Come back People On Phones, all is forgiven

There was a time when a consumer who had a problem with a product or service would pick up the phone and ring the company. The call-handler would then sympathetically deal with your complaint and leave you feeling marginally better than when you started.
Then Customer Services branched out into two different directions. On one hand was the recorded voice giving you a list of increasingly bewildering options that ended with the words: “To hear these options again, press One”. It was like one of those convoluted Eleven Plus questions: “John has a problem with his internet connection but not his email service. Mabel is a new customer with an issue with her email service and who doesn’t have Broadband. Sam is an existing customer who can’t connect at all. Which customer is the most disgruntled?”
The other innovation was the Indian Call Centre. This involved someone completely remote from you and your business attempting to solve your problems from a script. Cultural differences made this unsatisfactory; people in Indian call centres are often too polite for us British and don’t always understand our quips.
The other day I was introduced to a new refinement of customer services torture: the Indian Instant Messaging Complaint Service. A little dialogue box popped up and said: “Hello. I’m Jasmin. How can I help you today?” My problem was that Jasmin’s company had sold me a Broadband acceleration package, the latest version of which had immobilised all my browsers. So I wanted to find out how to dump the new version and reinstate the old. It took 90 excruciating minutes. She was obviously using cut and paste to fix the problem and whenever I asked a question that was “off script” she simply ignored it. After asking fruitlessly: “Can I have the old version back?” and “How can I reinstate the original version?” I became more than a little annoyed and ranted: “WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME HOW TO REINSTALL THE OLD VERSION??” I was interested to note that after another 10 minutes she sloughed off her innate courtesy and ranted back, also in capitals. But when the problem was eventually fixed and all inhibitions now gone I typed: “It worked! YIPPEEE!” She regained her formality and replied: "Is there anything else I can help you with today, madam?” I nearly replied LOL but it seemed inappropriate.