What cowboy done this?

Has anyone in the entire history of human civilisation and its Neanderthal antecedents ever bought a house that did not bring with it a whole heap of problems?

Somehow I imagine that the first intelligible sound a caveman heard, after he had found himself a dryish cleft in the rock, was a neighbour sucking through his teeth, pointing out some glaring defect and grunting “What idiot done that?”

(I apologise to those concerned about the finer feelings of idiots, but sadly at that stage evolution had not yet brought us the more freely abusable figure of the cowboy.)

Best builder's ad ever

I have owned my new house for four weeks now, and the only solid achievement has been the erection of scaffolding to permit the retiling of the roof. The contractor reckons he should be able to start the actual work around mid-July. So, if you are wondering when the glorious British summer will break and be replaced with a more traditional pattern of daily torrential downpours, there’s your answer.

To my surprise the only utility provider that has managed to deliver on its promises is BT, which had a phone line and broadband up and running within minutes of my completion of the purchase.

The wooden spoon goes to the electricity company which continues to deny categorically that any such property exists, despite my providing them with a fair amount of circumstantial evidence over and above my address, including an account number and the serial number on their meter.

It has been pointed out to me that I should stop moaning about this as it means I am getting my power for nothing. And, since they insist that my house is not there, they will clearly never be able to cut it off.

Meanwhile we discover little details that our surveyor somehow missed, like whole rooms bereft of a single electrical socket. Not bathrooms, either.

I realised before I signed the contract to buy the place that it had been converted from a chapel to a house by a DIY enthusiast who had done most of the work himself. What I did not realise, until I gained possession and started delving more deeply, is that he was even more incompetent at DIY than I am, which is saying something.

My favourite mystery so far is that the place is festooned with exterior lights that there appears to be no means whatsoever of switching on or off.

This is closely followed by the fact that every window in the house is equipped with a lock, but we have not inherited a single key.

The septic tank does not work properly and the man who claimed he could fix it has suddenly disappeared off to somewhere exotic, judging by the ringtone on his mobile phone, which he resolutely refuses to answer.

Meanwhile the remorseless advance of Building Regulations apparently means that we cannot replace our boiler, which is held together with gaffer tape, in its current location. Which would not be a problem if there were another logical place to put it. But there isn’t.

Every day seems to bring a new problem to which there is no simple solution. Even charming quirks like the wooden dog door, perfectly sized for Border terriers, proved to be a poisoned chalice; my insurance company vetoed it on the grounds that it would also afford ready access for Rat Boy to ransack our non-existent valuables.

I’d be tempted to stay put in the house we have rented for the last five years but for the fact that it is clearly reaching the end of its economic life, judging by the number of services and appliances that are failing on a daily basis.

Perhaps it is a curse. I have already written the unlikely story of the chapel’s supposed ghost. In exactly a week some chaps with a digger are supposedly going to excavate a large hole in the garden to install a gas tank. I am assured that, despite the ecclesiastical history of the house, it has never possessed a burial ground. Yet somehow I confidently expect to see the white glint of bones and hear a workmanlike voice saying, “Blimey, what cowboy sold you this?” 

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Dealing with British power companies: enough to depress anyone

I apologise for my absence last week. I was a trifle depressed. Or, to be more accurate, a horse burger depressed.

Though at least I had something to be depressed about, namely a substantial dose of work-related stress. Which is less disturbing, as any depressive can tell you, than the tsunami of gloom that occasionally engulfs the sufferer quite unexpectedly, for no obvious reason at all.

I dragged myself back to work after a couple of days and promptly burst into tears when someone said something nice to me, which is never good for my image as a hardened cynic.

A cynic, though perhaps not hardened enough

Cynical, yes, though I hope not unsympathetic, because a certain amount of empathy seems critical to the whole public relations process. A lesson clearly not grasped by the power company that recently upset one acquaintance through its heavy-handed approach to transferring an electricity account into her name after the sadly premature death of her partner.

She felt moved to make a formal complaint, which swiftly elicited a computer-generated letter of apology. Which might have helped had it not been brilliantly addressed to the deceased account holder. So she complained again. Predictably, the dead man then received another, even more grovelling, letter.

This could easily run as long as The Mousetrap. Much like the apparently never-ending pursuit of my dear wife by the same power company and two successive debt collectors over a small bill left unpaid by a former tenant of the house she occupied before we got married.

Mentioning no names, but ...

For some reason these goons failed to acknowledge her notification that she had changed her surname on marriage, then unilaterally accorded her a sex change from Miss to Mr on their files. So whenever they rang her up (which latterly was several times per day) they then refused to speak to her because she was clearly not the man they were looking for. Attempts to correspond by e-mail fell at the self-same hurdle.

Imagine their delight when they somehow got hold of my personal ex-directory number, because I am unmistakably a man and might therefore be just the lead they were after – if not the bill dodger himself operating under an unlikely pseudonym.

The hole in the triangle presumably symbolises the debt which this shower set out to collect for their clients; dealing with them can only be described as Kafkaesque

Reams of documents have been photocopied and despatched by recorded delivery to demonstrate who is actually responsible for the trifling debt at the heart of this dispute, and to provide his last known address. All have been promptly lost, at which point any normal company would apologise and give up. This lot just expect Mrs Hann to go through the expensive rigmarole of sending them all over again.

My wife’s own costs have vastly exceeded the amount claimed in the first place, never mind the hundreds of pounds in fees that must have been run up by the debt collectors. I did suggest that this argued for the simple if unjust solution of simply paying them to go away but, as my wife contends, “It’s the principle of the thing”. If you settle one bill you don’t owe for the sake of a quiet life, where will it end?

But that’s power companies for you. As if charging like the Light Brigade for our energy were not enough, in my experience they feel compelled to add insult to injury by screwing up every attempt at customer communication.

Ditto the laughably named British Telecom, who make it all but impossible for me to work at home because of the unreliability of the feeble broadband connection for which I pay handsomely each quarter. I long ago gave up complaining because I could never get through to anyone who spoke my language.

"I can assure you, sir, that I have checked your line and it is working perfectly. Hello? Hello?"

I refuse to blame this on privatisation. I remember having to stand in Soviet-style queues in bleak utility showrooms to secure gas, electricity and a telephone line when I bought my first flat in 1981, and there was nothing good about those old days.

Yet somehow us customers need to unite against the monolithic service providers of this country and make it clear that they must give some priority to our simple needs for reliability, affordability, responsiveness and politeness, particularly when things go wrong.

Otherwise we might all have good reasons for feeling ever so slightly depressed

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne

The Hann Perspective: My Number is Up

The most regrettable business development of my lifetime has been the relentless drive to downgrade the skills and wages of the average worker so as to maximise corporate profitability, and hence the related salaries and bonuses of top management.

I recently did some work for a restaurant company and encountered a research report lambasting it for falling behind its peers by not “deskilling” its kitchens.

Because why go to the expense of having a meal cooked by a trained chef when someone with the IQ of a rather backward Border terrier could just slam it in a microwave?

Not that you the customer would receive any discount for that, obviously. The saving would simply enhance the company’s bottom line.

Similarly, having long ago trained us to select our shopping ourselves, why should supermarkets employ several workers to scan the stuff at the tills, when you could pay just one to glower at us doing it for them?

The supreme example of ‘deskilling’ is, of course, the automated call centre. Mrs Hann was literally reduced to tears by one the other day as she ran the apparently endless gamut of multiple choice questions. She pleaded loudly just to speak to a fellow human, though soon wished that she had stuck with the robot.

A friendly Indian call centre

It was all to do with personalised number plates: a vain and stupid affectation, I know, but handy for those of us with failing memories.

I have one on my own car that begins ‘AI’. This seemed uncontroversial until I went to stay with a vet friend recently, and he asked what on Earth I knew about Artificial Insemination. Not as much as he does, that’s for sure. I once made the mistake of asking if he could lend me a cool box for a picnic, and ended up walking across the lawn at Glyndebourne bearing a large polystyrene box across which was blazoned in large red letters ‘Semen: Handle With Care’.

I bought another number containing the initials ‘XPR’ to celebrate my retirement from the public relations business. When I had to re-apply my nose to the grindstone, I donated this to my wife, who has been vainly trying to arrange its transfer from her old car to a new one she is buying. Dealing with our insurance company’s call centre has all but destroyed her will to live. And the bottom line is that the new car, which she hasn’t got, is now insured. While the old one, which she actually needs to drive, is not.

I have waged an equally wearing battle with my electricity supplier’s call centre for years. They consistently refuse to believe my own meter readings. Often they won’t believe their own meter reader’s efforts, either. The last time he gained access to my house they insisted on sending someone else around shortly afterwards to install a brand new meter, but it hasn’t helped. A month ago they sent me an estimated bill for several thousand pounds, with a proposal to settle this by increasing my direct debit by 400% to around £700 per month.

After voluble protests, they finally agreed to use my own meter readings, but then transposed the day and night numbers (for I have the old-fashioned Economy 7 rate for storage heaters) with the result that my debt went up by another few hundred pounds and my monthly direct debit to £800.

Eventually they acknowledged this mistake and sent me an accurate bill, but were still proposing to charge me the £800 a month. Which, the latest call centre person admitted, was more than she earned in a month.

This at least demonstrated that I was dealing with someone here in the UK, rather than one of the overseas call centres so beloved of banks, insurers and BT (Bangalore Telecom) where £800 per annum would probably be considered an enviable wage.

I liked it when you could go into an old-fashioned bricks and mortar building and sort things out with an old-fashioned flesh and blood human being who knew what their customer was talking about.

If I have to speak to a call centre at all, I want to deal with well-trained, well-informed and charming people. The sort I could share a pint with after they have solved all my problems for me. And, above all, I want to talk to a Geordie. So let’s all commit ourselves to North East job creation by affecting accents so thick that only a fellow Geordie can hope to understand us.

The nation's sweetheart: howay, pet!

People from other regions consistently report that they find the accent reassuring. And why stop at UK domination? Once Wor Cheryl has won over the doubters in the US, we should be aiming to take over call centre duties for the whole of North America, too, before giving our friends in India a taste of their own medicine.

Keith Hann is currently a PR consultant, but is likely to be seeking work in a call centre quite soon – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: My Mission

The camel has been famously described as a horse designed by a committee, so the duck-billed platypus was presumably the product of many long sessions around the whiteboard by wildfowl consultants “thinking outside the box”.

Er, what was my mission again?

The trouble with most corporate announcements these days is that they are similarly constructed through the collective efforts of those with too much time on their hands. Even though I make a living of sorts out of ghosting the things, I often find myself longing for the days when a Chairman’s Statement was just that: an autocrat’s personal and sometimes colourful account of how he (and, let’s face it, it was nearly always a “he”) saw the world.

Mission statements seem particularly inclined to suffer at the dead hand of the committee. When someone first came up with the idea back in the 1980s, I was all for it: a few simple and well-chosen words on the first page of an annual report that would allow the reader to grasp in an instant what the company did and how it intended to prosper. Once a name like “Jones the Butchers” on the cover would have provided a bit of a clue, but after the branding consultants had transformed that into Arriva, Aviva or Aveva, some further help seemed appropriate.

Then the groups with no ear for English and absolutely nothing better to do set to work, trying to come up with something inspirational and memorable that would bring a warm glow to all their “stakeholders”.

I recently wrote a brochure describing a technically complex business in what I thought were simple and accessible terms. A couple of attempts were required to correct my initial misunderstandings, but if I say so myself the third draft was as near to a good read as anything on this particular subject was ever likely to be.

Then the final version destined for the printers came through and I found that the inevitable committee had been at work, randomly inserting passages of total gibberish, laced with incomprehensible acronyms and couched in jargon that only an industry expert with a PhD in gobbledygook could hope to understand.

Few things seem harder than writing plain English. Researchers (presumably organised into a committee) recently came up with the breakthrough of rewording medicine labels, because the previous warning to “avoid alcoholic drink” apparently led to many people carefully skirting around the licensed aisles in Tesco, but cheerfully washing down their medication with a large tumbler of Scotch.

Now that will be replaced by “do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine”. Which, as any hardened boozer could have told them, will be taken to mean that you should not swallow the pills with the whisky, but that there is no reason not to have just the couple before or immediately afterwards.

Corporate statements can be short and pithy, for example “Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Which at least makes sense, even if it isn’t half as memorable as the informal company motto “Don’t be evil”.

Alternatively, they can be succinct and laughable, like Royal Mail’s “Our vision is to be demonstrably the best and most trusted postal services company in the world.” No mention there of their real mission of making deliveries ever later, collections earlier, and scattering red rubber bands in their wake.

My telephone and broadband provider proclaims that “BT’s mission, our central purpose, is to provide world-class telecommunications and information products and services, and to develop and exploit our networks, at home and overseas, so that we can meet the requirements of our customers, sustain growth in the earnings of the group on behalf of our shareholders, and make a fitting contribution to the community in which we conduct our business.”

Strangely this makes no reference at all to outsourcing virtually all customer contact to call centres in India, programmed to respond to complaints with assurances that you don’t have a problem at all; and to advise those with no broadband to seek help online.

And that, fundamentally, is the problem with mission statements. They don’t matter one jot if your organisation has not embraced the fundamentals of delivering excellent products or services through the efforts of well-trained and committed people.

I have read suggestions that the committee approach to producing a waffling mission statement is a great way of team-building, but if that’s what you’re after I’d just send them off to one of those places where they will be challenged to get across a lake with two planks, an oil drum and a ball of string.

And if you really must have something on your website about what makes your company so great, why not slip a few quid to a needy professional writer? Do contact me if you need some suggestions on where to look.

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who amazingly makes a living mainly from writing English – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.