Real life | 1 March 2018

‘Good afternoon, my name is Bradley, and how may I be of help to you today?’

After you’ve spent ten minutes negotiating an automated system that quite clearly aims to frustrate you from ever getting through to a human being, when you do get through to one, through dint of your own bloody-minded refusal to reply to any of the absurd automated questions — ‘If you are calling about something irrelevant, please say “irrelevant!”’ — until the system cannot cope with your silence, and concedes that it will have to put you through to a real person, it is patently absurd for that person to pretend to be your long-lost friend, beyond ecstatic that you have rung them.

I have a theory that call-centre people, for reasons entirely understandable, are boiling over with so much anger and unhappiness that they have decided to express it through the medium of oppressive long-winded courtesy.