With the economy thriving and high street spending reaching astronomical levels, news reaches Guru this week of an innovative customer-focused response tool that should further enhance your corporate social responsibility reputation with the hoi polloi.
Customers of a major cable TV supplier were hit with a veritable volley of verbal abuse after a company service message was tampered with.
Those ringing the helpline to report faults with equipment or services were given a less than helpful reply by the automated message.
It started off normally enough, stating, helpfully, that: “You are through to customer services.”
But then it changed somewhat in tone: “We don’t give a **** about you. We are never here. We just **** you about, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just **** off and leave us alone.”
The company says that either an angry employee or mischievous hacker may have been responsible for the prank and that it has updated the message to something less confrontational.
But Guru wonders why.
Surely the company’s frankness in telling its customers what it really thinks about them is refreshing and something to be cherished?
Guru wholeheartedly encourages all disciples out there to invest heavily in this new direction of customer anti-care.
After all, don’t they say that honesty is the best policy?
Dung-ho teacher causes a real stink
News just in from southern India: the education authorities have suspended a teacher after he reportedly forced his students to eat cow dung.
The teacher, a Mr Basavarajappa, apparently got a little upset when his students laughed after he fell off a chair while sleeping in the classroom.
So he did what anyone in that position would do – he asked a student to bring cow dung into the classroom and made the pupils eat it. This happened on four occasions.
Naturally, parents wondered why their children weren’t too keen on going back to classes.
When school management failed to act on the complaints, the parents told education officials who then ordered the teacher’s suspension.
Now it may not be the most popular idea, but Guru thinks Basavarajappa was on the right track. With UK education standards falling and children getting brasher and ruder by the day, the risk of a little poo-chomping may be just the thing to get this country back on track.
It would be cheaper and probably more nutritious than school dinners anyway.
Romanian woman loses the plot
Guru is a fan of free enterprise (well, it beats working), but a woman in Romania may have, he suggests, taken the concept a bit too far.
Reports say that she upset her dead husband’s family by digging up his body and selling the grave. The woman, from Cristesti, Mures county, said she needed money.
But to sell the plot, the woman had to remove her husband’s remains. It’s believed she dumped them close to the cemetery.
She told Adevarul newspaper: “Did I do anything wrong? Was that a crime? I don’t think so. I only dug him out and sold the grave because he was my husband – mine. I lived with him for 20 years and not his family.”
The man’s relatives recovered the remains and say they intend to re-bury them in a different cemetery.
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The woman is believed to have previously asked her husband if he could sell everything he owned to raise money, but he had replied: “Over my dead body.”
Naturally, she took this a bit too literally.
