The Lady in Boots

(not this year’s Madrid Players pantomime!)

One afternoon, a few years ago now, I went looking for María, who helps us out with many of the problems we encounter with our computer system up at the Centre. She is on the admin staff and as such works many more hours (and I would hope, earns a reasonable amount more) than us teachers, but the circumstances of her employment mean that she is not very far away from her desk when we need her. To my surprise, she wasn’t there; nor was she there when I tried again half an hour later. I decided she must have been taken ill or something, and looked for one or two other admin types who might have been able to help, only to discover that they weren’t there either. In fact none of them was to be found for the rest of the day, so my problem, whatever it might have been, went unresolved.

When I found María back at her desk the next evening, I got the problem fixed, and as she is someone I get on well with, I then asked her where she and the rest of the gang had been the day before. She grinned sardonically and informed me that they had all been attending a customer care seminar in the main admin building across the road. I groaned inwardly. I then figured that it would be OK to groan outwardly as well. I did so. María grinned again. (What with her grinning and me groaning, alliteration was rife in the Centre that night.) She said it was the way the world was going. She was right.

For customers are everywhere in the wonderful modern world of Management. Customers have to be cosseted, flattered and quite probably patronised within an inch of their lives before being relieved of huge amounts of their money. In the last few years hardly a week has gone by at the Centre without a junior member of management finally mastering the drawing of little boxes in Microsoft Word and then triumphantly producing yet another survey or questionnaire about something or other, all in the name of "providing a better service to our customers".

Teenaged students always answer questionnaires by saying that they would prefer to watch more videos in class, and play more computer games, and maybe sing the odd song, and not have to do homework, or grammar. Anyone who spends time with teenagers will know this, anyway, without the need for any kind of survey to be done. As their views are mostly. and quite rightly, ignored by management, then you cannot help wondering why so much of their precious time has been used to create the questionnaires in the first place. But someone, somewhere, has doubtless told them that customers are more satisfied, feel more cared-for, if they feel they are being consulted. Of course what is suitable for, to take an example totally at random, marketing Imperial Leather soap maybe should not be applied to a school, but you try and stop them.

I may have mentioned this before, but at the Centre we teach English. To Spanish people. Some of them are fully-fledged grown-ups, but many of them are teenagers, whose classes are selected and paid for by their parents. So yes, English classes are "sold" to what might be described as our "customers", although I much prefer to think of the younger ones at least, as students or kids, who not only have to be taught, but kept under reasonable control, and I insist on very high standards of behaviour in class, and I get it, what is more. I would not welcome someone who may come to exist in the very near future, and who might rejoice in a title like "Customer Care Liaison Manager", and be about seventeen years old into the bargain, trying to put me right about the best way to treat the people I am teaching, armed with a set of half-baked tenets dreamed up by someone with no experience of life as it really is, but half a drawerful of meaningless diplomas in this and that.

As María said, it is the way the world is going, and I cannot understand why. When I go over to Britain, I sometimes make use of the EasyJet flight from Madrid to Liverpool. EasyJet, like most passenger-carrying entities, is keen on making announcements. The stewards and stewardesses can hardly wait for you to sit down before they start yelling into those microphones, using a delivery which is extremely reminiscent of a nine-year-old child at primary school reciting a poem which she doesn’t understand, but is determined to get through without pausing for breath. Mispronunciations and random stresses on small words which shouldn’t really be vocalised at all, abound, and the worst thing is a kind of almost Gregorian chant-like intonation which they would never dream of using in their normal speech. And all to tell you what Basil Fawlty immortalised as "the bleeding obvious". Not enough to remind us to take care when opening the overhead lockers. We have also to be told that something might fall out of them. And injure someone. And they might die. And it will be all your fault. At the end of the flight, they welcome you to Liverpool, which as they have travelled there with you, is a trifle strange, though they do come from Liverpool, so maybe that’s OK, if it weren’t for the fact that they welcome you to Madrid as well on the return trip, and I always feel it should be me welcoming them. But then they start some customer-care management bollocks about realisin’ you have a choice of airlines, and thank you for choosin’ EasyJet.

If you want to fly from Madrid to Liverpool without changing planes, there is no choice. The 1650 EJ flight is all there is, so I don’t get this ‘choice’ business. There is a Manchester flight with BA a bit earlier in the day, but it goes to, er, Manchester. All the same, I think this is what they must be referring to by 'choice of airlines'. EJ, though, is a lot cheaper than BA, and if, like some of my colleagues , you are trying to get to Yorkshire or Shropshire , then it doesn’t much matter whether you go to MAN or LPL; you’ll go for the cheaper option, anyway. If BA flights were the same price, then people would fly BA; the leg room is better and there aren’t so many announcements, and the staff have a better idea of how to make such announcements as there might be, too. I suppose they think that this kind of thing is what the customer wants. And maybe they are right, and it is only me that wishes they would stop shouting about nothing in particular and let me read my paper in peace.

(Incidentally, the first-ever EJ Madrid-Liverpool flight took off, with me on board, just five years ago today, 6 September 1999, yet it took Barajas Airport more than eighteen months to put the word ‘Liverpool’ up on the departure boards. The first five or six times I took the flight, it was billed as going to LPL, which they presumably thought was in somewhere not too big on vowels like maybe Albania or Slovakia).

The railways are, if anything, worse. First of all they have this modern mania for welcoming you to things that you never realised merited a welcome, like newsletters, or your tax forms. "Welcome to the 1348 First North Western service to Barrow; we operate a no smoking policy. This is the most important thing we do and all we really care about. The 1348 will call at [every stop], due to arrive at Barrow at 1705 (or whatever, haven’t checked). Owing to non arrival of train crew, this train will depart approximately thirty, three oh, minutes late. Thank you for your attention. May we remind customers that we operate a no smokin’ policy." When you finally leave, and especially if you are going quite a long way, you are dismayed to find that the whole weary litany is repeated every time the train leaves a station, with just one station less each time, of course, plus you have had that mindless stuff about taking all (not just some) of your personal possessions with you at the next station stop (they have to call it that to distinguish them from all the other unscheduled, mysterious halts which happen about every twelve minutes). And why do they only tell you the scheduled arrival time at the final destination, and not anywhere else? Do they seriously think they are competing with aeroplanes? Trains do have intermediate stops, it is part of what they do.

On some trains, there is a buffet car. You can always tell. The train, as it might be from Glasgow to London , negotiates the complex pointwork outside Central Station and heads, still a little uncertainly, in the direction of Polmadie shed. You have already been welcomed and told what train it is. This always happens just as it is leaving, when it is too late to do anything about it if you are on the wrong train. You have had the no smoking policy lovingly described to you. You have been told that due arrival in London Euston will be about six hours later. You have not been told when the train (actually they call it a service) arrives at Motherwell, Carlisle, Penrith, Oxenholmethelakedistrict, Lancaster, Preston, Crewe, Rugby or Watford Junction, even though the train is going to stop at these places, and therefore there might be customers who plan to alight there. You have been told that the person speaking is your train manager. He might have vouchsafed that his name is Mike. He wishes you a pleasant journey. He tells you that they operate a no smoking policy. You feel like throttling him but mercifully he stops talking at you at this point.

You glance to your left and admire Polmadie depot, You unfold your newspaper; you start to look forward to your journey. Suddenly there is a slight whooshing noise and your heart sinks, for this means that someone is going to use the tannoy system, someone who is not very experienced with it, who therefore blows into it before starting up. It is Craig, with a broad Glasgow or Preston, depending on the crew roster, accent. Craig is going to tell you about the buffet. If it is Glasgow Craig, he pronounces the 't' at the end of this word. There is a buffet car on the (ra) train. It is situated between two other cars. These are D and E. They are near the rear of the train (or the front). This is as much as you need to know. That it exists, and where it is, should be enough for anyone. But Craig is thinking of customers who might not know what a buffet car is, and so we have to listen to him telling us that it is for the sale of hot, and cold, snacks, hot, and cold, drinks, and sandwiches (sangwiches), presumably neither a hot nor a cold snack. And loads of booze for people to get pissed on and make a nuisance of themselves later. No cigarettes though. There is a no smokin’ policy in operation at the buffet. I'd much rather have a no boozin' policy myself. And so on. You get this every time the train pulls out of a station "for the benefit of customers who joined the train at (say) Carlisle", as well as the train manager spiel, (see above).

Anyway what all this has to do with the lady in Boots is that on the day I decided (see post of 28 August) to purchase some orange-flavoured Imperial Leather, I spent a couple of hours in Manchester on my way back to the Wirral from north Lancashire, and having visited the two adjacent branches of Waterstones, spotted a branch of Boots. I quickly found the soap in a four-pack, and having this compulsion about having to buy at least two items whenever I shop (the ideal customer?), I picked up a pack of Excel razor blades as well, and headed for one of the checkout tills. I waited for a minute as a young woman who did not speak English very well attempted to turn what looked like a 5p-off soap coupon into actual cash, and when she was eventually persuaded that she was wasting her (and my) time, I smiled sympathetically at the motherly lady operating the till and put my soap and blades on the counter. She asked me something which I didn't catch; I asked her to repeat it and she did so. She wanted to know if I had a [can’t recall the name] card, i.e. the Boots loyalty card. I shook my head. I no longer bother telling them that as I live abroad, it would be pointless, but then something struck me. And she looked like a nice woman. "I bet you get tired of asking that question", I said. She smiled in a resigned sort of way. "Thirty or forty times an hour, seven or eight hours a day", she replied, "and they come round and give you points for the way you do it". "There’s a lot of this kind of thing now", I said, "I can’t understand who benefits from it". And I can’t. "They" are, one supposes, the management idiots who dreamed this idea up.

They would argue that it is to do with customer care, but I am the customer, and I don’t want their care. I am not an idiot, and can perfectly well find a buffet car, read a timetable, and spot a no smoking sign when I get on a train. And the train I get on will be the one that is going where I want to go, as well. And if I am interested in achieving nugatory discounts by deft use of a loyalty card, then I don’t need reminding of this every time I buy something.

In fact, if the word ‘customer’ were to be dropped from all management strategy, the world would be a better place. If the word ‘management’ could be dispensed with too, it would be paradise, but that is too much to expect, especially with the people in charge of things nowadays.