I’ve been catching up with more old contacts in the outsourcing world and all the old bounders are decidedly perky. While business owners are shedding backside bricks in their silvery wake, there are only tears of joy for many managers.

Furloughed but earning to the max. Absolutely creaming it. The scams are vanilla, even wafer-thin, but the risk of being rumbled, and then crumbled, is practically zero.

It’s cake and eat it time.

You see, there’s always a silver lining with a crisis cloud. Everybody just wants to get through to the other side and few pertinent questions get posed. People are too busy getting their own houses in order than worrying about what may or may not have gone down.

And meanwhile, the Job Retention Scheme is being furiously banged by every rogue on the manor.

One of the cads could hardly contain his merriment. Whether he’ll have a longer-term role is anyone’s guess. However, as soon as the beano is over, it will be either back to the office or the trousering of a redundancy payment. Even with the latter, at least the 4 or 5 months following any re-start will be secure. Given the known precariousness of the outsourcing space, it’s coveted reassurance in any circumstances that you’ll have your dues buttered until the end of the year.

And if he does evade the chop, coronavirus will be offering up a juicy black hole for all his business corpses to be shovelled in and entombed forevermore. Spectacularly bombed service levels, abysmal resource planning atrocities, and the mounting customer queries which had nestled into unchartered inboxes to see out their days unmolested by unqualified hands. All these artefacts of failing operations are destined for a woomphing sweeperoo under the coronacarpet. A timely reset to zero on all extant steaming failures and omissions.

Happy days, and not just for him. They’re all going to be at it.

In the meantime, should any deluded soul have the temerity to belch up a grievance, the courteous riposte will centre on references to ‘understandable confusion’ and that old scoundrel ‘inevitability’. But there won’t be too many customers and clients kicking off.

Only a tsunami of understanding awaits.

We’re all in this together, are we not? To adopt any other position would suggest that we’re not rowing in the same direction during a national crisis, and that kind of position garners only censure.

And at all costs, all parties will be assiduously seeking to avoid the most heinous badge of shame – that they are not supporting the NHS. Once appropriated, commercial crooks will wield that one with impunity until the paint flakes off in order to swat away any ambitious flies that are circling their particular turd.

Digging a crisis-harrowed shallow grave has always been the chosen path for a spot of emergency business boomeranging. Back in the day when a commercial disaster precipitated customer meltdowns and insurmountable enquiry volumes, outsourcing contact centre managers would be cracking open the champagne. Well, metaphorically at least, unless they worked on an online shopping account and were caning the customer goodwill vouchers. In which case, they glugged the real McCoy, gratis.

It was a get out of jail free card for all the corner-cutting, swindling, and abject loafing of preceding months. A diversionary godsend to steer the grim service chickens away from the roost of a damned harsh and vigorous shoeing.

The bug will prove to be angel dust for the lower-level journeymen. A hall pass for a good rest and a clean slate.

Let them eat cake.

unsplash-logoNathan Bingle