Customer service rant PART THREE
2006-12-17

I often complain about the customer service I receive in England. It's atrocious. I have not had a good experience with British retail in the entire year I have been here. But this is Christmas, surely, they would put in an extra effort to make some extra dough over the holidays, right?! WRONG.

Argos is a catalogue driven store where you find what you like in the catalogue, go down, give them the product number where they retrieve it from behind a giant WALL OF MYSTERY for you. We had a store like that in eighties, it was called Consumers Distributing and it went bust. For good reason, Canadians don’t like to queue. The Brits, apparently, love it.

Booked my wife’s gift, waited in line to pay for it because only two of the eight tills are manned (a common occurance in England). Got to the front of the queue where a lady (and I use this term loosely) tells me that the 15 day return policy is being waived.

Me: Whoa, what? Does that mean if she doesn’t like it we can’t bring it back?
Argos pinhead: Correct.
Me: Not even an exchange?
Argos pinhead: Nope, only if it’s faulty. Would you like to pay £50 to get a warranty though?
Me: You’ve got to be kidding.
Argos pinhead: How about an Argos credit card, then?

Stifling the urge to rip her fucking throat out, I say “no thank you” and move to step two in the Argos process. If my time here has taught me anything, it's that there is no point in arguing, nothing you can possibly say will make English retailers give a shit.

After you move from the till, people are then asked to watch a giant screen to see when your number comes up. So, I move over with all the other zombies, watching my number move further and further in the queue. Oh, up another level, over, back, up again, forward. Oh, Oh, It’s changed colour now, I must be close. This isn’t boring, it’s FUN. Somebody kill me.

Finally, after about 20 minutes, my number is called and I walk over to collection point D. That’s right, “D”, inferring that there are at least four collection points. Truth is it’s one table behind which, stand two teenaged dropouts who try to serve about 40 people. As I WAIT IN LINE AGAIN, some bozo BUDS IN FRONT OF ME and says “Mine is right there, love.” and points to the shelf behind her.

The pimple faced numbskull behind the counter takes her hand off my item that she was about to grab and gets his. His wife looks at me and says, “You got to be pushy, or you ain’t getting nuffin in this place.” and lets out a horrible, toothless wheeze which I assume was a laugh. She’s covered head to toe in fake gold. I ignore her, safe in the knowledge that she will die of lung cancer soon.

Finally I get my item and leave. My wife HAS to like it or I'm out some serious dough. Talk about pressure.

Came home to a letter from my best friends, British Telecom. This is a quote from it:

“Until recently, if you were out and about, and somebody left a message on your home phone, you wouldn’t be able to hear it till you got back there. Well as a BT 1571 customer (catchy, isn’t it) that need not be a problem anymore.”

You know what the new feature is?

They’ll send my answering machine messages to my mobile. What a great idea! Because calling my answering machine and getting my messages is such a huge hassle.

Sky gives out free broadband, and this is the best BT can come up with? No wonder Rupert Murdoch rules the world. Next BT will be sending me mail telling me that they are setting up a new feature called “Ringing”.