Pick up lines: it's a laugh a minute at the call centre. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
Has the voice at the end of the phone ever made you want to scream? Do you feel customer service in Britain is taking the piss? Well, here comes the proof - it is.
According to one of those threadbare polls that are commissioned when someone (MSN, in this instance) has something to sell (clips of stand-up Ed Byrne in action), "UK workers spend 24 working days a year in stitches". And the biggest laughers work in customer services. It says here that 63% of them "enjoy a good chuckle at their customers' expense". Well, ha ha ha - as I wasn't saying on tax return day when the man at my telephone bank professed never to have heard of the Inland Revenue.
Forgive me if I take some of the conclusions of this "poll" with a pinch of salt. The results are gleaned from interviews with a whopping 1,000 respondents, says MSN, which boasts 465 million users worldwide. The pollster is ICM Research, which has previously informed a dumbstruck public that "fewer households in the UK own bibles than was the case 50 years ago" and that "9% of men and 8% of women say that volunteer work has improved their sex life".
In the latest pseudoscientific show of hands, we're being told that UK workers spend an average of 45 minutes each day having "a good giggle". Women laugh more in the workplace than men. The young laugh more than the old. The leisure industry is more mirthful than the offices of accountants and advertisers, and the Midlands is more fun than the south-east. (If you share a desk with a 17-year-old female swimming pool attendant from Leicester, don't expect to get any work done.)
But there are dark smudges across MSN's portrait of quotidian British gaiety. First is the strain of the effort to equate laughter at work with general happiness: "for those seeking enjoyment at work, a career in customer services and hospitality or travel offers the most enjoyment" (sic).
In fact, the survey tells another story - of a country where laughter in the workplace is at best provisional, at worst, a cri de coeur from deep in the Stygian abyss.
"One in seven UK workers barely even summons up a smile at work" - ho ho! "Over half of Brits are too busy at work to stop for a laughter break" - hee hee! "One in four claim that their boss won't tolerate laughter in the office" - chortle! "One in five are too unhappy in their jobs to find anything to laugh at while at work." Guffaw? I nearly slit my wrists.
It's sweet to think that genial Irishman Ed Byrne might help. But what use a sticking plaster when the patient's heart is bleeding on the office floor? As those subversives at MSN clearly intend to suggest, if your life is so boring that you choose to answer the telephone to ICM Research, or to download three-minute clips of whimsical observational comics just to get through the day, you really ought to stop giggling and get yourself a more exciting job.
