure that we weren't the idiots in this conversation. I calmly and collectedly continued answering questions he asked me, I asked a few questions of my own, and the call ended and everything was fine.

However, my mother hovered and loomed over me and, to be honest and the fact that she has a real hatred for these kinds of people, I pretty much pretended that the roles were reversed and said, and I quote, "I'm on the phone, go to your room!"

To be honest, I didn't think she would go to her room and, to my dismay, I was right. She continued hovering over me to figure out when I would supposedly crack and start yelling myself, just loitering, talking to me about casual things, and laughing a little. Now I was starting to see why she doesn't like people in these kinds of professions.

So naturally, I was getting really irritated. Not at the more than gracious customer service representative on the phone, but at my mother for distracting me to the point that I was very VERY close to yelling at her to go in her room and to keep quiet. However, that would be bad if the guy overheard it.

In any case, she finally went into her room and I finished the phone call with everything I needed to know and a few things I didn't think I needed to know before. So they're going to be sending over a box for me to ship my laptop in sometime in the next couple days and I should get it back within the next two weeks or so. Also, they advised me that I should go to a shop to get my laptop's memory backed up prior to shipping.

All in all, the guy was very helpful and my mother, quite frankly, was not. It turns out she was thinking that, by listing off everything that was going on with the computer, that the guy was actually going to remember all of that and that everything would get done that much faster. While my mother claims to have sufficient common sense, she didn't realize that this wasn't the case.

It's like traffic lights. If you go the exact speed limit, you may encounter a single red light while driving, but other than that, they'll usually be all green. However, if you go faster than the speed limit, you will easily encounter many more red lights that are put in place to help regulate speed limit.

It's just impatient people that happen to be the idiots, not the telemarketers or the traffic lights they encounter and it really annoys me that these people seem to think that their way is the right way and that doing things the correct way is just lame and stupid when there are so-called shortcuts that just end up bringing you back to square one or worse.

You see, common sense dictates that the speed limits are there for a reason, a reason NOT being to go any faster than them. Telemarketers, customer service representatives, etc... they all follow a strict list of things they need to say, ask, check over, and the like that are designed to make the process easier for both the person calling and the employee.

First, they read a friendly greeting that is written and worded to be friendly and polite to anyone who would be calling. Next, after you, the caller, tell them, the employee, about your problem, they look up your problem on their computer so as to give you the correct instructions. Sometimes they ask you for your name, phone number, address, etc. That information is most likely to be to log who made the call in a formal manner because such things as Caller ID is a breach of privacy.

Next, after they find the problem on their computer, they ask you questions, most of which may sound like the stupidest things in the world. Now, for it to be smooth sailing, you wait until the employee finishes asking his question and THEN you answer the question. You do NOT list off the things that's wrong and expect the employee just to skip the questions you answered. That is not how it works.

Now, if you did not follow the step above properly, you are most likely going to get really really irate and aggravated. This is going to interpret to the employee that you're obviously getting flustered, but they cannot stray from what their job entails, so they are forced to continue on. They will keep asking questions to you until they have solved the problem and then they will tell you what to do from there. If you don't want to speak about this problem to this hotline again, I suggest writing things down because that way, you will know what to do next time.

So the moral of the story? Don't hate customer service representatives who are doing their jobs to the letter, don't hate the traffic lights that seem to turn red every single time you stop at them, hate the impatient people who make them out as the bad guys. They're the real antagonists of this story.

One final note: I am not a telemarketer, a customer service rep of any kind, nor do I have anything to do with traffic lights of any sort. I am just a keen observer with the common sense to know what the hell is going on.