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Hello. I am a phone monkey.
In past posts I've spoken of working in customer services and my admittedly trivial, yet more or less sincerely held desire to provide good service for everyone who calls me, without fear or favour. However, it is hard sometimes to give of one's all for people who seem to be happy victims of an entirely self-inflicted blinkeredness, bordering on stupidity, when it comes to understanding the terms of the contracts they have entered into. The company I work for provides finance for a vast array of commercial goods and services, everything from cars and motorbikes through to furniture, laptops, musical equipment, training courses and season tickets, and people seem quite happy to sign up to hire-purchase agreements that mean unavoidable financial commitments lasting several years. The number one complaint I hear from customers, when any hiccups occur with their agreements or the goods they cover, is that they didn't read the Terms & Conditions because they were in a hurry, under pressure from the salesman and so on, and it's therefore unfair that they should have to continue with their rental payments or pay charges for being in arrears for months at a time/fitting a personalised licence plate/discovering that the sofa doesn't fit up the stairs. To which the invariable reply from all of us is, as it must be: "You signed the contract, and so you agreed to all of the Terms and Conditions." A statement that any responsible adult could only agree with, no matter how arrogantly delivered.
However. It has occurred to me that morally, spiritually, ethically, this response is somewhat insufficient. Shouldn't I try to be more understanding of people's mistakes, shortcomings and oversights, as I hope they'd be of my own? Haven't many of us made impulsive purchases of items that involved a hefty financial commitment, only to find that the goods weren't all they should be, or turned out to be of limited usefulness? Is it really doing my soul any good to sit at the end of a phone line all day, smugly failing to empathise with people whose only real crime is having eyes bigger than their wallets? As a combined personal-growth manoeuvre, act of penance and unscientific research exercise, I've begun this thread. I want to hear your stories of purchases that seemed great or potentially life-changing at the time, but turned out to be lemons; or worse still, were great in themselves but were made worthless by lousy aftersales care when you ran into problems. And conversely, if you think I'm indulging in unnecessary hand-wringing and that people in general need to take more responsibility for themselves and their money, please post about that too.
Phone monkey wants to evolve! |
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