Baffled

[channonyarrow]

So Cingular calls me and asks me if they can speak to "Mr or Mrs channonyarrow." Already going "bwuh?" I say that I'm speaking. (What the hell, I owe them a lot of money.) They ask me to verify my last four digits of my social for them.

Wait, what? YOU call ME and want ME to VERIFY THAT I AM WHO I AM?

Asking why causes the blowup doll on the other end of the line to explode.

I did not, and I should have, ask HER to verify who SHE is.

But apparently she can't tell me what the call's about - beyond that it's a thank you call - without knowing that I am who I say I am. Jesus fuck, I answered the phone and it's not like you're saying you want to discuss my account, right?

WHY DO I HAVE TO PROVE WHO I AM SO THAT YOU CAN THANK ME FOR SOMETHING THAT I DID NOT DO?

So I hung up on her.

I think I need a new service provider.

Comments

i deal with this every day

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

When I call people from work (I work in collections) we have to verify people before we can discuss the account with them. There are major privacy laws in Canada that dictate that if I tell somebody something confidential about your account - and in Canada even whether or not you have an account is confidential - I go to jail and the bank gets sued.

And people do lie about these things. Why, I don't know, but it does happen fairly regularly.

So if you owe them money, that may have been the reason for the phone call. What she should have done was give you a phone number where you could call back and verify that you were speaking to the company before giving her any personal info.

Re: i deal with this every day

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

But she said it was a thank you call, rather than an account information call - I got that much out of her before I ended it. If it had been a call about my account, I'm down to give my info, and I would insist on being able to call them back to verify that it was who it was.

They need my account number to tell someone thank you? So what if it wasn't me? Make someone's day a little better and tell them thank you, for all I care - it didn't sound like she was going to discuss the actual account, for god's sake. Just thank the person for whatever you're thanking them for, and get off the damn phone.