World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.