A cautionary tale of a credit card, 50 quid and a call centre smart ass

THE voice on the phone asked if I was me.

I confessed to being me. As the voice continued, I realised it was from a call centre.

Because I have trained many people working in call centres, I warmed up immediately. Call centres have fast staff turnover, mainly because the work is hell. Some tasks are worse than others. Cold calling comes up at the top of the horror scale. Next in line comes trying to fix people’s computer problems by remote control, closely followed by trying to help customers whose satellite televisions have stopped dead, which they usually do just before the final kick in injury time or the last putt of a major golf tournament.

The gentleman on the phone told me he worked for Diners Club. My account was in arrears. It couldn’t be, I told him. I rarely use the card, knew when I had used it last, and had sent a cheque to cover the amount, which, if I remembered rightly, was around €56. The call centre man’s voice took on a sneering tone – the “Oh, yeah, the cheque’s in the post line” tone. The account was overdrawn, he repeated, and what did I propose to do about it?

Right there was when warm, cuddly and compliant ground to a halt. I told him it was bloody outrageous to ring someone on their private line over a sum like €56, that a cheque had already issued and that this conversation ended right now. Dumping the phone, I searched for the chequebook. Yep. There was the slip, neatly filled in. Another phone call distracted me and I answered it without checking who it was from.

Mr Call Centre was back, sarcastically noting that the earlier call had been disconnected. Too true, I told him, because our conversation had ended.

“Oh, do you have anger issues?” was his next question/sneer.

End of call. Sometimes, when your anger issues flare up, the best option is that little red icon that finishes a conversation right there, right then.

I was kind of disappointed when he didn’t have another go, because I’d have had the kick of telling him that what he was doing amounted to harassment and telephone stalking and that if he kept it up I would report him to the gardaí. I’m not sure the gardaí would be that interested in an overseas call centre dunning me for €56, given their problems with lads like David Drumm who are being dunned for €8.5 million, but you never know.

The paradox of this aggressive debt-collection, of course, is that Diners Club started, in 1949, because a man named Frank McNamara was embarrassed in a restaurant when it came to paying the bill, having left his wallet at home. (His wife saved the family honour by paying for the meal.) The Diners Club website records Frank resolving never to face this embarrassment again, and goes on to describe him pitching up in the same restaurant some time later and paying by the first credit card, invented by himself.

Now, apart from the tackiness of the company’s ho ho ho claim that this has gone down in industry history as “The First Supper”, the entire story begs the question of how, precisely, Frank’s invention of the credit card guaranteed that he’d never again be embarrassed in a restaurant as a result of leaving his wallet in his other suit. Most men carry their credit cards in a wallet, so the danger of leaving it at home – credit cards and all – would seem to present an ever-present threat to their equanimity.

That aside, our friend Frank invented a key product of the financial services industry, much copied and greatly improved upon by other suppliers, once they cottoned on that this was a fantastic money-spinner.

Twenty or more years ago, I was persuaded to carry a Diners Club card. It proved to be an almost complete waste of time and money. Instead of paying off a little of the debt and paying interest on the rest, the rule seemed to be that a card carrier had to pay off all of the debt each month. But that was minor, compared to the other problems presented by the card. Whenever they sent a new one, I hoped it would do what none of the previous cards had done: be recognised by an ATM or work when a retailer swiped it. That never happened, although its failure to swipe was not as much of a disadvantage as might be expected. Most retailers saved themselves the hassle by not accepting it in the first place. Over time, I realised that, outside of Dillards (a Florida department store with a great shoe department) and Barnes & Noble, the bookstore, it was simpler not to bother trying the Diners Club card elsewhere. If you proffered it, the retailer would examine it, check what they were authorised to accept, and hand it back.

Some of them behaved as if the silver card was weird but oddly pleasing, like a financial services duck-billed platypus. Others took to the high moral ground, as if you were trying to pull a fast one.

The end result was that, over two decades, I never ran up any debt that would have frightened their computer into singing “Daisy, Daisy” like HAL does in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was a pretty damn perfect customer, although they didn’t seem to notice. They never sent me letters of appreciation like American Express; lovely enthusiastic personal missives telling me my long service to Amex was much valued and that they were chuffed to have such a long-standing stable relationship with me. (Admittedly, they sent these heart-warming notes to Mr Terry Prone, but I didn’t hold that against them.)

Nor did Diners Club do what MasterCard did: have a heart attack when someone in Seattle bought skis, climbing boots and a weekend at a spa on my card. Within a matter of hours, their computer had worked out that either I had lost my marbles – since the nearest I get to exercise is sneezing and I get panicky at the very idea of hot stones being put down my back – or that my identity had been stolen. (It turned out to be the latter, fair dues to them for quick action.)

Me and Diners Club just jogged along. Until they decided to hound me over fifty quid (the administration and phone calls undoubtedly cost them more than I owed them), set a call centre smart ass on me, and I ensured I closed my account.

When I mentioned this to others, I found that some financial institutions, pursuing multiples of fifty quid, resort to punishing persistence only when half a dozen other methods have failed, while others seem to think that blood can be squeezed out of a stone if you torment the stone often enough. Customers harassed this way should contact the Financial Ombudsman.

Meanwhile, I’ve sent Diners Club another cheque (with a note about the number and date of issuance of the first), their useless card, cut into several pieces and a compliment slip suggesting they might read today’s Irish Examiner.

Anger issues? Moi?