Big Brother v. mugger brother

At my grandma's the other day, where once again she received cold calls from faceless salesmen. The first claimed to be from her phone and internet provider, TalkTalk. Acting as her call screener, I had my doubts about this man's credentials: why was he bothering a 93-year-old, whose telephone and internet use are extremely uninteresting, with go-faster products ? Not nice ... even if he was an actual TalkTalk employee.

But the psycho who called shortly after, asking for a Mr. L - never mind that the master of the house was long since deceased and anyway went by the appellation of Dr. - this low-life was something new and shocking.

I am more than acquainted with the Indian call centres whose desperate foot soldiers try to bore and bamboozle the socks off you, using a monotonous stream of incongruous sounds and weird Indian-English cadences. The challenge as a weary recipient lies in making these characters break rank and respond in a way that doesn't simulate a primitive computer.

This usually proves a challenge too far ... but times may finally be changing. For the character who called my grandmother that fine day - an emissary of the imaginatively titled "UK Claims Department" - this scumbag quickly veered into a very unscripted persona.

I had made it immediately clear that I knew exactly what kind of a scam he was playing but still I invited him to give me his pathetic pitch. To my surprise this elicited a veritable tidal wave of ranting and raving, swearing like a trouper and threatening to this-me and that-me. "You want some more ?!" he kept asking. And when I told him I was from the BBC and was recording the conversation it only seemed to make him up the ante, with evermore voluminous invective.

Obviously it was disturbing to be on the receiving end of such a call while knowing who the intended recipient had been. But it made me curious to know how many other deadbeat employees in these Indian call centres had also finally lost the plot and suffered this kind of a meltdown ? Essentially no different to Fagin's pick-pockets, they have sat there, year in, year out, following their absurd script in which they pretend to be called John and Jane and located in an office somewhere in leafy England, usually "just down the road".

For these slumdog millionaires, this was supposed to be the first rung of the ladder in the new Indian Dream. Today a wretched, thieving call centre, but tomorrow ... the world !

Or not. And now we see evidence of the phenomenal spread of one aspect of globalisation: mental illness, brought on by the rush of great expectations and the inevitable car-crash of crushing disappointment. Today's Indian galley slaves sell their souls and their pride but then, instead of turning on their employers, they stupidly try to regain their lost self-esteem by snarling and snapping at the "customers" who refuse to be mugged.

Update: I notified Charles Dunstone about this blog post. The founder of Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk, Dunstone was always remarkably responsive to my personal emails while I was a TalkTalk customer (something I have already noted on this blog). There's a disconnect in having such a responsive chief exec running a company that too often has been slammed for poor customer service. But there we are, just another of life's mysteries. Anyway, this is what Charles emailed to me, as usual within hours, if not minutes, of my inquiry.

"They [the cold callers] keep changing the numbers they call on. We can restrict your grandmother's line to only accept calls where the CLI [Caller Location Information] is displayed, but we are shooting in the dark trying to anticipate what numbers they might call on otherwise."