Dear talisman (CJ in drag) we can always rely on you to 'sniff out a racist' can't we :)

"Yeah, I have noticed the extreme increase in my energy bills compared to last year. So have we all."

It might interest you to know that I've been slugged HEAPS more in my electricity bill as well..and when I recommend Hasbeen giving hell I'm talking about the COMPANIES... the skin color of the 'meter reader' is irrelevant, because with our new SMART meters they will be redundant and unemployed.

Remember? SMART meters=>Greens=>Landis and Gyr=>Kathy Zoi=> Al Gore and his Demobrat/Green socialist alliance.

Now that I've fixed your head.. please remain fixed for at least a few weeks...k?

I suggest he get a front bench position with the current Government. He would certainly fit in.

Not quite so fast Talisman.

To start with I was left in no doubt that "the electricity company" would not be able to sack this bloke, due to his ethnicity. This was one area of my complaint. If employees are lying on their reports, they should be sacked.

Secondly, I have Tinnitus. It's a damn nuisance. I can not decipher one voice from a number of voices, or from background music in badly produced movies or TV.

I also have great difficulty deciphering words from heavily accented speech. As an Ozzie, who has payed their taxes for a great number of years, I should not be made uncomfortable in my own home. I stop doing business, where ever possible, with companies who put me in this situation. The public face of any company should have adequate English to do their job, to the satisfaction of the customer.

I have closed my account with an oil company, & a phone company, when I found myself connected to overseas call centers. I refuse to struggle with their accents. If enough of us did this, the jobs might come back to Oz.

The fact that the same meter reader will continue to read my meter, no matter which company I have my account with, does not help with my annoyance, at lousy service, & lousy government policy.

I can understand why someone might start
a discussion about inflated electricity bills.
As Johnny Rotten says, we're all experiencing
that.

I can also understand why someone would be
upset at catching a meter reader out in falsifying
his meter reading. That is quite a serious allegation
and I'm surprised that the electricity company
didn't take it seriously.

I can even understand (at a stretch) how if you
have the misfortune to suffer tinnitus then you
could find people's foreign accents annoying.
But in this case we are told that the person who
dealt with Hasbeen's complaint was understandable
("unlike Telecom call centre staff"). I'm not sure
what the relevance is of the meter reader's "very
poor English", given that on his own account Hasbeen
didn't actually speak to the man.

What I don't understand at all is what possible
relevance the man's "dark skin" or the Equal
Opportunity Commission have to Hasbeen's complaint
about his power bill.

On the other hand, I'm not at all surprised that
ALGORE responded so well to the dog whistle,
and also can find support in Hasbeen's story
for his Socialist uber conspiracy theory.

You are so gullible, Hasbeen.

>>To start with I was left in no doubt that "the electricity company" would not be able to sack this bloke, due to his ethnicity.<<

She's a call-centre jockey.

She does not make company policy.

What she was doing, of course, was softening you up.

She did this in your case by pandering to the prejudices you had clearly displayed in your complaint. It is a well known technique, used by many of the smarter operators, where they pretend to take your viewpoint as their own. This is quite a disarmimg ploy for many people, and allows the call-centre chick to close off the call in the shortest possible time. Which is, after all, how they are measured, and earn their pay.

By the way...

>>Something told me this was one of those calls NOT being taped for "training" purposes.<<

Thing is, there is no way the call-centre droid could know whether it was, or it was not, being recorded. It is agreed when they take the job, as part of their terms and conditions of employment, that they would be listened to without prior notice.

Nice rant, though. I'm sure it felt a lot better, getting that off your chest. I'm only surprised you didn't describe him in more, errr... forceful terms, than merely a "little dark skinned man, who I later found has very poor English"

Showed immense restraint on your part. Well done.

"little dark skinned man, who I later found has very poor English"
if this individual had dark complexion & was challenged in height then as what on earth else could Hasbeen have described him ??
Before this idiotic diversion by Talisman & that Rotten character the point was an incompetent employee not reading the meter & then making a false statement resulting in an excessive bill. Can I say bill or should it be a william ?