Snail-in-Peanut-Butter Speed and Power Utility

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday December 12, 2023 07:38

My issue was around cutting off trees that were interfering with power lines on my street and the contractors leaving the cut branches strewn in my street without thoughtfully disposing of them. So you log your queries through the call centre.

Call centres are the trend nowadays mainly because service providers don’t want coming face to face with an enraged customer and the customer trying to remove their bodies from their heads without any surgically-approved tools. So the call centre reduces the interaction to talking with phantoms. First I had to listen to a Euro sounding lady telling me 56, 367 times how their call agents are currently busy and they will be with me shortly. This ‘shortly’ turned out to be about 15 minutes.

By then I had picked my nose 73 times and scratched my butt four times. I keep wondering whether we still have these women locally because many of them left when next door President Mugabe said, ‘You can keep your Britain and I will keep my Zimbabwe’ and an ANC activist told one male version, ‘here you behave or you jump’. So since Botswana was sandwiched between these two countries, there must have been trepidation that it is just a matter of time before this happens in Botswana.

Euros study patterns and they could see this happening in Botswana so they gathered their bags and left. So I wonder where they got that voice. When the agent did answer it was a male. Bad start. On a Friday after lunch and you are being served by a man in a call centre.

That cannot work. Most men around that time are more worried about the Liquorama closing hours and whether they will make it to the beer line before Liquorama closes. It didn’t help that I started off by mouthing off a complaint regarding the waiting time. Of course he wasn’t too pleased and responded without any emotion in a voice that at best was even more mechanical than the Euro lady. He asked me to hold my call even though there seemed a veiled tone to hold my horses.

An apt demonstration of who really has the power. His tone resembled someone who after winning an award for being lazy could send someone to pick it. It took eight minutes of listening to those songs similar to RB1 programme, For You Alone. The power utility I think has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the RB1 programmers to advertise their music on their toll free lines as classical music is failing to gain traction in a conservative society more interested in songs of Kulenyane, Idibala and Buchara type.

Well, I will give you a quick feedback here and now. It is not working. In fact, it irked me even more and when the guy came back on the line he must have heard the sound of my blood boiling. After taking down my numbers he informed me the area engineer will get in touch. Either the engineer is busier than a one-armed clown making balloon animals at a kid’s party or due to the December madness, the network system is clogged and he cannot get through to me as I am still waiting for his call. A week later! (For comments, feedback and insults email inkspills1969@gmail.com)