Strong feelings

Exasperated! Infuriated! Incensed! Enraged! Lots of words to describe a feeling of very strong irritation or annoyance. And why am I feeling this way? Because I have just spent almost 90 minutes of my precious Saturday morning waiting for customer support of a large, online travel agency to answer my phone call. I feel irked, vexed, inflamed – more descriptive words to express my anger. I am not sure if having so many words to explain the same feeling helps me or makes my blood boil even more (another descriptive phrase dropped in there, did you notice?) but that’s another topic.

I am, of course, not the only one to experience such strong emotions when trying to deal with customer call centres on the phone. But I am home alone at the moment and need to vent somehow ((offload my anger) and so, please excuse me here, but I need to rant (another phrase for offloading my anger).

These days you often need to navigate the initial conversation with an extremely friendly (but irritating) AI agent. “Hello, Joanne, how can I help you?” I must say I was rather taken aback – how did she know my name? Great stuff! We’re off! But then my heart sank when I realised it was not human. Oh no, I’ll have to go through the tedious replies until the robot understands me (this is not always easy when I am speaking German and my English accent confuses the bots).

When the call was eventually answered, I was put through to the wrong department (of course) and then was put on hold while they found the correct person to help me. That never ends well. You just know that you will be put back in the loop with the music that you started off rather liking and perhaps humming along to, but 15 minutes later the same music has got your back up (another descriptive phrase to go into this mix). Then when you are speaking to the correct department, the person working for a global company decides that his English isn’t good enough to speak to me and immediately puts me on hold again (and so back to the music) even though I have tried to interrupt and say that we can try in German (before anyone criticises me, I do begin in German but always say that I prefer to speak in English if possible on the phone).

Anyway, my Saturday morning has almost disappeared. My planned tasks are on hold. And the end of the customer call conversation has not brought me any satisfaction whatsoever because I now have to send them an email with all the pertinent information – I absolutely can guarantee that I will soon become enraged, inflamed, exasperated again – because the point of the call this morning was to let them know that I have written about 26 emails on my issue and not one reply to date.

However, I always try to see everything positively – it has given me a good theme for this blog post!  My rant is over and I feel better.