Metropol

This morning, I received in the post, what I thought at first was rather an interesting offer. It was
from "Midland Mainline", the train company I went with in November last year to visit London for
the MacExpo 2003 event. This leaflet in question promotes their "Unwind This Spring" offer.

The offer was to go to London for £17 return, or £27 return by First Class. Since I'm considering
another trip to London for sometime this month, I thought this offer would be just what I need.
Or, "just the ticket", if you'll pardon the pun! It's just as well that I looked at the fine print.
It said "Travel is not possible from Manchester Piccadilly or Stockport.".

So, I phoned up to check if they went from Manchester Victoria instead. The customer service
operative I spoke to, had a strong Indian accent, so I assumed Midland Mainline is another
of those companies that have their call centres in Bombay, or elsewhere in India.

After being kept on hold three times, the rep informed me that the offer does not apply
to any of the stations in Manchester. I told the customer service operative, that there's
no point in continuing with my enquiry any further, so the call came to an end.

Once I'd put the phone down, I thought, "What was the f***ing use of them sending me this
offer in the first place? I can't use it even if I wanted to!". The offer leaflet is now in the bin.

Anyone else received any equally useless and/or pointless offers . . . ?

I live in London and the other day I received a similar mailing from Midland Mainline - offering me cheap tickets to visit London.

You would have thought they might have at least filtered out the London addresses on their mailing list for this mailshot.

Off the topic, but I had to call Quark this past week (makers of QuarkXPress, a page-layout tool) and they, too, had outsourced their call center to India. I've never spend more time on the phone with someone that I wasn't at some point sleeping with.

What with my Dad coming from India, I feel able to say what most people think, and know. Particular accents from India can be very thick to understand - I myself even have difficulty on occassions. I think that this is one fairly serious flaw over-looked by companies moving their call centres there.

MrTomServo wrote:I've never spend more time on the phone with someone that I wasn't at some point sleeping with.

lol I like it!

Being from Nottingham, but living in London I have no choice but to use Midland Mainline when I travel home to see my family.

I've spoken to people on the phone quite a lot and they've always had either Yorkshire accents or a Derby/East Midlands accent, so I'm surprised to hear that you may have spoken to someone in India. Perhaps more likely that you spoke to a British person of Indian heritage?

London St Pancras was a mess of a station (it's MM's terminal in London) and the move to the "temporary" station is a welcome one, it's facilities are actually better than the original. It'll be a fab place once all the work on the Channel Tunnel link has been completed and you can travel to France from there.

I'm also a member of Midland Mainline's "More" scheme whereby if you register as a business user, you can get return first class weekend tickets to any MM destination for the smart price of just £19 - fan-bloody-tastic!

MrTomServo wrote:I've never spend more time on the phone with someone that I wasn't at some point sleeping with.

ROFL!

Aston wrote: I'm also a member of Midland Mainline's "More" scheme whereby if you register
as a business user, you can get return first class weekend tickets to any MM
destination for the smart price of just £19 - fan-bloody-tastic!

Cool! I just registered. Here's hoping it doesn't take "1 calendar month" for my membership pack to arrive!

OK, THis is totally irrelevant but it's been niggling me for ages.

DJGM, why are your posts always fixed-width? it's irritating enough at full size but when your browser is stretched thin, your posts come out all weird with all those carriage returns.

I used to get contant phonecalls from a stinking Paki/Indian c*nt trying to sell me NTL calls.

After 12 calls and a threatening letter from me later, they finally stopped calling.

Fortunately, everytime I call a call centre, I speak to someone actually in the UK. I have far more confidence in the company I'm dealing with if the person on the other end is actually British too.

I hate the idea of speaking to some scummy Asian turd. Call me a racist, but I'm really f*cking fed up of going into a corner shop for some fags and being served by a Paki/Indian person who stinks of what I can only assume is excrement, and who only grunts at me.

Plus the state of the corner shops here in Treforest is disgusting. The dirty old shop owners never clean the floors, walls, shelves etc. They are dingy with shoddy old shelves and food packaging that's covered in dust.

Ok, I'll say it: I'm flabbergasted at how racisit you are James.

Its one thing to choose not to buy from a company who outsource call centres to India, and not employ British staff. You are quite entitled to vote with your feet, as it were. Blame the company for how many times you are called, not the staff. To call them 'stinking' when you are clearly thousands of miles from any such odour, is a cheap shot, and rather unbecoming, if I may say.