Train pain

November 5, 2007 – 5:52 pm by Cath

Oh, for Christ’s sake. How’s this for the conversation I had just a few moments ago…

“Hello, Central Trains, how can I help you?”

“I’d like to book a ticket from Cardiff to Birmingham New Street please.”

“Certainly. When do you want to travel?”

“The 21st November.”

“The 25th November?”

“No, the 21st November.”

“Oh, the 23rd November.”

“No! The 21st of November.”

“The 21st?”

Needless to say whoever I was speaking to didn’t have a clue what I wanted even though she was parading as someone working at Central Trains. She didn’t even sound as if she knew what country I lived in, let alone where the hell Birmingham New Street happened to be, so I guess that explains why we had trouble communicating through my Welsh twang and her thick, Indian subcontinental accent. It remains to be seen whether I really will receive tickets for the date and times I want to travel. I suspect that she booked me on the slow train to Aberdeen three years from now rather than a fast route to Brum in just over a fortnight.

Is it just me or does your heart also sink when the call centre mole picks up the phone and you can’t understand what they are saying?

I recently endured the swooping joys of a dodgy internet connection. The upshot, to save you the tedium of the full story, was that I had to call Wanadoo several times in order to get the bloody thing working again. It didn’t help that each time I was put through to a country far, far away. The result? My explaining, to a man who lied about his name being Roger so that I wouldn’t guess that he was slaving in an Indian call centre, that the interweb had gone tits up Chez Janes. You can only imagine how the conversation went, not least because each time I called I had to explain my two syllable password three times before we could even skirt the problem. On my fifth attempt, and for some freakish reason, I actually got through to a UK-based call centre. The guy I spoke to was called Keith and we understood each other perfectly. He fixed the problem within minutes and, girlishly, I cried just from the relief of not having to be patched through to the other side of the frigging world again.

I’ll let you know if I ever get to Birmingham.

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