[WillowTheWhisp]

I worked for the TSB Ian and although we were not on commission we were under a great deal of pressure to sell, sell, sell. In the days before telephone and internet banking we had this stupid device which customers had to pay £10 for which they held over the telephone mouthpiece and punched buttons on to do their banking over the phone. It looked like an overgrown calculator. You had to make an airtight seal between the end of it and the mouthpiece which was all very well if you had the old fashioned style phone like:

but totally useless if you had a trimphone because the mouthpiece was - well, er, trim!


Even those of us who had tried one at home on our bog standard phones had the dickens of a job trying to get the wretched thing to work - a bit like loading a computer program from a cassette tape, the slightest crackle on the line and the computer (which you communicated with via this thing) misinterpreted your instructions - and yet every time a customer came in with a general balance type query or a "Has my wage gone in yet?" type question we were supposed to get them to cough up a tenner for this ludicrous thing which we knew wouldn't be any use to them. If we didn't sell a set number each day we were called to account for why not. If people came in to complain that they'd got one and it didn't work we had to convince them that it was their fault, they were doing it wrong.

I hated the thing and I hated having to con people into buying one.