I'm re-posting this because I now realise how much I fucking hate the call centre industry

It only costs 25 quid to sell your soul

On holiday last month - missed sending off a cheque to my credit card company by one day. Statement arrived today - twenty-five quid plus penalty interest, plus they got the cheque anyway a day late and cashed it. I add this robbery to all the other attempts at invading my pocket this month.

People are dying in Iraq in the name of democracy. This commoditized democracy will surely mean that in ten years from now some American bank gets the right to charge each and every one of them twenty five dollars for paying their debts a few hours late. I cry.

I called the call centre just because I was bored and guessed that the operators were bored to. Bored of taking calls from pissed off customers that their company had stolen money from. Bored of their crap pay, bored of their robotic lives. Battery hens crap where they stand, its rare to be forced to stand where somebody else craps for money.

It only costs twenty-five quid to sell your soul.

I wonder where the call centre guy is based.

The accent is non-specific and geography means nothing to me anymore. It could be Birmingham, it could be Bangalore. I ask myself if I care as I force him to explain, again, why they have charged me twenty-five quid and why they can’t rescind it.

I don’t (care).

There could be a civil war happening outside his electronic fortress; a bloody coup d’etat. History could be changing at the very perimeter of his carpark. And yet I still force him to explain to me, three times, why I have to pay the fee when they have already banked the money I owed.

We are not writing history anymore, we are wasting peoples time, creating crap, franchising fraud.I wasted twenty minutes of my life talking to call centre guy, and I guess I wasted twenty minutes of his life too. That’s forty minutes of wasted effort.

If I cared I could have asked him how he was, learned something about his culture, understood his geography, and religious beliefs. But twenty-five quid is twenty-five quid and that‘s all it takes to sell your soul.