» Customers from Hell

Where am I?
To fund my student lifestyle back in the day I needed a little bit of money for rent and bills, and a lot of money (proportionally) for decadent self indulgence. Sadly it strikes me that the opposite ratio is true these days.

Anyway, I took a job in a call centre. Thankfully it wasn't an outbound call centre, but one where my job was to help people who called up requesting public transport information - bus, train, ferry timetables etc.

It was a pretty cruisy job really. After a while you knew all the major routes and timings so barely had to look things up in the system. But one kind of customer really got on my tits.

Me- "Hello, Transinfo, how can I help?"

Cretin- "Uh yeah, when's the next bus?"

Me- "That depends. Where are you, and where do you want to go?"

Cretin- "At the bus stop. I wanna go to town."

Me- "I see. Buses on that route run all the time."

Cretin- "But I've been here ages."

Me- *clickety* "In fact, you've just missed one."

Cretin- "No I haven't. I'm here at the stop."

Me- "Did you look away from the road for a minute? Maybe at the sky or your watch or something? They're very quick these new buses."

Cretin- "Really? I don't have a watch. What's the time?"

Me- "It's (1 hour past whatever the time really was)."

Cretin- "Oh shit. I'm late."

Me- "Oh, that's a shame. Your bus will be there soon."

*click*
*beep*
(Thu 4th Sep 2008, 17:54, More)

» The Credit Crunch

I'm sorry to have to tell you this ...
I recently had the displeasure of having to make someone redundant for the first time in my not-so-long career of oficially "managing" colleagues.

Working for a very small company made it much more difficult, as we all work with each other in close proximity every day. And it's not like we have a crew of HR harpies to call on when we need to let go of a few faceless monkeys in sales.

The worst part was having to pretend for a short while that it was just a review of his position, and until the end of the consultation period there would be no final decision. But the decision had been made, and the poor guy just wanted a clean break.
So we kept it as short as possible and bunged up the severance payment as much as we could.

He took it fairly well though (probably better than I would have done). And we're helping him with his CV, contacts etc.

Business is picking up a bit now, but it couldn't get much worse than the last 3 months of 2008. Hopefully we won't need to let anyone else go.

Sorry for lack of funnies. To make up for it, here's a semi-topical joke from Sickipedia:

I got sacked from my job at the beauty salon yesterday.

I don't understand: all I did was give her a 'facial'...
(Wed 28th Jan 2009, 16:19, More)

» Puns

I used to write headlines for a newspaper
Pun-tastic fun when you could get away with it. My favourite was one I wrote for a story about the Russians re-discovering the bones of the executed Tsar and his family and there being a debate about what to do with them.

My headline: Russia's royal bones cause grave dilemma

*feel free to groan and slap your forehead; I won't be offended
(Thu 5th Mar 2009, 18:16, More)

» Addicted

Fieldrunners on iPhone
I got this little game called Fieldrunners for my iPhone last week, and can't put it down. It's a nifty little tower defense game with great graphics and strategic challenge.

I've even found myself looking forward to going to work so I can play it on my commute. Highly recommended, but perhaps less so if you have an addictive personality when it comes to games.
(Wed 24th Dec 2008, 10:09, More)

» Cringe!

Yet another culturally inappropriate joke
Kaol’s post below reminds me of a Japanese language class at high school. We had a temp teacher in for a month or so; a short, rotund Chinese woman, funnily enough. Her english was nowhere near as good as her Japanese (or Mandarin for that matter), but she still understood enough when we were regularly playing up and taking the piss out of her.

One lesson, we got side-tracked into competitive Sickipedia-style joke telling while we were supposed to be preparing for some role play exercise. This is 1989, just after the tanks rolled into Tianenmen Square, so the following joke didn’t go down too well:

Q. What’s the difference between a lobster and a Chinese student?
A. Nothing. They’re both crustaceans (crushed-Asians – badoomching)

The teacher burst into tears and hurried out of the room. That caused enough *cringe* to start with. But when we later found out that some members of her family had been caught up in the government crackdown, the cringe factor went through the roof.

Still feel kind of bad about that. But hey, I was 14, an age when most boys have about much tact as the bastard lovechild of Robert Kilroy-Silk and Prince Phillip.
(Wed 3rd Dec 2008, 15:01, More)