Reason to be proud?

I've blanked out names. This is actually a source of perverse pride to me. I've only ever had one work complaint levelled against me that I'm aware of. This is it. As complaints go, its pretty full-on. Might as well go the whole hog I guess.

It was sent on Friday.


*****


From: Pissed off customer
Sent: 26 March 2010 14:01
To: My whole work team (including me)
Subject: Phone call

Called your "call centre" 10 minutes ago to order a pocketalker hearing device for my severely deaf father. I have never had such obnoxious, rude and downright poor customer service.
I hung up on the phone call after he tried his hardest to treat me like an idiot.

The man was cocky and surly and has without doubt lost you a sale. If it wasn't for such a poor website I would not have had to use your call centre in the first place.

Please pass this email on to your manager/training department. He should not be allowed to speak to the public in that tone.

Pissed off customer

****


I would contest that I was hardly cocky or obnoxious - no more than usual anyway. I was trying to be my usual helpful self, and the woman was a stroppy shit, hassling for me to speed up my answers, which is impossible without superfast broadband, which is something we don't have.

Generally speaking, in a situation where a customer wants answers I don't have, I'd ask them politely what they need to know, do the research and ring them back, and in 99 percent of cases, this works fine. Seems old "firework up her arse" bitch here wanted the answers now, and NOW only.

So uptight. Such a fuckwit. It tells you a lot that she "hung up on me". I've never had cause to do this to a customer - ever.

I hope she enjoys the remaining years on earth she has. I guarantee that unless I get thwacked by a car or some other act of God, I'll be on this planet for a greater number of years than her, since her stress level appears, at least today, to be stratospheric. I'd love to say with some
honesty that I feel sorry for her but if she insists of pissing off everyone around her, then I don't. I feel sorry for her husband (if he managed to last more than a year in her company he must be a masochist), her family and her few remaining friends.

I believe that the issue she really had with me was that I didin't show her the deference she expected. There are few people I will ever defer to. I generally take the simple rule that if you aren't paying me, aren't someone I care a lot for, or my parents, then deference is earnt, not given as a right.

This is a test

This is just a test to see how easy it is to write a blog entry without having to use the blog thingy itself.  This is just a wee test. 

Great sounds in music #1 - The DX harp preset

An occasional wee series where I pontificate to some extent on what I regard as the most interesting, justifiably famous and simply plain easy to like sounds that have infiltrated pop music over the past 20 years or so. Mostly, just because I prefer that kind of thing most, these will be electronic or otherwise synthetic sounds. Rather than trying to describe them too much, I'll let you find out more about these for yourself with Youtube links to each sound.

So lets kick off with...the lovely sound of the DX7 harp.

A preset on the original DX7 FM synthsizer, launched by Yamaha in 1983, this incredibly fragile, lightly percussive sound graces many a quieter 80s and 90s track and appears in some unlikely places, such as the opening bars of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. Almost Japanese in quality, it doesn't really sound like a typical plucked Welsh harp, but has a more "oriental" quality. Given a bit of chorus or a tiny bit of vibrato (as was done by Level 42 in Sleepwalkers) the sound is like a light breath of fresh air.

I first heard Irish folkmeister Christy Moore's "Reel in the Flickering Light" in the late 90s and am as taken with it now as I was then. Not the usual kind of folk Mr Moore is renowned for, this work of childish whimsy is simply beautiful. I keep wanting to to repeat the adjective "delicate".

Like a lot of FM sounds, they were both over-used in the 80s especially and went out of fashion. And yet, the sounds on this instrument are almost laughably ubiquitous due to the fact that due to clever licencing, just about every computer sound card contains an identikit set of sounds from the synthesizer module.



Another new age-y place you can find this sound is Lanz & Speer's "Behind the Waterfall". Worth seeking on Spotify.

There is a plethora of wonderful sounds on the DX7, and I'll be returnig to it very shortly.