Telstra’s Escort Service

We had a problem with our phone bill this month – Telstra had charged us $17 extra, so we called them up to complain.

Anyone who lives in Australia and has ever called Telstra will have encountered their calling system; one of those voice-recognition thingies, where instead of giving you options to “Dial 1 for faults, Dial 2 for billing, etc” it has a computer generated voice that asks you to tell it what you’re calling about, which it then tries to interpret.

It’s hugely frustrating. I can never manage to get this computer to understand me, and this time, after talking to it for a few minutes, I lost my patience and screamed into the phone (knowing that I’m talking to a computer who wont take offence) “I JUST WANT TO SPEAK TO A @#$%ING PERSON %$&#$!!!!”

To my shock, this actually worked, and we were immediately connected!

A woman at the customer service centre took the call, Purple explained the problem to her, and she replied that she needed to put us through to another consultant to handle the problem.

The phone clicked, and rang again, and was answered not by another Telstra representative (I assume) but by a perky woman’s voice on an answering machine, saying:

“Thank you for calling Sydney’s Hottest Escort Service, we are unable to take your call right now, so please leave your name and number and we’ll get right back to you”

Thank you Telstra!