1. Call center calls are pretty much ALWAYS recorded and retained at least for however many years might be relevant in potential lawsuits' statutes of limitations. Many workers have time-to-resolution or number of calls quotas they must meet. So, yeah, a call center worker is not going to deviate from their script and job's purpose to burn time chatting about another country's politics.
2. I do not mean this in any demeaning way, but standard customer-facing/hearing interaction is all but literally scripted. That smiling Walmart greeter might, IRL, hate you or all customers, but they will still smile and greet you politely.
This is generally true but people who work at call centers are human beings. If you demonstrate some empathy then you can often get them on your side. I would never discuss politics with a CSR because there's a 50/50 chance you'll offend them but if you use their first name and ask them how their day is going then many CSRs will engage in some innocuous conversation.
Example: I used to fly a lot with United for work. For various reasons I'd need to change my flight and want to avoid the flight change fee. They would generally "read the script" and say they had no discretion in the matter but I knew that wasn't the case. What I would do is just call several times knowing that I would get a different CSR every time. Sometimes it would take several calls but eventually I could usually find a CSR who liked my empathy for them enough and would waive the fee.
CSRs are trained to be robots but if you acknowledge that they are people then you can get much better results.
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