A man walks into a branch of Bank of Scotland.

Man: “hello, I’d like to pay in £40 please”

Man hands over bank-card and two twenty pound notes.

Cashier: “ah, you know that you have to fill in this form now?”

Man: “No?, I don’t usually fill out a form, I just use my card”

Cashier: “We are one of the first branches onto a new system. You have to fill in this form. I will fill it out for you, this time”

Man: “Oh, thanks. It just seems odd that I used to be able to use my card”

Cashier: “it’s because we are migrating to a new system now that we have merged with Lloyds TSB”

Man: “I thought you just merged with Halifax?”

Cashier: “That was before. It does mean we’ll be able to offer a lot more products”

Man: “Great”

Form is filled.

Man: “Isn’t this a bit daft – given that I didn’t need to fill out a form before?”

Cashier: “We’re not allowed to say that”

Man: “Yes, but I am a customer and I’m allowed to say it?”

Cashier: “hmmm. I don’t actually know where the forms go.

Reader, that man was me.

I’ve recently contacted a number of organisations via web-forms on their respective websites as part of my ongoing campaign to become a grumpy old git.

Of the three I can think of right now, only one actually bothered to get back to me at all. That one company was Scotrail which I mentioned in a recent post.

Meanwhile, Royal Mail, who I contacted because the postman keeps delivering my post to another street, completly failed to reply despite promises of being very interested in my views. And, perhaps more surprisingly, the Charity Commission did not see fit to reply to a message I sent about a charity mailing I received which felt very dodgy. It was also from a charity that, according to the Commision website, had not filed accounts for two years and should therefore be suspended or under investigation.

I guess the moral of the story is that it is very easy to design a web-form and encourage feedback from your customers. It it much harder, but equally as important, to ensure you have the administrative back up to actually do something with the feedback.

The end result of all of this is that I actually have a ‘warmer’ feeling toward Scotrail and a much lower opinion of the Charity Commission. Royal Mail was a lost cause to start with and possibly delivered my e-mail to the wrong place…

I bought a new alarm clock from Argos over the weekend. Nothing fancy, just a basic digital alarm clock that tells the time and makes a loud noise at a time of my choice in the morning. Except, it also beeps every hour. And there is no way to turn this off. And this is causing me consternation. Why would a company design an alarm clock that will clearly be placed in close proximity to a place people will be sleeping, that beeps every hour?

So now I can’t sleep because I’m too busy thinking about how our global economy can allow some poorly paid Chinese worker to assemble my clock and ship it halfway round the world only for me to return it ’cause it actually keeps me awake.

We mostly operate in our little worlds with our comfort zones and our safe little spaces where we meet similar people and talk in our own work-based language of acronyms.

Today, I was at a Child Protection Conference at a hotel in Glasgow where we had an exhibition stand. It was the usual people, talking about the usual things with the gentle buzz of conversation audible as delegates enjoyed a coffee break.

Then, out of two separate lifts, a large group of men in red tracksuits appeared, speaking a foreign language, and walking straight through our gathering to the other side of the hotel.

This caused a noticeable ripple of confusion amongst the child protection delegates and a similar level of consternation for the tracksuited invaders.

As it turned out, the hotel was also playing host to the footballers from Hapoel Tel Aviv who play Celtic tomorrow at Parkhead and they wereon their way to a pre-match meeting.

I have to be honest. I would rather have been at their team talk..

A knock at the door today heralded a chap offering to sell me a picture of my own house! He claimed his father had been doing aerial survey work nearby and had done some freelance shots on the trip.

Now his son had framed these pictures and was driving around, locating the houses and selling the photos off. I declined his rather pricey offers and in the end he took the photo out of its frame and gave me it for a few quid. I’m guessing a picture of my house has no residual value beyond my own doorstep.

This is no google earth photo either (my first suspicion). You can see the carpet in the house next door.

Hats off to his entrepreneurial skills but slightly creepy nonetheless.