Just stopped at a train station and used the toilet but the toilet paper was worse than the schools of the 1960s and 1970s… It should be a legal requirement that any toilet roll in public places must be a minimum of two-ply, if not more.
Blog
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Drops of Jupiter in Hanna’s hair
Back when I was a fresh-faced 16 year old, I was in a long-distance relationship (if I can call it that, given the benefit of a decade of hindsight!) with a girl called Hanna all the way from the United States of America. She was my first love, my first heartbreak, and my first real taste of the Yanks.
When things went sour, as teenage relationships so often do, and I couldn’t as much as face getting out of bed for two days straight, she told me that, if I were ever sad and she couldn’t be there to soothe my stinging heart, she hoped that I’d listen to Drops of Jupiter by Train and think of her.
After wading my way through a very turbulent decade for such a day to come, I became fortunate enough a year ago tonight to stand just metres from Pat Monahan, and to blast my heart out to one of the songs that stands out to me as one of the few reasons that I held on when I felt like I had no other reason to do so.
So, Hanna, if you ever end up back in the atmosphere, with Drops of Jupiter in your hair, and happen to stumble on this piece, I want simply to say thank you. What we had was a fleeting moment in amongst a rather hectic lifetime, but it happened, it mattered, and it’s remembered through its ripples on my life to this day.
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Hi, little guy!
Just seen this little guy on my commute and managed to stand still long enough to photograph him. Cute, ain’t he?
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The late David Hockney
I watched a documentary on BBC iPlayer a few days ago, which felt poignant after the death of Mr Hockney earlier this month.
Being a big fan of bright and bold colours, I’ve always been particularly fond of his painting of Nichols Canyon in Los Angeles.
A rather remarkable man, by all accounts, with a talent that was clear to see. What a loss.
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Customer service as a mirror of modern life
As my Now page will tell you, my day job is handling complaints for a major UK-based telecommunications company. My role sits in our executive complaints team, where we deal with the most serious of complaints—those sent to our senior bosses, to MPs, to the papers, and so on.
One of the most fascinating parts of my job is the edge cases.
Think about it: our frontline customer service operation is optimised for the 99% of queries that come in at scale:
- “How do I set up a Direct Debit?”
- “My broadband stopped working last night.”
- “Can I add Netflix to my package?”
What comes to my team is the remaining 1%—the edge cases.
When you speak to a dozen ordinary people every day, you have the privilege of seeing beneath the tip of the iceberg. What might be simply the third complaint about our home phone service that day for me might be quite literally the difference between life and death for a vulnerable customer with a telecare alarm connected.
It’s the same with other types of complaint too. A complaint about bills being too high might sit atop recent redundancy. A complaint about a missed engineer’s appointment might be because the customer struggles with their mobility and couldn’t get to the door in time. A complaint about the wrong name on a letter might come just days or weeks after a bereavement.
As anyone who has ever worked in customer service will tell you, it’s seldom the case that anyone contacts you on the best day of their life. Indeed, my best days have been spent with my nearest and dearest, a varied playlist on Apple Music, and a creamy pint of Guinness, rather than sat alone calling my broadband provider.
By the time that you’re wound up enough to escalate all the way to my team, your complaint is often less about how it started and more about the journey that you’ve had along the way. At that point, it’s often gone from a simple enquiry to feeling like you’re being heard but not listened to. My first job is to remind you that there’s a human just like you behind the brand.
It makes me think that we need to look at complaints differently: not just as a measure of when we get things wrong, but as a mirror of the complex and interconnected lives that we all now lead. I struggle to think of many complaints that I’ve dealt with lately that have been as simple as a service failure alone.
As I sign off, I shall leave you with one of my favourite quotes by the late MP Jo Cox, as I think it sums up far more elegantly than I ever could what my job reminds me of every day:
“We all have far more in common than that which divides us.”
Jo Cox MPThe more customers that I speak to, the more I think about just how right she was.
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Food for thought on prosthetic limbs in hot weather
Whilst suffering in the sweltering heat that’s engulfed the UK this week, I came across this live update from Emma Tracey, who is a disability affairs reporter at the BBC:
When I speak to BBC Sport reporter Sally Hurst, she’s sitting in front of a fan and her voice sounds strained.
Sally is an amputee and is finding the current weather particularly tiring.
That’s because above-knee amputees use around 65% more energy to walk than non-disabled people do – but it’s not the only reason she’s struggling in the heat.
Prosthetic limbs trap heat around the socket, causing residual limbs to swell and to excessively sweat.
“I may have to literally pour sweat out of my socket several times a day,” says Sally. “Yes, it’s gross!”
The extra moisture and heat can cause blisters as well. Plus, with fewer limbs, Sally tells me “you have less surface area to get rid of heat through sweating”, making it harder to regulate body temperature.
“It’s important to manage your condition as an amputee, because any blisters can take days to heal and make wearing a prosthetic impossible.”
Amputee charity Steel Bones advises the people they support to also look after their prosthetic limbs, including avoiding leaving them in the sun or a hot car as the heat can damage the materials and affect the fit.
There’s definitely food for thought in there on how to identify vulnerable groups ahead of an emergency and how we support them—not least as I wouldn’t have had a clue, admittedly.
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A friend, a crossword, and a free pint
I was recently doing a crossword in the pub when I got stuck, so I asked my notoriously generous Scottish friend: “I’m stuck on this one: ‘Trapped on a desert island, eight letters, starting with M?’”
She responded: “Come on, silly, it’s Marooned!”. Me being me, I promptly clapped back: “Oh, go on then – I’ll have a creamy pint of Guinness*, please!”.
* Other alcoholic drinks are, of course, available.
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To be the best…
Enjoyed this quote from Lil Wayne, courtesy of Matt Mullenweg, this morning:
I believe that, to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best. When you throw your trash in the garbage can, it has to be better than anybody else who ever threw their trash in the garbage can.
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Soft drinks, DIY-style
Found this blog post from the human known as “blinry” recently (side note: I’d love to know where the nickname came from!) and found it fascinating. Isn’t the ingenuity of some people’s side projects marvellous?