Sunday 1st June 2008

I participated in a telephone survey for the Student Loans Company this evening. It was a little confusing: the number wasn’t one I recognised, and the junk callers seem to have become a lot more slick since the last time I received a junk ’phone call. The mild-mannered Scottish woman on the other end of the ’phone was asking me questions before I’d really realised who she was, where she was calling from, or what her voice was doing in my ear.

It was evidently in response to the recent sending round of loan statements. In each, there was a leaflet included helpfully entitled ‘explaining this loan statement’ (I thought it was pretty simple—you owe us a humongous sum of cash), with ‘we want to help’ written beneath (you could always try writing off my debt? Or at least stop charging me interest). Had this leaflet improved my customer experience, and did I now think the bastards charging me for my education which until fairly recently would have been free were amazing, approachable bastions of corporate responsibility?

In one section, I had to give ratings from one to ten to quantify how well I thought a certain adjective fitted the SLC. ‘Bureaucratic?’ ’10.’ ‘Efficient?’ ‘1.’ You know, that kind of thing. The questions weren’t too bad. It was definitely easier than finals.

But then, the meek Scotch girl on the blower asked me to rate the SLC on ‘flick’. ‘Sorry?’ I asked. ‘Flick,’ she repeated. This happened a couple of times. The line wasn’t great, and single-syllable words are hard to understand in Scottish because, north of the border, they’ve only really got one vowel sound, which is variants on the letter i. Try saying ‘flick, flack, fleck, fluck’ in a Scottish accent. They’re all identical. It’s like talking to a Gatling gun.

‘Can you spell it for me?’ I asked. ‘Eff, el, aiii, see, keigh,’ she responded, all Scottish. It’s supposed to be one of the sexier ’phone accents, and the sounds of letters tripping nonchalantly off her luscious tongue more than the staccato repetition of ‘flick’ was starting to convince me of this fact. I seriously considered asking her to spell a few more words. ‘You wouldn’t mind spelling “antidisestablishmentarianism” for me, would you, love? How’s about your ’phone number?’

I settled instead for a brief confused pause, followed by ‘I have absolutely no idea what that adjective means in this context.’

‘Neither do I,’ she admitted, in a flirtatious act of deference, ‘I’ll put that as a “don’t know” then, shall I?’

I wondered if ‘flick’ might be a cool word which I, not being so hot on cool, might have missed. So I tried a few people I know who are cool, from various different locales (including a Scottish bloke), and firmly established that ‘flick’ was either a noun, which described the act of propelling ink from the tip of a fountain pen, or a verb, which you repeatedly wrote out you wouldn’t do again during a detention for the former.

The only remaining possibilities are that it was a really horrendously misguided attempt by the SLC to get down with the kids, to the point at which their cool word didn’t even exist, or that it was a special test to make sure you were paying attention during the ’phone survey (anyone who gives the nonexistent word a numerical rating is obviously an idiot). Well, wily SLC survey-writing man, I passed your little, so-called ‘test’. Does my loan get written off now?

 

Comments

  1. Tom says (12:54 26/10/2008)

    I'm jealous that they called you. I tried to tell them I was back in the country in August, and they gave me the number for the 'repayments line' which automatically hung up on me after saying I was going to be put on hold, no matter how many times I tried.

    Working weekdays meant I didn't get round to trying again for a month or two, when I advised a (perhaps identical) Scottish lady that I was back in the country, and I'd had trouble getting through. She said that was no problem. A week later (9th October) I got a letter reading "You advised us that you would be returning to the UK on 18 August 2008", which was completely true. I had told them that some 6 months previous in a letter sent from the Great Abroad. Why couldn't they make it easy, and check if I was lying automatically?

    The letter also says I must prove how I'm supporting my new incomeless life and that if I fail to provide the information, I'm liable for a penalty of up to £150. Perhaps if they take that in 26p chunks once a month too, that wouldn't be so bad, but I do find it rather cheeky.

    Oh, and *how* do I prove how I'm supporting myself? They tell me I must refer to the 'enclosed leaflet' about it. Except there wasn't one, and there's nothing on their website.

    I'd give them a 9 for flick, just because it sounds bad. If they could like, um, re-halve their interest rates, that'd get them an 8.

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