Being insulted by British Gas

In my long exper­i­ence of cus­tomer ser­vice, my call to Brit­ish Gas over the week­end must rank as a par­tic­u­lar highlight.

I had a few prob­lems to sort out regard­ing my account, and on call­ing up I found myself speak­ing to a very friendly and pleas­ant Irish woman. Except that she wasn’t entirely Irish — there was def­in­itely a trace of some­thing else in her accent that I couldn’t identify. It became really notice­able when she pro­nounced cer­tain words.

Um, how to explain this without encour­aging the wrong sort of search engine refer­rals … let me think.

One of the words that obvi­ously cropped up a great deal in the con­ver­sa­tion was “account”. Except that, due to the woman’s accent, it soun­ded rather more like “a c*nt”.

It doesn’t tit­il­late me one bit to have to type this sort of lan­guage, really it doesn’t.

This state of affairs became even more unpleas­ant when she referred to “your account”, because what I heard was almost con­stant insults being thrown at me, as in “You’re a c*nt”.

“You’re a c*nt” this, and “You’re a c*nt” that. Not nice. Not nice at all. And that’s how I man­aged to spend ten minutes on the phone to the Brit­ish Gas call centre being unin­ten­tion­ally insulted.