Customer service experiences that left you laughing or crying.

I will start.

One afternoon, I decided to take a train, to avoid crawling out of London in the traffic.
I set off from a small branch line unmanned station a few minutes walk from home and needing to know which way I needed to travel to make a connection to my destination, I had to talk to a circular metal box on the platform.

This was something that I had done before and knew that I would be chatting to the local main line control room at Wimbledon, about 3 miles away. So needless to say it was never a problem.
However, on this occasion, a girl answered and seemed completely clueless, asking me how to spell my destination, a well known town and asking me a series of other bizarre questions, before taking 15 minutes and a missed train to work it all out.

Me, being me, confused by her lack of knowledge, I asked her where she was based.

She proudly answered.
I am at the new combined British Rail, London Underground and tramlink public information centre.

She then added.
We are in the Philippines.

 

That is because BT run the English call centres in the Philippines for their accounts. The staff all have qualifications in maths and get a 6 week holiday in the UK for training. It works well for them, because it does not need geographical knowledge. They tried engineering centres, but they brought them back to the UK. Sadly, they have recently moved the accounts to south east India and they are a disaster. Everything now seems to be coming back home.
I am not certain, but passing the Pilipino centres over to British Rail may have been part of the deal, to avoid redundancy payments.

 

I agree. We still have unemployment while sending our sterling down a one way street. However far more comes back into our everyday economy than from China.
The only country where we seem to have a fair balance of payments is India. They spend much of the money on improvements, particularly in fresh water and sewage, so it is a win win situation.
What can be so cruel in countries like the Philippines, is giving the workers hope, along with houses and better cars as a result of their salary, Then taking it away again, resulting in the houses and cars being repossessed. The US computer giants did exactly that to the republic of Ireland, leaving three of Janes brothers in serious financial difficulty.