Next month: June 2006
So I duly phoned back this morning, only to be greeted by what can only be described as a "bolshie" Camelot employee. She first of all (wrongly) insisted - multiple times - that the UK winners info was on the Website, so it took a lot of persuading that it actually wasn't (the issue wasn't clear this week because there was one UK jackpot winner - equalling the number of European winners - plus having a "No of winners" column rather than "All winners" or "No of European winners" doesn't help either).
Anyway, she scampered off and came back with the figures, which she read off fairly quickly (I suspected she wanted to get off the phone ASAP and no, she didn't apologise for leaving me on hold for over 2 minutes or for being wrong about the Web site not having UK winners info) and then she asked why I wanted the figures. I told her that I ran the #2 UK lottery site and was about to tell her that they used to have the figures I'd asked for on the official site when she interrupted me with "are you Richard Lloyd?", to which I replied "yes". She then amazingly accused me of being a scammer: "You're the person who gives out information that tells people they've won?"! Yes, those were her exact words - quite shocking and somewhat unprofessional, IMHO.
I started to explain "That's scammers using my name..." and she interrupted me again with "...I'm not interested to be quite honest." - which begs the question why she started the conversation thread herself and then twice interrupted me - and I decided to end the phone conversation there (being polite and saying "thanks for the info then...bye"). Quite a staggering conversation really and the first time in 11.5 years of phoning Camelot for info that I've been accused of being a scammer!
Previous month: April 2006