Phone Monkey : The Secret Diary of a Frustrated Call Centre Worker [Kindle Edition]

Anyone who's worked in a customer facing role from receptionists to ride attendants will probably be able to tell you some funny stories of the customers they've faced and the weird situations. On the phone, I was expecting things to get even stranger with funny stories all round but instead I found something else short but still mildly amusing - the diary of someone training to be a call centre worker. While the anecdotes and some of the stories were in parts amusing I couldn't help but feel the book could be longer and the author could have waited to gain some more customer stories before putting it together into a book.

What did exist, however was amusing and anyone who's worked in an office will be able to relate to some of the people described here and their actions. Short chapters and illustrated cartoons break up the short tale into even easier manageable chunks which drags the book overall up to average after expecting much more.

This book was a freebie so hard to complain really,but it was just ok really, probably ok as a free read, doesn't take a lot of thinking about to read it, would have been disappointed if had paid for it and have had much better freebies on the kindle so I am pitching it against these. I think the long and short of this review is really that's it's just ok, nothing more, nothing less. Sorry

This book made me laugh a lot. I'm a phone monkey myself and some of the stories in the book I could definitely relate to (e.g. spending hours decorating the office under the heading "Visual Management" - I once spent around three hours cutting out snowflake shapes from bits of paper in the call centre of a bookmakers; the threat of immediate dismissal if you take a moment away from your phone or even go to the toilet too often and God help you if you ring in sick). I loved the stories about Phone Monkey's ridiculous colleagues and the customers who called up (particularly the blind woman who wanted to renew her car insurance) had me in stitches. There was an element to this that wasn't particularly well-structured and in places it was all a bit random with phone monkey stories mixed up with everything else the narrator had ever done in his entire life. There was also an element of bragging which got on my nerves a bit, but on the whole, this made me laugh more than it ticked me off. The author doesn't make any claims to literary genius with this and is quite open about the fact that it started life as Facebook posts and blog entries, but I couldn't help but feel that this would have been a better and funnier book if the author had stuck to the point a bit more and concentrated on his call centre training and subsequent calls taken. However, I liked it enough to buy the sequels and I'm looking forward to reading about Phone Monkey's next adventures.