As well a spending a couple of years in Technical Support, I also spent a couple of years working the claims line for an insurance company. Like a lot of call centres, there was a huge turnover of staff. There was hardly a week when there wasn’t someone leaving. For most people, their last day consists of taking no calls and just hanging around until lunch time. But that wasn’t good enough for Pat. No, Pat had to go out with a bang.
Being a known bit of a messer and up for anything, one of the girls bet him that he couldn’t work the word “cabbage” into a call. Now being an insurance claim line means that the subject of cabbages doesn’t come up all that often. So this was going to be interesting. Their were a couple of side bets going on trying to guess how Pat would work “cabbage” into the conversation. Among them were:
Isn’t the weather terrible? It’s playing havoc with my cabbage growing endeavours.
I was just about to go for lunch. There’s bacon and cabbage on the menu. I love bacon and cabbage. Don’t you?
No-one was prepared for what he actually did:
Good afternoon. My name is Pat. How can I help you? Cabbage.
And it went on:
I understand that you’ve lost a large amount of money, but your cabbage policy will only cover x amount.
And on:
Yes, your cabbage cheque is in the post. You should have it in a couple of days…..cabbage.
The original bet was for Pat to work “cabbage” into just one call. He was obviously having fun, because he did it for the entire day. One moment he’d be having a perfectly normal conversation and suddenly mid-sentence he throw in the word “cabbage”.
The strange thing is that even though he did this over the course of 60 or 70 calls, not once did a caller pull him on it. Either they didn’t hear him, or their brains told them that there was no way that they’d actually heard the word “cabbage”. As the day progressed, more of the team heard about Pat’s running joke and people were calling by just to listen to him. So on his last day, Pat ended up taking more calls than anyone else. And all because of cabbage.