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Call Centre Hell
Aug. 7th, 2006 09:08 pmTo round off a perfect rainy day, I just lost my university student ID card. As I put down my wallety thing to type my PIN, a gust of wind caught it and the card disappeared into the left-hand "waste" slot of the local Westpac ATM. By the time I'd gone home and got back to the ATM with a coathanger and chopsticks in an attempt to retrieve my card, a couple of people had already shoved their receipts in on top and it was out of reach. Bugger. Without that card I have no after-hours lab access, and during the day I'll need to get someone to open the door in the middle of the HIT Lab corridor for me every time I want to go through it.
I just spent somewhere around quarter of an hour on the phone to a Westpac call centre employee as she attempted to find the ATM, and which of the branches in Christchurch was responsible for it. English was not her first language. Nor was MĒori. Or Welsh. I had to spell "Wairakei" (the road it was on), "Greers" (the road I was on/it was next to), "Bryndwr" and "Burnside" (two suburbs it/I might be in).
About three times she got confused and started talking about me losing my ATM card or losing my ID card in the ATM slot and saying it would be automatically destroyed, when had I told her very slowly and clearly where I had lost the card and what it was. I was put on hold twice while she talked to people in another department - and they had just the one song playing on repeat. There were a couple of times where she just didn't talk while she was doing something, without telling what she was doing, for about a minute. Finally I was informed that the branch responsible was the Upper Riccarton branch (she'd been asking me for the closest; it's not), and that I should visit there in business hours tomorrow and ask if they can return my card when they next empty the ATM waste paper.
Gah!
For reference, now that I'm near a web browser, I've found out that the five nearest branches are here:
And the ATM in question is here:
So the closest branches are (1), (3) and (2); I have to go and talk to the people at (4) tomorrow. I found this information in roughly 20 seconds.
On the plus side, even though I slept through two alarms this morning after a shocking night's "sleep", I just got to my morning lecture on time, and wrote around 900 words of thesis material today, plus formulae. At least some things are going right, even if I do feel like a zombie. An angry zombie, deprived of call centre brains.
I just spent somewhere around quarter of an hour on the phone to a Westpac call centre employee as she attempted to find the ATM, and which of the branches in Christchurch was responsible for it. English was not her first language. Nor was MĒori. Or Welsh. I had to spell "Wairakei" (the road it was on), "Greers" (the road I was on/it was next to), "Bryndwr" and "Burnside" (two suburbs it/I might be in).
About three times she got confused and started talking about me losing my ATM card or losing my ID card in the ATM slot and saying it would be automatically destroyed, when had I told her very slowly and clearly where I had lost the card and what it was. I was put on hold twice while she talked to people in another department - and they had just the one song playing on repeat. There were a couple of times where she just didn't talk while she was doing something, without telling what she was doing, for about a minute. Finally I was informed that the branch responsible was the Upper Riccarton branch (she'd been asking me for the closest; it's not), and that I should visit there in business hours tomorrow and ask if they can return my card when they next empty the ATM waste paper.
Gah!
For reference, now that I'm near a web browser, I've found out that the five nearest branches are here:
And the ATM in question is here:
So the closest branches are (1), (3) and (2); I have to go and talk to the people at (4) tomorrow. I found this information in roughly 20 seconds.
On the plus side, even though I slept through two alarms this morning after a shocking night's "sleep", I just got to my morning lecture on time, and wrote around 900 words of thesis material today, plus formulae. At least some things are going right, even if I do feel like a zombie. An angry zombie, deprived of call centre brains.
