Girl Friday
When I left school I had one of those fill-the-gap temping jobs whereby I worked for the 'call centre' of an equipment repair store, Tvs, Videos and the like. Our back office was staffed by about 7 people with one guy downstairs on the phone to engineers out on the road. We were all school or university leavers so being more or less the same age we all got on well. Too well really because the number of calls we took from worried people threatening to cause havoc (ie throw bricks/knives at the engineers, abuse them verbally) should they be without their daily episodes of Brookside, Corrie, Eastenders, Trisha and the like, diminished rapidly after about the first month of our employment. We discovered the internal email system, quite a novelty in those days, we perfected the art of making cartoons of our fellow colleagues, we learnt how to make speaker calls blare out through the whole building etc, etc. One girl came to work some time after the first of us were employed and soon let on that she wasn't there for the 6 month contract we all had but was planning to work a short while and then go back packing. Fair enough. On her last day at work a new boy came in to replace her. Knowing she wouldn't recognise his voice we asked him to call her internally (which should have been a sign to her) from downstairs and state that he was from Flywizz airline or whatever she was flying to Australia with. The good news? The airline had overbooked the seats on the plane and were upgrading her to first class. Whoopee! As we sat next to her we could hear her side of the conversation. Exclamations of joy and glee at the prospect of free champagne and plenty of leg room. Then came the bad news. We asked New Boy to tell her that the company had already charged the cost of the upgrade, around £1000, to her credit card. 'But you can't do that' we heard her say. You can if you pretend you've already spoken to the passenger's mother who had authorized the payment to go ahead and there was absolutely, absolutely no way they could refund the charge. Shouts of glee soon turned to rage as the girl argued her best to get out of a £1000 charge she'd saved so long to earn. Eventually she hung up in tears. The pracitcal joke had turned sour. How evil we all felt. Thinking it best to own up and brighten her day once more, we told her the truth. She fumed and spat feathers, refused to speak to us and left without saying goodbye. oops!
(Rosemarysbaby, Mon 17 Dec 2007, 23:43, Reply)