This Call is Being Monitored for Quality Assurance

Here is a little five minute audio clip of someone trying to cancel his AOL service.

Service is the operative word, because the AOL representative keeps insisting on trying to "“help"” the customer even when the only help the customer wants is to be cut loose.

It is easy to hate the AOL representative, until you realize that he probably goes through dozens of these calls every day. And that he is being monitored so his only way of dealing with stress is intolerable customer service.

It continually amazes me that people allow situations to get this absurd. The AOL representative is confined to a script that doesn'’t allow for shortcuts; the caller doesn'’t understand this and just wants to be let go.

Some jobs make us less than human, just like the rights of the customer make us sometimes more inhuman.

I got this link from the Jonathan Coulton website.