oh my word!

Acolleague had a little trouble with the password attached to her television subscription. She’d forgotten it entirely.

It’s a scenario I am very familiar with. I routinely forget my online banking, TV provider, broadband supplier, everything, passwords.

My colleague had been phoned by a customer service representative. These people attempt to sell you things you don’t want and didn’t know existed. But if you show the merest spark of interest, they ask you to prove who you are – even though they called you!

But my friend was unable to “prove” who she was by being utterly unable to recall the password she had given several years previously. Undaunted, the sales representative decided he could give her a few hints. “It’s a colour,” he said. She said blue, green, red, yellow but none satisfied. “It’s a common colour,” he insisted. Increasingly bemused, my colleague tried black, white, aquamarine with cerise polka dots... all to no avail.

Eventually, his desire to sell her a product overcoming his belief in the sanctity of his company’s password protection policy, he told her, in a stage whisper, that if he said “mild red” would that be the password she had given all those years ago?

Well... No. It wouldn’t. She had to inform him that the password wasn’t a colour at all. It was the name of a cat she once owned. Mildred.

What’s the point of being phoned by a “service provider” who can’t understand or read out simple English words?

Before anyone jumps to conclusions, the reason I’m telling this tale isn’t to berate or deride call centre workers in foreign countries. This wasn’t a call from overseas. There wasn’t a language barrier. This was an English person calling from England.

I’m afraid I have a more depressing point to make. A foreign call centre worker probably wouldn’t have made that mistake.

I have been assured by a well-travelled English teacher friend that, in his opinion, the best English language tuition anywhere in the world is being given in India. They teach proper grammar, with close attention to sentence construction and great encouragement to own a wide vocabulary.

India is a huge country, of course. English teaching standards won’t be uniform across the entire nation. But what have we come to when other countries are providing better English language teaching than we are?