Gwasanaeth Cwsmeriaid Da

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At last: a truly uplifting customer service experience. I gave up wrestling with DHL's robots yesterday after the second consecutive failure on their part to deliver my replacement iPhone to my home; and so I phoned the Apple helpline in desperation. After an initial struggle with an AI bot - just swear at the damned things in a Brummie accent [other strong accents will do fine, but the key thing is to pile on the expletives] for long enough and the system reverts to contacting a real human. Thankfully, in this instance, not an anonymous call centre, but an actual, rather lovely woman - originally from Fife in Scotland - living on a mountainside overlooking the Corinth Canal, in Greece; would you believe. From her mountain fastness she could see from Apple Maps our very own mountain sanctuary here in Caellwyngrydd quite plainly.

What on earth DHL can see on their system is obviously another thing altogether. All I can hope is that her escalation via Apple to the courier will have the desired result. Otherwise, the credit payment will be cancelled and I'll stick with what I've got. Whatever happens, a small friendship between two, far-apart mountain-dwellers has temporarily been forged out of the morass of AI-fuelled corporate bollocks, which really can't be bad: two human beings, unknown to each other, over a thousand miles apart, making actual, conversational contact through common experience. If anything positive has come out of this to date poor customer service, it is this simple, direct, human interaction itself...

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