Slip of the Tongue

I felt by turns amused and sympathetic towards someone I dealt with on the phone this week.

I’d called the phone-banking service (which is usually very good, in contrast to their utterly shit branches) for my bank, RBS, to find out the benefits (or lack thereof) in downgrading my account from their ‘premier’ current account (where I use very few of the services) to their more run-of-the-mill current account that has most of the benefits I actually use, and costs half as much.

I called phone banking because their website doesn’t actually have a ‘compare accounts’ function, and so I figured that the people in phone banking might have more information to hand about this kind of thing.

Only, as it turned out, they don’t. So the poor guy was printing out various screenshots, and trying to compare them. (I only realised this afterwards, or I’d have told him not to worry) However, he’d forgotten to put me on hold, so the amusement came when I heard a bunch of papers go flying, followed by (in a Scottish accent

Och, fer fucks sake, this is crap. Fuckin’ thing

At which I laughed out loud, and he was quite shocked that he hadn’t put me properly on hold. Poor guy – I had no problem with the swearing, but I know that if the call was recorded, he’s going to be deep in the shit. I did make a point of saying in the call that I had absolutely no problem with it, but I know that won’t fix anything with his superiors.