LIFE
Real life
Melissa Kite
BT have just put the phone down on me for
asking them to stop sending me junk mail,
which is a bit much really. I rang the cus-
tomer services number to ask if they would
please unsubscribe me from all the emails
they’ve been sending since I became a wifi
customer of theirs. ‘You’re driving me mad
with these emails,’ I explained, and truly I
was at the end of my tether.
Every day, the same message arrives in
my inbox, warning me I have only days left
to take advantage of a special offer on BT
Sport. I wouldn’t mind but one of the things
I spent countless precious hours of my exist-
ence explaining to BT when I took out wifi
was that on no account did I want BT Sport.
I’ve tried to unsubscribe from the emails but
all that happens when I select the unsub-
scribe option is that I am redirected to a
page bearing a short paragraph that, if it
is a way to unsubscribe, is surely the most
impenetrable way that proposition has ever
been worded. This is it, word for word:
‘Contact BT. Email is the quickest and
most environmentally friendly way to keep
up to date with BT’s latest news and offers.
We’d love to continue contacting you by
email, but feel free to unsubscribe here if
you wish. Email address.....................
If you are a BT customer and just want to
change your contact email address please
visit https://home.bt.com/login/loginform.
Submit.’
That’s it. All you can conceivably do is
enter your email. But as they already have
my email, and what I’m trying to achieve is
them not having my email, how does enter-
ing my email achieve un-entering my email?
You can click the submit button withoutentering your email, but if you do all it says
is ‘Please tell us your email address.’ ‘But you
already have my email address, you fiends!
That’s why I’m angry!’ I scream at the screen.
Not wanting to enter my email again, and
make the seventh circle of junk-mail hell
even worse, I decided to ring customer ser-
vices. I suppose I expected a mild apology.
But the chap on the other end of the
phone — in Swansea — took umbrage.
‘That’s nothing to do with us,’ he snapped.
‘How can emails from BT asking me to
sign up for BT Sport be nothing to do with
BT?’ I asked, hardly believing that those
words were having to come out of me as
they came out of me.
‘I don’t know who they’re from,’ he said.
‘They’re not from us.’ And he went on and
on about how he had no way of stopping
emails that were nothing personally to do
with him.
‘I’m not saying you personally sent these
emails!’ I said, my voice getting on for a
squawk. He then gave me the old ‘calm
down or I won’t help you at all’ routine.
‘Look, I’m cross because you’ve done some-
thing wrong,’ I said. ‘This is another prob-
lem. You wind your customers up then tell
us we’re the problem when we get angry.’
‘Well, I’m just trying to help.’ No, you’re
not. ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I took out BT wifi,
I gave you my money, and all you’ve done
ever since is send me an email a day asking
me for more money. So if they don’t stop I’ll
have to terminate my account.’
He told me to hold the line while he got a
supervisor. A very short time later, barely a
minute, he came back and informed me that
his colleague had successfully unsubscribed
me from all BT marketing emails.
Oh, so when you said you can’t make
them stop what you meant was you can
make them stop in 30 seconds, I didn’t say.
‘Out of curiosity, before I go, tell me what
it was I should have done on that unsub-
scribe page.’
‘You press the unsubscribe button and it
unsubscribes...’ ‘No, ’ I said. ‘You can’t press
a button...’
‘You’re not listening!’ he shouted, and
then he went off on one, yelling down the
phone about me not paying attention. ‘You
need to calm down,’ I said. There was a gasp,
a barely audible retort. ‘You (something or
other)...’ And a click, as the phone went
down. The usual questionnaire was texted
to my phone 15 minutes later.
‘Hello, BT here. You spoke to our advi-
sor. What did you think?’
‘Well, I rang to complain, he told me to
calm down, shouted at me, then, when I told
him to calm down, he put the phone down
on me,’ I texted back.
‘Thank you for taking part in our survey.
Your feedback will help us to continually
improve.’ Of course it will. And I’ll get no
more junk mail. And the world will live as
one.Subscribe to The Spectator
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spectator.co.uk/podcastPODCASTWRITERS WORTH
LISTENING TOa foot on the first rung of the ladder. Was I
married, she said? Sadly not, I said. Was she
married? ‘No. Single,’ she said.
The Xanax had made me ravenous. Joy
talked about her work and her famous cli-
ents and her ambition while I gulped down
the spicy food. ‘Eat!’ she said, maternally
shovelling another heap of whatever it was
on to my plate. ‘Do you like the music?’ she
said. The music was a repetitive saxophone
melody with a sort of spaced-out funk
background. If I had said not, no doubt she
would have conferred with the manager and
had it changed. I did like it, however, and
said so. In fact, I was listening to it, repet-
itive as it was, rather than to her. She did
not like it, she said. It was bloody awful. She
said ‘bloody awful’ in a posh British accent.
‘Do you like my accent?’ she said. ‘I am
funny, aren’t I? Everyone laughs so much
when I do my funny accents. Oh, you will
see how funny I am. All my clients say I am
so funny. Eat!’ I gobbled faster. ‘You have
never been married?’ she said, sceptically.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You have girlfriend?’ ‘Many,’
I said. ‘Oh,’ she said, and for a moment she
looked crestfallen.
The Donald Trump election
campaign baseball hat was too
precious to wear, she said