Or: The Customer Is Always Right, Unless There’s a Form

I am a terrible snob.

Not the sort who insists on being addressed by her title, drinks champagne at breakfast or sends the soup back because the spoon is facing the wrong way. No, my particular form of snobbery is considerably less expensive. I make judgements about people based on their names.

There. I’ve said it.

I spent my formative years in a rather prosperous suburb of the capital, where certain people could tell which side of the railway tracks your grandparents lived on by the way you pronounced a vowel.

I have since been transplanted to a small village in northern Sweden, where people are considerably less interested in one’s pedigree and rather more interested in whether one knows how to stack firewood.

It has been a beneficial change of environment, although certain unfortunate habits have survived the move.

Which brings me to Angèliqüé.

That is not her real name, I hasten to add. I have changed it to protect an entirely innocent woman from my imagination.

Angèliqüé works in customer service for a large electrical retailer. I have never met her. I have no idea how old she is, what she looks like or whether she spends her weekends rescuing abandoned kittens.

For all I know, she is a delightful young woman who volunteers at an animal shelter, remembers her grandmother’s birthday and always returns her shopping trolley.

Nevertheless, the moment I saw her name at the bottom of an email, an entire person materialised in my imagination.

This is deeply unfair.

It is also, I’m afraid, quite automatic.

There was a time when a certain sort of mother, having read one too many historical romances, decided that her daughter simply could not be called Anna.

Anna was what you called the girl next door. Anna wore sensible shoes, passed her mathematics exams and eventually became an accountant.

Her daughter was destined for greater things.

Her daughter would be Angélique.

The novels about Angélique, that ravishing seventeenth-century heroine who spent a remarkable amount of time being desired, abducted, imperilled and generally inconvenienced by aristocrats, inspired a particular enthusiasm for names with a Continental flavour.

And if Angélique was good, surely Angèliqüé was better?

Why settle for an ordinary spelling when you could scatter accents across a name like hundreds and thousands on a birthday cake?

The resulting child would spend the next eighty years spelling her name to receptionists, correcting official documents and explaining that the accent over the second vowel was absolutely essential, despite serving no discernible linguistic purpose.

But her mother would be delighted.

She had given birth not to an ordinary Swedish girl but to a heroine.

Unfortunately, the heroine would still have to attend compulsory school, queue at the pharmacy and eventually find employment.

Possibly in customer service.

Which brings us back to my telephone.

My telephone, a perfectly respectable smartphone which had until recently performed its duties without complaint, has suffered what I can only describe as a catastrophic nervous breakdown.

It will not start. It will not respond to reason. It displays its manufacturer’s logo, grows alarmingly warm and refuses to proceed any further.

In this respect, it bears a certain resemblance to my husband when confronted with flat-pack furniture.

I contacted the retailer, explained the problem in some detail and pointed out that I was making a complaint under consumer protection legislation.

Angèliqüé replied.

She asked me to describe the problem.

Again.

She also wanted to know whether I had performed a factory reset, despite the fact that the telephone was about as responsive as a brick and considerably less useful, since a brick can at least be employed to prop open a door.

There was a form.

Of course there was a form.

There is always a form.

The form offered me a choice between declaring that I had already reset the telephone and authorising someone else to reset it, potentially at my expense.

There was no box marked:

The bloody thing won’t switch on.

Nor was there one marked:

I would prefer not to have all my data obliterated merely because your computer system cannot accommodate a third possibility.

I wrote back, politely.

I explained that the telephone was entirely unusable, that I was exercising my statutory rights and that I did not consent to chargeable work or the destruction of my data without prior agreement.

Angèliqüé replied.

She needed me to complete the form.

At this point, I began to suspect that Angèliqüé and I were conducting two entirely separate conversations.

I was discussing a defective telephone and consumer legislation.

Angèliqüé was discussing a form.

Somewhere in the depths of the company’s customer service department, I imagine there is a training manual containing the words:

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DEVIATE FROM THE SCRIPT.

A customer might report that their washing machine has burst into flames, their television has swallowed the cat or their refrigerator is making threatening remarks in Norwegian.

The correct response would presumably be:

Thank you for contacting us. Have you tried restarting the device? Please complete the attached form.

I should make it clear that I do not blame Angèliqüé for this.

She almost certainly has targets to meet, procedures to follow and a supervisor who measures productivity in closed tickets rather than solved problems.

She may well be perfectly capable of understanding my complaint but entirely unable to do anything useful about it.

That is the particular genius of modern customer service. Companies employ human beings and then go to extraordinary lengths to prevent them from behaving like human beings.

And I, who have spent much of my working life identifying problems and finding ways around them, find this almost physically painful.

I want to reach through the screen, take Angèliqüé gently by the shoulders and say:

“My dear girl, forget the form for thirty seconds. Read what I’ve actually written.”

Instead, I make another cup of tea and compose another impeccably polite email.

Because that is the other thing about being a snob.

One must, at the very least, maintain one’s manners.

It is perfectly possible to be furious with a company without being unpleasant to the unfortunate person employed to represent it. Indeed, I make a point of distinguishing between the two.

Angèliqüé did not manufacture the telephone. She did not break it. She did not design the form.

And, most importantly, she did not choose her own name.

That last responsibility belongs entirely to her parents.

Who, for all I know, may have been perfectly sensible people who simply liked the sound of it.

But I shall reserve judgement until the telephone is repaired.

In the meantime, somewhere in northern Sweden, a middle-aged woman with a questionable upbringing, an increasingly cold cup of Earl Grey and a completely dead smartphone is preparing her next email.

And somewhere else, Angèliqüé is probably preparing to ask her to fill in the form.

Again.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.