Tuesday 25 February 2020

No Bouquets for Plusnet.

I had to call my ISP today (Plusnet, if anybody in the UK is interested) because my internet connection has suddenly become slow.

It didn’t go well. I ended up getting cross and aborting the call, partly because I decline to go through their absurd procedure which I’ve gone through before to no avail, and partly because the boy I spoke to (he didn’t sound old enough to be called a young man) irritated me greatly. When somebody cuts aggressively across what I’m saying and becomes patronising, I get cross.

It isn’t the first time this has happened – with Plusnet and others – and I’m inevitably coming to the view that the level of customer service in the corporate world is declining. In the case of Plusnet I assume it’s because they place too much emphasis on an applicant’s technical training, and too little on his or her ability to treat customers with calmness, helpfulness and respect. (I gather they call it ‘interpersonal skills’ these days.) I have found, however, that young women are much better at this sort of thing than young men, being generally more mature, more understanding, more open-minded, less inclined to aggression, and being possessed of more little grey cells.

Where I go from here I don’t know yet. Maybe the slow connection has something to do with the wind and rain we’ve been having quite a lot of lately, and will right itself eventually. But here’s an amusing irony:

Since I’ve consciously made a point of naming the transgressor in this post, it occurs to me that somebody’s algorithm somewhere will pick it up and start trying to persuade me to take Plusnet as my lawful wedded ISP. It always struck me that there must be something oddly satisfying about standing at the altar and saying ‘no.’

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