Are you being served?

The great Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma to you and I) was a wonderful proponent of offering up salient and timeless quotes; pearls of wisdom, little nuggets of incisive, purposeful gold, life's truths, that resonate and hold true as much today as they did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

One of my favourites was something I first came across when working as the Customer Service Development Manager for InterCity West Coast trains in the mid 90's.

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it.

He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.

We are not doing him a favour by serving him.

He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so."

...and so to contrasting experiences in the past week or so.

1. 'The Ugly': The Post Office, St. Peter's, Worcester

We are in the process of obtaining Indonesian passports for Milla and Louisa, who are eligible for both British and Indonesian citizenship until they are 18, when the will be required to choose whether they wish to be British or Indonesian. Sounds complicated, it is.

This involves a fairly extensive round of form filling, passport photos and documents dispatched to the embassy in London.

So, laden with all the appropriate documents (x2) I visited our local post office in St. Peter's - a post office serving a community of a significant size. Indeed, St. Peter's has it's very own behemoth in supermarket form, Tescos; a place that is open from 7:30am - 12pm with the cash till ringing continuously. St. Peter's is big.

The lady behind the counter, a middle aged woman with a bookish face eventually looked up to realise I was waiting to be served. The only customer waiting. To say her manner was brusque and officious is, frankly like saying Colonel Gaddafi has been a 'little bit harsh' on his own people.

Our exchange was memorable;


Me; "Good morning. I'd like to send these documents to London please by registered mail and include a special delivery envelope, pre-paid so they can return them please."

(Mrs Postman Pat gets two Special delivery envelopes)

Me; "Er, I don't want 2 special delivery, but to send..."

Mrs. Pat; "Registered delivery is special delivery."

Me; "That's not what I meant, I just want to send it so they sign for it..."

Mrs. Pat; "Well, you need recorded delivery. Just fill in the address on the special delivery envelope....oh, if you can sort yourself out over there, so I can serve the gentleman behind you"

I moved over, filled in the address in 30 seconds , turned round and Mr. Gentleman-Behind-Me had about 8 big parcels, addressed to Ireland, Estonia and all over the globe. Which had to be weighed.

I wasted another 15 minutes of my life listening to old Mrs. Vinegar Knickers telling Mr. Parcels that "I can't lift them...I won't if they are heavy...I've just had an operation, so I am not lifting anything!"

Mr. Parcels.."But, but..what do I do then?...."

Mrs. Vinegar Knickers, "Just put them on the scales.!..oh, they are not heavy".

Each bloody parcel had to be weighed, stamps applied and passed through to the increasingly bored and exasperated Post Office Customer Service Assistant of the Year, 1862.

By now, blood pressure rocketing, veins on head throbbing in frustration, I was ready to explode. Aha! My turn again.

"I've filled them in. Do you have an envelope I can purchase to put all the documents and the special delivery envelope in please?"

Mrs. Postman Tw*t "No. We don't sell them here."

Me; "You don't sell envelopes!....but this is a Post Office....I need to send my documents...you haven't got any envelopes.....RIGHT! I'LL HAVE TO USE A SPECIAL DELIVERY ENVELOPE THEN!!!!"

Cue more address filling (but there was no way I was moving this time) and the immortal words;

"Just put your card in...no the other way up (idiot!)...that's £11 exactly please".

ELEVEN POUNDS of the Queen's money!! To send some documents, which were not valuable, but I needed to know were received in London. 11 pounds. £5.50 for each special delivery envelope. Ridiculous. But the fact I had to pay such a large sum of money is nothing to the fact that;

• The Post Office doesn't sell envelopes in a sub post office serving a community the size of metropolitan borough of London


• I had to endure the worst kind of officious, odious, arrogant, presumptuous and p**s poor customer service outside one of Stalin's gulags
  

I should have cycled there myself and delivered them in person.

"The Good": Church House Farm Campsite, Llangain, Carmarthen, Wales

Ying and Yang. Black and White, Shoddy Customer Service and Excellent Customer Service.

To quote Issac Newton's third law of motion; "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

For every Mrs. Postman Pat, selling stamps and dispensing gruff, obnoxious service, there are people like Mrs. Freeman.

In the planning for the cycle trip to Dublin, I am organising 4 campsites in Wales, Ireland and England in addition to a night in a hotel in Dublin.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. However for everything you need information on their is a vast quantity of ideas, suggestions, recommendations, together with contrary opinions, warnings and people giving their two penneth on anything and everything.

After a considerable trawl, I decided on a campsite just south of Carmathen in south Wales, the end of the first day of hard cycling in June. 114 miles over hilly and then mountainous terrain. We will need a welcoming, friendly place to rest our aching legs by the time we roll in to the campsite.

I rang the number and Mrs. Freeman listened to my request and informed me of someone else doing a cycling trip for charity who is going to stay on the campsite. She was genuinely interested and impressed at what myself and Oliver are going to do.

I enquired how much it would be for the night.

"Well, it's ok...because you are doing it for charity, I'll waive my fee, it would normally be £24...but there's no charge."

"We can camp for free?...That's really kind of you...I never expected that...thank you so much. We are really looking forward to coming to Carmarthen."

Amazing how different people can be.

3. The Bad / So-so / OK, but wait and see.

Jury is out on this one. I have had some t-shirts designed and printed and two cycle jerseys printed for the trip. They cost a lot of money, which Oliver's company has kindly provided us the money for in sponsorship. They look really good. The t-shirts are a stand out red with a cool design on the front. I'm really happy with them.

The cycle jerseys look good too, but I have a gripe. The name and SCOPE logo on my shirt are wonky. Sloping at an angle of 25% upwards, whereas Oliver's is spirit level flat. Perfect. Is it that difficult to get something as critical as my name and the charity's name straight? Especially when they cost a lot of money.

I won't name and shame as I will be returning to the shop tomorrow to ask them to put their mistake right.

I hope they will take Mahatma Gandhi's words of wisdom and apply them to me. I expect to have my customer status respected and reaffirmed and the problem rectified without fuss. I do not expect the antithesis of Gandhian principles as displayed by Mrs. Postman Pat.

We will see. Come on Gandhi!