*I am currently over the quarter-way point towards a whole year of inanity. Huzzah!

Friday: Conversations with customer service representatives are getting more and more difficult.

I don’t know why, but it seems like lately, the quality of people who work in customer service is going downhill. Last night, it took me ten minutes to order pizza. I was at my aunt’s house, and we were hungry, so I called Pizza Pizza. For some bizarre reason, they have a call centre, instead of letting you call the store you want to get the pizza from. The guy taking my order was NOT a native English speaker. And that’s ok with me, as long as he could actually speak English. But this, apparently was a challenge. Shouldn’t the most important criterion for hiring someone to take pizza orders be that the person can understand the language the pizza orders are mostly going to be in? He asked for my address at least 5 times. I said it, I spelled it. He said it back, he spelled it back. He was wrong each time. We went back and forth like this for a few minutes, my aunt looking terribly amused in the background. When I finally said, with a certain amount of frustration, “It’s Keats! Like the poet!” she laughed out loud and said, “There’s no way THAT’S going to help.” I hadn’t even gotten to the food part of the order yet. Don’t get me wrong—it has nothing to do with what country someone comes from—in fact, I had even more trouble trying to order something from a Sears rep. who was from Quebec, and whose English was also virtually non-existent.

But face to face can be just as bad. Today, I was in an antique mall, and I found an old historical atlas of Oxford County in one of the stalls. I was really excited, and opened it up to see the price, because most responsible antique dealers pencil the price inside the cover to avoid damaging the outside. It said $12.00. Awesome! Then I looked at the outside cover, and it said something MUCH more expensive, on a nasty sticker. Well, I wanted the atlas, and the booth was 15% off, so I took it to the counter. I showed the woman the page with $12.00 written on it and said, “Can you remind your vendors to remove the price they paid from their items before they re-price them?” then I showed her the price tag on the cover. She looked at me and said, “What?” Actually, it was more like, “Whuh?” I don’t know how much clearer I could have been. I keep thinking of variations but they seem to all sound very Neanderthalic, like “Old price good, new price bad. Old price go away. Me buy book.” That makes even less sense. Maybe she didn’t know what a ‘vendor’ was.