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.

Hence, when you tell Bradley you want to do a transfer, he doesn’t say yes, he says: ‘So you want to do a transfer. Yes, of course, I’ll be happy to help you facilitate that transfer today in just a moment after I’ve taken you through security, if you are happy to do that with us, here, today?’

You say you are. But he doesn’t ask for your passcode. He says: ‘That’s excellent news! And now, if you’re ready to continue, I’ll commence to take you through that security process with us, here, today, by asking yourself, if you don’t mind, the first digit, and the fifth digit, of your telephone banking passcode, please, so that we can get that transfer sorted for yourself, with us, here, today.’

It is clear to you that he is playing a cruel and savage game. He not only misconstrues the reflexive pronoun — an old trick — but he pretends to finish a sentence, then just at the point where the verbosity might end, he adds another word, then another, until you are driven half mad trying to second guess where the sentence is really ending, or indeed if it is ever going to end, a form of torment that is blood-vessel bursting.