On the bus

Ok, here is a little example of the customer service to illustrate my point. This was overheard yesterday when I was on the bus, this exchange between the bus driver and somebody at a bus stop.

Where's the 432?

It just went by.

The sign said it was the 401.

Oh, he must have forgotten to change the sign.

Well, that's just fucking great.

Well, it isn't my fault, is it. (This wasn't spoken as a question.)

The bus drivers are like the worst. Sometimes they make all the stops, but they don't care. Whether you get on the bus or not makes no difference to them. They get paid the same and their shift ends at the same time. Sometimes you have to almost jump in front of the bus to get them to stop (which for you kids at home is not something you should try because the buses are huge and the drivers are scary drivers) and still if they don't feel like stopping, they will keep going on.

Slavishly following the trend?

Seems like you are nothing without one of these bl*g things (hate hate hate that word, oh why must it be such a stupid word?). Will I become all powerful and have politicians knocking on my door asking for a nice mention in my little page? Will I tip the media my way, back where I think it should be?

Or will it mostly be things like, so why is customer service in the UK so abysmally bad? They don't really say 'piss off or I won't help you at all', well not outright. It isn't even East Coast rude bad which is always jarring coming from a West Coast mentality. You pay for a courier to deliver something to you and spend two days getting an answering machine trying to set up the delivery and then when you finally get a real person to answer the phone, you get 'piss off and maybe we will deliver it tomorrow or maybe we won't deliver it at all and we will just send it back, so there'.

Oh, there is a friendly face on top of it and a nice accent, but you know when you walk out the door, they are saying, what a prat that was. I worked in this guy's computer shop for a few weeks and it was funny to see the things he would say about the customers after they left. He just clipped them for a good sum and he was chuckling about how stupid they were and how easy it was to take them.

Hmm, yeah, probably more of that then.