David Craig, on October 25th, 2023Wednesday blog
I’ll only leave this up for one day as it’s not particularly insightful and nobody is interested in my boring little life.
Not having children and doing most of my administration on the Internet, thus avoiding bank branches and call centres, I don’t have much contact with the younger generation.�But I found this trivial incident, when I did interact with Britain’s Generation Z, interesting. I thought it might be worth mentioning as maybe some of you have had similar experiences.
First, the boring background
Last Friday, I had a one-year fixed-interest bond with Nationwide Building Society mature. Using the Internet, I moved some of the money to my current account to cover living expenses for the next year. But when I tried five times to put the rest of the money in a new one-year fixed-interest bond, the Nationwide system crashed five times. So I had to go to the nearest branch.
At the branch I explained what I needed done – a simple matter of a few clicks on the Nationwide website taking no more than two minutes. I know this as I’ve done this before. However, I was told that this was so complex that none of the five staff in the branch was qualified to do this unbelievably simple task and so would have to wait half an hour for the only person there capable of this task to come back from her lunch break.
Incidentally, the Nationwide area manager responsible for six branches was there. But either he was incapable of doing this incredibly simple service or else he had much more important things to do than serving a worthless customer like myself (one of the people who pays his no doubt generous salary and pension).
Given that I had to wait 30 minutes to have this two-minute task done, I asked the girl (not?)serving me if I could make a complaint about the poor level of service at the branch. She started typing heaven knows what into her computer, so I asked for a copy of my complaint. She refused saying it was against Nationwide policy to let customers see the complaints they made. As the area manager was there, I asked him for a copy of what the girl was typing. He said that wasn’t possible and if I wanted to see it, I would have to make a ‘Subject Access Request’ to Nationwide head office. Anyone who has been following the saga of Nigel Farage’s debanking by Dame Alison Rose’s Coutts will know all about this.
Things went on in this vein for about twenty minutes and I felt that the staff there were trying to obstruct everything I asked for in order to wind me up in the hope that I would lose my temper which would give them an excuse to refuse to serve me.
“You’re making me feel uncomfortable”
There were several big signs on the wall about how Nationwide Building Society would not tolerate any abuse or violence or threats against their staff or something like that. So I asked the girl, supposedly taking down details of my complaint, if I was being abusive or threatening or whatever.�She answered “no”.
We’ve all met many unhelpful, bloody-minded, useless bureaucrats in our lives. Usually their attitude is something like: ‘I am superior to you, I have power over you, I consider you to be a worthless piece of dirt, I can be as obstructive as I like and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Particular experts at this, I’ve found, are useless, arrogant, lazy BA check-in and cabin staff; underworked NHS nurses who feel their nursing degrees put them above menial tasks like looking after patients and anyone working�employed in a phone company or Internet call centre
Like most of you, I’m used to such people and generally can handle their mulish incompetence and obstructiveness. But this girl really threw me by adding “you’re making me feel uncomfortable”.� This was a brilliant move on her part. I was the customer wasting my time trying to get just the most basic customer service from an organisation which had quite a lot of my money, whose IT system was a pile of cr*p and whose branch staff were beyond incompetent. But by saying “you’re making me feel uncomfortable”, the girl immediately made herself into the victim and thus found an excellent excuse to refuse to serve me.
The limited insight I got from this was that for the snowflake, me-me-me, I-am-the-centre-of-the-world, social-media Generation Z playing the victim in any confrontational situation was a sure-fire way to win.
Next time I have to deal with some ludicrously-misnamed ‘customer service’ employee or call centre, I think I’ll try this tactic – make myself the victim by bleating about my hurty feelings and need for a ‘safe space’ rather than allowing myself to be pushed into the role of an increasingly frustrated customer trying to get the most basic level of customer service.
My complaint to the BBC
And while I’m on the subject of wasting time dealing with useless, self-serving bureaucracies, I’ve just done one of the most pointless acts of my life – I’ve made a complaint to the BBC.
Last Sunday, there was a BBC documentary on the housing crisis – how a shortage of new homes was driving up home prices making them unaffordable to anyone without a bank of mum and dad to call on. The BBC blamed governments for not building sufficient homes and evil, capitalist buy-to-letters for snapping up the homes that were on the market thus shutting out people looking to own their own homes. But no mention was made of immigration.
Here’s my complaint:
Why did the programme not mention immigration??
In a programme about the housing crisis (mainly in England) there was no mention of the effect of immigration on the availability and affordability of housing. Between 1997 and 2021, the population of England shot up from 48.7 million to 56.5 million – a rise of 325,000 a year mainly due to immigration – at a time when around 200,000 to 250,000 homes were being built a year. The fact that your programme-makers didn’t mention the effects of immigration suggests either that they are incredibly stupid (which I doubt) or that it was a deliberate result of political bias that the programme covered up the effects of immigration on housing availability and costs.
Please issue an apology and correction
I’m looking forward to being fobbed off by the usual overpaid, arrogant, waste-of-skin, wfh, Generation Z BBC tosser.
Category: 
This made me smile a lot David, I can sympathise with everything you say. In my advancing years and as a father of adult millennial children I dread to think what the future (and attitude)of these people will bring. It seems to me they expect everything in return for nothing ….. I know i’m going to sound like my father but in my day they wouldn’t have gotten away with it, as you know, it was either shape up or ship out.
Cheers
Daveh
Bang on David. These snowflake are best voided, they�re bad for our blood pressure.
Perhaps to ease the tension with this young lady you were making feel uncomfortable, you could have tried a change in conversation – maybe tell her you are an author and discuss the subject of one of your books ????. She�d never recover. On the other hand you�d probably find yourself debanked by Nationwide for not �sharing their values� – whatever THAT is supposed to mean in the context of banking.
I avoid the bbc at all costs except at night as the only channel I can get on my bedside radio is The world service. Last night I had the joy of listening to �The Climate Question�, yes, there is a programme about it. This episode was entitled �How do our listeners stay positive on climate?�, the previous episode was apparently �Bill Gates: How I stay positive on Climate change�. Do what??! It seems the wee lambs are so anxious about the end of the world coming, they can�t sleep at night. Gimme strength.
I think it explains why we only have about an 80 year life. Attitudes change so much that life eventually becomes intolerable.
I was entertained by a conversation on the bus this morning between a 72 year old man and a 17 year old boy. I think they must have got talking at the bus stop before getting on. The man was happy to talk about his life in Australia and spending half the year here. He claimed to have a view of the Indian Ocean but lived in Brisbane. The response from the boy to most of this was “cool”. It all got too much when the man said he was going back to Australia because it was summer there which the boy found quite astonishing. Geography wasn’t their strength. We might be to blame for Gen Z because we did educate them.
Police put people’s hurty’ feelings over most other crimes. People are in jail for saying ‘hurty’ things. Many have lost their jobs because they said the wrong thing to someone. But there are only certain groups that will be pilloried for saying ‘hurty’ things and only certain groups that will always be protected. Additionally there is a hierarchy of groups and the only group that cannot ever have ‘hurty’ feelings are straight, white men.