After having done half dozen of phone calls, got two job reference numbers, talked to different technicians over the phone for several times, and this also includes waiting for the stupid answering machine finishing over its crazy speech each time I rang, pressing some designated numbers as instructed, punching, squeezing and yelling and scolding over the phone to the HP specialist and our colour printer, our poor fellow colour printer, finally got back this afternoon. It was a miracle, but to be honest, I still don’t know what the problem was, what I did and how it got back

The printer has been dead since another girl changed the magenta cartridge and played a bit with its rear and front doors, and her limited knowledge. I wasn’t in that day; otherwise she wouldn’t have had the chance to cause this sort of trouble at all. I don’t like people who looks knowing everything but actually knows nothing or people who tries to fix the problem that s/he actually couldn’t fix. I am not saying I don’t like people who are interested in new knowledge or curious, or eager to explore the world. But if it’s the case that you have to sacrifice other people’s time, money for any of your faults, you’d better be off the place and play somewhere else. Last month, we have spent $1300 to fix the transmission belt and service call fee. It took me a lot of phone calls and a great deal of time explaining what’s happening over the phone and doing the trouble shooting. I was so drained out.

Last week, I almost was yelling at a HP lady over the phone, who kept asking me t check the series number and product number. She insisted that the series number in their record system is not the one I gave her and we are also no longer in the warranty which also is not the information I’ve got from the Council IT people. Everybody in the office can hear my angry voice “look, I don’t have any other number. Just get me a guy to come over and service the printer. That’s all I wanted…..” But soon, I realised that my anger might not be fair to an innocent girl at the other end of the line. She was just trying to help me out and following their bloody procedure as those care centres normally do. Then I calmed down and started to apologize to her. Finally it went pretty well, although nothing really had been fixed.

Sometimes I feel really sorry for people who work for Care Centre or Customer Call Centre, especially the case involved in a lot of technical problems and means a lot to customers’ daily living. The customer side, counting on the people on the phone to fix the problem straight away; while the call centre side, being left in the least known position about the situation, might have been led to the wrong direction completely, which helps little in solving the actual problem.

But what else can you do to make it better? And aren’t we in the same position everyday just like those people work for the call centre? Sometimes after I finished the talking to the clients and hang up the phone, I wondered how much information has been really well received and how much of it had lost in our subjective interpretation.