Sometimes, they understand exactly how stupid I am.
*
At one end of the scale, you have a nameless local pub that took to extremes its expectation of what an averagely dumb middle aged man can do with technology, when my mate and I visited.
‘Just order and pay for your drink on our app’ said the girl in the apron, ‘And put your table number on it. Then we’ll bring it to you.’
‘We don’t have your app,’ we said, and she told us to download it.
‘My phone’s out of battery,’ I lied, but only to disguise that this was all way above my pay scale.
‘There isn’t any signal,’ Richard lied, but only to disguise the fact that he didn’t know how to do it, either.
‘Up to you. You can’t have a drink any other way,’ she said. So we sat there and looked sad until someone else came up and kindly, and illegally, took our order.
‘Still not on it?’ she beamed, when she went past, with more than a hint of the Borgias. We smirked, because we knew that our drinks were on their way.
‘Can we have the bill?’ we asked, half an hour later.
‘No. you’ve already paid,’ she said, assertively. ‘You couldn’t have got a drink any other way.’
‘But we did,’ we said, ‘and we don’t want to do a runner.’
‘You’ve paid. That’s all you need to know,’ she added with finality, as if the bill had been settled by an event of immaculate conception, or one of Matt Hancock’s publican friends had stood us the round. For an instance, I wondered if some passing piece of technology had read my card.
The friendly waiter walked past, and we offered to pay again, only to find that he would get into more trouble if we did, and it was found that he had broken the rules, than if we did a runner, and he had to admit that he had failed to stop us.
I think we sorted it by giving him a tenner’s tip and suggesting he offered it to the publican if it didn’t all balance up at the end of the evening.
*
Compare and contrast this with the much maligned DVLA, who courteously reminded me that my car tax was up for renewal at the end of the month.
Because I hate and fear technology, and because every local post office has either been closed, or its postmaster wrongly imprisoned, or something, I made it the first thing on my to-do list at 5.15 this morning, allowing a couple of hours to complete it before I walked the dog.
By 5.16, I had done it. It set the few steps out with such miraculously wonderful clarity that even someone- me, obviously- who can’t access his i-phone diary, sailed through it like Prince Harry sails through a tough Oprah Winfrey grilling.
Whoever says that small business has got service cracked needs to go down a similar road to Damascus.
I felt almost cheated. And then I felt almost churlish spending a small portion of the spare 1 hour 59 minutes writing to Grant Shapps asking how he thought we were likely to achieve carbon neutrality when people like me could drive my car 15,000 miles a year on expensive and crowded roads for just £30.00. I make that £0.02 pence a mile.
Now, in my lunch break, I understand the gorgeous sense of what Martin Sandbu of the FT calls the ‘tomato ketchup economy’, in which everything that has been so difficult to get recently, no matter how much you shake the metaphorical bottle, (hence increasing prices), is suddenly going to be in bountiful supply when the ketchup finally pours out (and therefore much cheaper).
Beer. It can only be solved by beer.
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