My bank keeps phoning me, usually at some half-baked time of the evening when the last people I want to talk to are low-rung representatives of a giant, impersonal bank. The conversation immediately gets off to a rocky start as I wait for the person on the other end of the line to connect, even though they phoned me. I hear a series of clicks and lines being re-routed or whatever those sounds are when the person on the other end is working in some giant call center and frantically realizes that somebody actually answered their call.
In reality, this is usually a good time to hang up the phone, before the actual low-rung representative gets on the line.
If you do wait for them to get their act together, you’ll be told immediately that “the call is being recorded for quality purposes and are you okay with that?” This is an extremely odd question, especially since the “quality” of every single one of these calls is always poor as far as enjoyable phone conversations go.
Also, in these days of secret surveillance and tracking, do I really want my phone calls being recorded and having that recording being kept by my bank? This is not a good opening line at all. But their next line is usually worse.
The next bit of their spiel is how, lucky for me, I’ve been selected for a credit increase, or some newfangled credit card. I wonder how this selection process works, and I wonder why they think I would consider myself lucky for being selected.
It’s like being selected for jury duty, and nobody ever feels lucky about that.
And these days, with the Bank of Canada jacking up interest rates on all credit, to try and coerce me into adding more credit to my life is like throwing a concrete block to a drowning person and claiming you were just trying to help.
This is around the time you have to hang up abruptly. I still feel a pang of guilt about this because hanging up the phone on somebody is rude. But so is cold-calling people with offers that take them one step closer to their financial destruction.
It’s moments like these you still wish you had a landline so you could slam the handset down into the cradle.
The next day in the mail, though, I get the same pitch but this time in writing. They’re nothing if not insistent, these banks, but it’s the dumb insistence of a pet that’s gotten a bit old and whose mind is now singularly fixated on getting a treat (even though you just gave them one).
That, in a nutshell, is the bank’s strategy: bug and bark and paw at people until they relent to their request just to shut them up.
Tip to banks: if you want to really help the people who prop up your debt-driven financial success, then have the good taste to do what all robbers do when they’re done robbing you, and make yourself scarce.
D’Arcy Closs lives in Greater Sudbury. A rotating stable of community members share their thoughts on anything and everything, the only criteria being that it be thought-provoking. Got something on your mind to share with readers in Greater Sudbury? Climb aboard our Soapbox and have your say. Send material or pitches to [email protected].
