Letter: Dear Caller

Dear Caller,

Being a phone operator in a call outsourcing company there are many things that get on my nerves about work. The fact that no one seems to notice that I do all the work is only one of the little things that get to me. However, I have a major issue with certain callers and you are one of them. You successfully managed to do all of the things that annoy someone in my line of work.

For starters, if you get put on hold, it’s for a good reason. I’m already taking care of a call and you happened to ring in during said call. I’m not going to put the first call on hold, take care of you and then go back so I put YOU on hold. You successfully managed to go over the first hurdle in 2 ways. For starters, when I asked you to hold the line you said you were waiting for 20 minutes just to get through. This was a blatant lie, and I say that because for every call there is a timer from when you first rang in. You were barely waiting 1 minute! You then did an even more annoying thing of hanging up and ringing in again, and when I asked you to go on hold you said your problem is needs to be dealt with urgently!

This brings me to the second hurdle you went over, telling me the call is urgent. Let me translate that for you, you say a call is urgent. What you actually mean is you spent the last 2 hours ignoring it, you’re reaching the end of your shift and you only remembered now that you had to call it through and you know that you’ll get in trouble with your manager if the call doesn’t get logged. In otherwords, it’s not actually urgent at all, you were just too lazy to bother ringing it in sooner. Before you say, “Well it could have been an emergency”, if it was, you wouldn’t tell me that it’s urgent, you’d just tell me the problem and I’d clock it. It is an almost certainty that when someone calls in and says something is urgent, it actually isn’t at all. To make it even clearer for you, you don’t get to decide if your call is urgent, I do.

The third thing you did was even more annoying, when I finally got back to you after an astonishingly long time (2 minutes), you blurted out all of the information so quickly that I couldn’t catch any of it. You then got annoyed at me because I had to ask a whole load of evidently awkward questions like, what your name is, where you’re calling from and what exactly the problem is. Before you ask, NO I can’t just send someone over to you. You then asked the most stupid question, “Is the engineer in the office?”. NO! It’s 2am, he’s at home in his bed and you’re ringing me to ask me about replacing a lightbulb!

The forth and final thing you did to cap it all off was possibly THE MOST ANNOYING THING ANYONE CAN DO! After I hung up on you, you rang back every 2 minutes asking why the engineer hasn’t called. If you’re ringing me, he can’t ring you! Put down the phone and wait longer than 2 minutes and you’ll get a call. Sweet bearded messiah of your choice! How can there be someone as impatient and annoying as you? Previously there was no one who fit the description of “Most annoying caller”, but you are it!

Please, if you ever have to ring someone in the middle of the night looking for help with something, take all of this on board. Why? You’ll find that the operator will be more willing to help you in the end…

Your’s Sincerely

Felix