I decided to phone Sky yesterday.

There was no particular reason other than my annoyance at paying for a service that provides a cart load of stuff that is useless to me.  Herself rarely if ever watches their films which all seem to be aimed at the brain dead, such as Superheroes, Zombies [confirming their brain dead status], Horrors or Teenage RomComs.  In other words they are a steaming pile of dung and make no allowance for those of us with a discerning nature.

So I went into Sky’s website to look for a contact number.  There wasn’t one.  Their support consists of a menu thing where you drill down through a series of menus until you eventually end up with a series of FAQs, none of which are any help.  Leastwise I never found the FAQ that asked “What are you going to do about those of us who dislike the utter shite you call Premiers?”

I eventually decided to try their Messenger service so I clicked on the link.  That brought me into Farcebook [yech!] where the little chat thing informed me that Carlos [or Carlo] would be my assistant, but that he was busy and would get back to me in half an hour or so.

So I left Carlos [or Carlo] to finish off his game of “Call of Duty” or whatever and I went about my business.

Now I am not that fond of Messenger or any of those Chat things unless I’m in touch with a friend, and Carlos [or Carlo] hadn’t graduated to that status yet.  One of the things I find frustrating is that while I am typing stuff in, I keep getting repeat messages asking if I’m still there.  I can’t help it if I’m a slow typist?

Anyway, it occurred to me that I had a series of questions and comments that I wanted to put to Carlos [or Carlo] so I opened a text editor and spent the half hour writing long paragraphs explaining precisely my stance on their crappy service.  I even predicted the first question which would be “How may I help you?” so my first paragraph started of with “Hello Carlo [or Carlos] and thank you for helping me.  Here is my problem……“.  I like to add a touch of politeness at the outset.

It’s amazing how much I can type in half an hour and it afforded me a chance to be precise and eloquent in my messages.  I had them all sequenced by predicting in advance what his answers to all by questions would be.

Sure enough, after half an hour or so a message popped up – “Hello.  My name is Carlo [or Carlos].  How may I help you?”.  I scrolled to the top of my text editor and there was my first paragraph that I wanted to send, knowing that Carlo [or Carlos] should be impressed with my speed of response.  I pasted into Messenger and pressed Enter.  The fucking thing scrolled like mad and I realised I had accidentally copied my entire opus and had sent it all at once.  Woops!

It took a while for him to read it all and to get over the shock of my typing skills but eventually I got a response – “Thank you for your comment. I suggest you contact our Customer Loyalty Department” and he gave me a phone number. He was probably too shaken to deal with me any more and probably needed a stiff whiskey.

I rang the number and got onto a girl.  She seemed to be devoid of personality or sense of humour, but I did finally get her to knock around €30 off my monthly bill which wasn’t too bad.

I hope Carlo [or Carlos] got over his shock and didn’t need a transfer to the phones.

Sorry Carlo [or was it Carlos?].