I'm not racist, but . . .

It would be nice to ring my internet provider and talk to an Australian. In Australia.

I rang Dodo on Friday to complain about what I believed to be overcharging on my account. The girl (presumably based in Mumbai) told me that it was because I had 10gb of downloads a month, only five of those were in peak times, and I would have to use the other five in off peak periods (which would be awesome if my hobbies included surfing the net between the hours of 1am and 9am).

So anyway I told her I didn't believe I had that explained to me when I changed my package, and she said someone would call me back within 48 hours to play me the audio recording of my phone call, presumably with me agreeing to said conditions. It's now Monday and this hasn't happened, but whatever . . .

At this point, I suggested I might like to upgrade my package, to include an extra 10gb of downloads a month (giving me 10gb total in peak periods) for an extra $10.

She said she could help me with this, and after putting me on hold, came back after a while and explained two things.

1) My increase in downloads would occur with my new package starting at the end of March, a month away, and

2) If I wanted to downgrade my package at any point, there would be another fee, of roughly $100.

At this point I told her to cancel the upgrade, leave everything as it is. It seemed like she understood me. She asked me if I was happy with the call, and I said "Not really", to which she said "I understand".

Evidently she did not.

Because I got into work this morning and found an email from Dodo explaining that they were upgrading my account with increased download limits in March.

Now I think Indians are generally pretty smart people. They seem to make fine doctors and engineers. Not so much with the call centre jobs though. I presume it is because of the "English as a second language" thing. All I know is that I feel like I'm talking to a child when I try and explain myself to them. I was saying today that because they work on standard scripted answers, it's like talking to a computer, not a person, if you don't ask the right question, phrased the right way, they don't know how to deal with it. The whole time I was on the phone (including all of the breaks to "go talk with a supervisor") I couldn't help but think if I could talk to an Aussie in an Adelaide call centre I'd have the whole thing sorted in two minutes.