Sunshine, palm trees, the film festival ... and occasional rain
Most of us, I suppose, have minor horror stories of trying to deal with customers services departments that have been relocated to far-off places where the staff may be charming and willing to help but sometimes struggle to understand or make themselves understood.
The BT people in Bombay or some other great Indian city once waited until the middle of the night to ring and offer to guide us through the steps that would restore our internet connection. That was in the UK; in France, I am accustomed to being told the Orange/France Telecom person at the end of the line is in the Maghreb.
But HSBC's Abu Dhabi branch took the biscuit for me since its call centre was just down the Sheikh Zayed highway in Dubai and yet it was 1) virtually impossible to penetrate the automated system and b) a near miracle for the call to achieve any useful result.
But I liked this anecdote from the renowned French scribbler Philippe Bouvard, whose pithy little columns appear daily on page one of the Var-Matin. Noting the Hollande government's plan to forbid relocation of call centres beyond French territory, he recounted this conversation:
Caller: I am looking for the number of the Carlton Hotel
Operator:
Can you spell that please?
C: It's in Cannes ...
O:
Can you spell that please?
C: On the Croisette ...
O:
>The what?
C: But the sea, the palm trees, the film festival ...
O:
In which country is this?
C: France. Do you need me to spell that?
O:
I'm sorry. I'm in Agidir.
I'm torn between sympathy for M Bouvard, or whoever's story he was recounting, and the thought that the caller could actually have been more helpful. But the point is made all the same. If you have a better story of outsourced call centre woes, let me know ...
And while I am on page one of today's paper - nothing wrong with plagiarism provided it can be passed off as research, as my friend from The Times once had it - let me add my own congratulations to Yannick Agnel on winning not one but two gold medals at the London Olympics.
He is from Nice, where the newspaper's parent title Nice-Matin is, of course, based. And had he done so well before the paper carried out its straw poll on whether readers would be bothering to follow the Games now that the mightily impressive opening ceremony was out of the way, I suspect the Yes camp would have been a little higher than 36 per cent.
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