FraserWords

Yes, yes, I know it’s late. I’ll explain why in a minute. But first, having had a shall-we-say challenging week, I’d like to start on a positive note.

Into the tiny, low-ceilinged room bustled a man with an armful of CDs, obviously the proprietor.

“This,” I addressed him sternly, “is a nightmare”.

“Oh dear,” he said, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“This,” I continued, “is a music shop. With music in it. Real music. A shop like I used to go to when I was young. I passionately want to buy several dozen of the CDs on your shelves. And I, being a writer by trade and a customer of licensed premises, banks, lawyers and British Sodding Telecom, have not a brass farthing with which to scratch my fundament. Nightmare.”

But, gritting teeth and damning the bank manager to the eternity of buttock-bound torment that awaits all their cheap-suit-clad NVQ Level 3-in-customer-care ilk, I advanced upon the shelves with the panting eagerness of a bored, thirsty rugby player spotting a dwarf-throwing bar.

The shelves contained jazz, classic rock, folk, music from every corner of the world. Of the inanity that populates the shelves of HMV, precious little sign. Here be Lee Morgan and Horace Silver, here be, for the love of all that’s decent, The Skatalites and Jacqueline du Pre.

I tried to be good, but I nevertheless spent money I could ill afford. I did it on a point of principle: people with the courage to open such a shop in this world gone mad deserve our support. Hasten yourself to The Tavistock Bookshop and ascend the stairs to the third floor. You will not be disappointed. Unless you’re a Lady Gaga fan.

Customer disservice

Recently, in The Independent, good old Mark Steel described the soul-shattering misery of dealing with car insurance firms as a sort of purgative, good for the soul. And as one of the worst experiences of our consumer society it is possible to suffer.

I wasn’t so sure. As somebody who, as you all know, has been wrestling with banks and lawyers over the alleged sale and purchase of a house, I think I’ve got a prettv firm grip on suffering. Channel 4 property presenter Phil Spencer was quoted on the subject of the property market in the Daily Telegraph last week and squarely laid some of the blame on this agonising process: “One of the biggest frustrations is the drawn out conveyancing process and in particular the bad service often experienced.” Amen.

To prove that the only thing in English life slower than house buying and selling is the political process, the MP Dale Campbell-Savours tabled this early day motion in the House of Commons in 1996:

“(This house) believes that the Government, in failing to conduct thorough conveyancing reform and to introduce measures to ensure a more orderly market, have opened the door to widescale abuse; recognises widespread public dissatisfaction with conveyancing practice nationwide that can lead to gazumping and gazundering ….; suggests that to tackle abuse an amended Scottish … system should be considered for adoption throughout the United Kingdom whereby purchasers and vendors are bound at an earlier stage; suggests to tackle the problem of multiple surveys that vendors, not purchasers should commission surveys and the duty of care of surveyors should extend to any potential purchaser; recognises that it would be sensible if copies of such surveys were retained in log books to provide a reliable history of the property for the sake of future purchasers; and calls upon the Government to set up an independent review body to examine reforms of this nature which could at little or no public cost remove endemically depressing factors from a fluctuating housing market and stimulate the wider economy.”

Light-touch reforms followed, but as you and I know and Phil Spencer highlighted, there remains “widespread public dissatisfaction” with conveyancing; a Scottish (or Australian or any other more enlightened country) system binding buyer and seller at an earlier stage is yet to get rid of the menaces of gazumping and gazundering; pointless multiple surveys still take place; and endemically depressing factors in the housing market mean our ailing wider economy remains unstimulated.

All that said, however, I now contend that house-moving is not the worst customer experience our society can offer.

Because I have had to report a telephone and broadband fault to British Sodding Telecom.

My God. My sweet lord.

I have never in my life experienced such inefficiency and indifference. What evil mind nightmared up a system that requires you to spend 20 minutes being harangued by automated voices threatening to charge you if you’ve damaged BT equipment when all you want is the reinstatement of the service for which you pay so handsomely and on which you depend? How is it that we ever tolerated the evolution of a service that takes nearly six days – nearly six days! – to mend a fault? How can it be that we allow computers to spend minute after hideously expensive minute telling us all the reasons why we shouldn’t be bothering a human being with our petty, unnecessary and infinitely unimportant little problem?

In my case, an engineer arrived two-and-a-half days after the fault was reported and mended the cable. However, he was from BT OpenReach. Therefore, he was not my service provider. No. That is BT.

He eyed the three colour-coded cables that required manacling together in order to enable me and my two neighbours to, in my case, once more work and look after my distant dependent family. It was a brief job, he said. But he could not do it. It was a separate job and would have to be re-booked. Sorry. That’s the system.

I’m not ashamed – well, I’m slightly ashamed –  to say I begged. I offered cash. I would have slept with him. But no.

Away he drove in his van, leaving me on my knees in the dirt in the manner of Charlie Sheen in Platoon, leaving me to wait another three days for what he’d described as a simple repair.

Every time I wanted to discuss this aberration I had to go through a queue system that costs a fortune on mobile phones. This has cost me £40 in credits so far. Until, presumably fed up, BT diverted me to a call centre in Lincoln and the direct line of Adam Anderson, whose thankless task it is to listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth of helpless victims like me. He was very patient, very sympathetic and really tried his best to help.

But his best wasn’t the issue, because I’m not organising the repair, of course. BT, my service provider, books repairs through BT OpenReach, to whom I am not allowed to speak. Unbelievably, this public service in the hands of a private monopoly declines to have contact with its customers.

“Oh, go on,” I said. “I’d love to discuss the pitiful shambles of their service with them. I’d love to find out how they justify the colossal stupidity of not permitting engineers to mend faults when they spot them, thereby incurring massive further costs for their business…. I’d love to discuss the overweening arrogance that enables them to carry on their sick apology for a business without actually being accountable to their own poor customers. I’d love a debate about how the provider of an essential service vital to the health and welfare of millions and millions of people is allowed to get away with not answering the telephone.”

In the end, by virtue of hand-delivered letters and posters stuck to the doors of local Open Reach offices, I made contact with the operations manager for my patch and the repair was carried out. No doubt OpenReach would say it would have been done anyway without my efforts. Given the evidence of colossal institutional incompetence, I would call them liars.

This sorry saga of corporate indifference will now go through whatever complaints procedures I can find and be reported to the industry regulator. I’ll write to my MP, for what that’s worth, and the relevant minister, and I’ll claim compensation for the loss of my line for such a long time, for fuel costs, for mobile phone costs.

Mind you, most look at me as if I’m mad. I rant pretty freely, after all. I rant about the dismal service consumers receive in this country and people chuckle in that tolerant way with which they put up with eccentric pensioners and say “don’t get so stressed, don’t waste your energy – that’s just the way it is.”

Well fuck that. I say it’s the way it is because people don’t get stressed; because people allowed our essential services to be handed over to corporations and their shareholders for a pittance, gifting them the sort of monopoly that enables this crippling condescension; because people allow these corporations to milk them like some sort of cash cow and then treat them like medieval serfs; and I say it damn well shouldn’t be the way it is.

I know I’m committing that most un-English of sins: I’m making a fuss.

Well so be it. I’m not English anyway.

Yes, it makes me grumpy and ill-tempered and viewed as some sort of crazy loon for standing up for decent service, courtesy and efficiency, but at least I’m a grumpy ill-tempered crazy loon with self-respect.

When my crippled mother sat in a hospital waiting room for an appointment for two long hours without even being offered a cup of tea, I ranted. When the poor soul died and the hospital couldn’t release her cold dead body to her family because the doctor treating her had buggered off on holiday without completing her death certificate, I ranted. Because how can we let people get away with the cruel effects of casual incompetence and unkindness?

Well… at least I reckon that when, in a few hundred years, baffled historians look back with contempt at the utter, abject shambles we have made of our life, people like me, and you, brothers and sisters, will be judged to have been on the right side of the argument.

There. That feels better.

And finally

Thank you, Sister Sylvester and Brother Lockett, for your kind remarks on last week’s epistle – it really is much appreciated. Spencers: you are hereby reprimanded for showing levity in the matter of the Godlike Leonard Cohen on my Facebook page.