Rate your service — no thanks
Sometime in the second half of last year, many weeks after the bill was due, I entered the offices of the Hamilton City Council to donate some money.
Experience has shown that you can put these things off in the short term, becoming overly fixated on the salary structure of local body bureaucracy or the personality deficiencies of certain high ranking individuals in receipt of such sums, but sooner or later they are going to get you.
They are the establishment. You are not.
Without the contributions of local businesses large and small how will the complex system of street signage fees be sustained?
Assessment of eligibility, acknowledgement of fees due, enforcement of the chapter and verse of the by-law, nothing comes cheap. You are the user. You pay. They are the council. They collect. It’s a racquet. Like the numbers game or the quid pro quo for ‘‘protection’’.
Anyway, my wider point isn’t about council extortion. Nor is an ironic one concerning the remarkable, almost laissez-faire attitude exhibited toward collection, a restraint I must concede is vastly greater than any ever tolerated by the la cosa nostra. No fingers were cut off in lieu of payment, no knee caps broken.
The persuasion was friendly, in the nature of the pickpocket, not the standover man.
This gentleness extended to the ladies at the counter. What a pleasant, efficient demeanour they demonstrated. I was genuinely convinced that they were happy to see me. Moreover, I was happy to see them. This had something to do with the guilt felt over months of nonpayment.
I was being liberated from all that. They were my liberators, cleansers of my conscience.
After the business was done, the eftpos transaction concluded, the receipt printed and the relevant GST number noted, one further action was required.
A small screen beckoned. I was being hailed. My opinion sought. The system was asking for an appraisal.
How would you rate the service you received today?
To their credit, the counter ladies were embarrassed by all this. They were not the types to seek or milk a compliment.
I was embarrassed too. Our interaction had taken at most three minutes. There was no question about their manner or competence.
If I was going to be fleeced I could ask for no better shearers. However, the act of canvassing the opinion was ridiculous.
Any judgement expressed would be a superficial one, if only because our interaction was superficial.
What a waste of time it would be to express it. What a waste of time it would be to take any notice of my response. How much had this silly little machine cost?
What was the salary of the bureaucrat who came up with the idea of instantaneous, real-time, microassessment? I guess my money was going to a good cause.
It would be in someways comforting to believe that this madness reflected only the type of blinkered, rigid thinking required in the corridors of power.
Unfortunately, subsequent events have proven otherwise.
Running Hamilton’s last remaining DVD rental shop as I do, from time to time new stock is required.
By happy coincidence I live around the corner from the city’s largest DVD retailer.
Some time after the episode at the HCC, I entered JB-Hi Fi on a mission. A customer was seeking a movie that I too had missed during its theatrical release, a biopic of Vincent Van Gogh.
After a cursory glance at the shelves I approached the counter for assistance. Did they stock At Eternity’s Gate? Whilst the ‘‘team member’’ wanted to help, the question was met with a blank stare. She had not heard of the film. Well, no crime there. She swiftly looked it up on the computer system.
Two further blank stares later she delivered the bad news.
They had once stocked the film but it had sold out. When pressed as to how many copies they had ordered, she confessed that it had been only one.
A few minutes later, after buying something else, the JB Hi Fi EFTPOS screen required post-transaction attention.
The nature of the inquiry was familiar. Feed back was again being sought. How would you rate the service you received today?
The truth was the service was adequate but the end result disappointing.
Out of fairness to the shop assistant, I again declined to register the opinion. How symptomatic of the times though that institutions show more interest in appraising the performance of their least paid functionaries than in addressing genuine, structural shortcomings.