Surreal moments

Do you ever have moments so surreal, that you wonder if you're acting out a Little Britain sketch???

I seem to experience quite a few of these at work, and the majority of them are down to some of our global colleagues.... now before I upset the Politically Correct brigade, I'd just like to point out that I don't care where my colleagues are based, providing they give a good service, and are up to the job. Sadly, this is not often the case, which makes it incredibly difficult to refrain from agreeing with customer's when they voice their displeasure at service they've received from a call centre based overseas. In fact, I have to bite my tongue so that I don't beg for sympathy from the customers - our colleagues in the call centres have to have a higher level of linguistic skills, than the staff based in the "back offices" whom we have to interact with. I have given up counting the number of times I've asked an 'either/ or' question, and been given the answer "yes"!!!!

Yesterday, our fax machine wasn't working, and I drew the short straw for phoning the systems help desk, based overseas. After several "can you slow down please, I don't understand what you are asking me?" I gave the information that they required, only to be told that they would have to phone me back as the system they used to route the faults to the relevant departments was down, so they couldn't do anything, and they couldn't tell me when it would be back up. The department who would need to help me was also experiencing the same system problems, so they could not do any work either. I asked if they could transfer me through to that department, as they may be able to talk me through fixing the fax over the phone, and was told "computer says no"... How I didn't lose it completely, I will never know!!!