On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:20:55 +0000, Paul wrote:
[ overseas call centres ]
They are *awful*. As soon as I get the "sounds as though he's on
Mars" line quality, the poor English, the accent, and the background
noise, I say "can you tell me where you're speaking from please?" If
it's other than the UK, I hang up.

If enough of us do this there will no longer *be* any overseas call
centres, and a good thing too.

Will there though? If there's no alternative - i.e. every company operates
an overseas call centre - then consumers have the choice of phoning
overseas (cheap for the company) or not phoning at all (even cheaper for
the company).

I suspect that the root cause of everything bad is that, as a species,
humans are far too greedy. Unfortunately there's no way of changing that,
so I expect that we're ultimately screwed :-)

Business owners are greedy and want to make as much profit as possible.
Consumers are greedy and want to spend as little as possible. It's a trend
which seems to be getting steadily worse, but even if it could be reversed
I don't think it's something that can ever be eliminated.