Have A Nice Day!

When did shop assistants and restaurant staff begin the custom of concluding transactions with the phrase, "Have a nice day"? The consensus appears to be that it began in earnest in the United States during the 1970's but variations on the theme go back as far as Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales from 1387. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.

"Have ye a nice day, my liege."

I remember watching the Michael Parkinson show, it must have been the best part of forty years ago now, and the actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov, whom Parkinson was interviewing, mentioned the practice and how it made him want to respond with, "I'm sorry, but I have other plans." On the one hand that might be regarded as a witty riposte that exposes the insincerity of "Have a nice day," but alternatively is a somewhat curmudgeonly response to what is in many ways simply a piece of verbal punctuation that indicates that the matter is concluded.

Having worked for many years in customer facing roles I know that after a while it becomes a matter of routine; it is difficult to serve a constant stream of customers and remain fresh and sincere. Inevitably one descends into habit and the repetition of stock phrases which inevitably which eventually sound hackneyed. As a bank cashier, in the days when cash dispensers were not so widely used, cashing cheques was a major part of the job and would habitually require one to enquire, "How would you like the money?" After uttering that for the umpteenth time it is difficult to inject any originality into it. Similarly when I worked as a foreign clerk a major proportion of my day during the summer months would involve selling foreign currency and travellers cheques to customers. After asking the customer to sign the travellers cheques, I would hand them their cash and cheques together with the record of the cheque numbers and utter the phrase, "And remember to keep the cheques separate from the receipt so that in the event that the cheques are lost you have a record for insurance." Once you have said that twenty times in a day it begins to lose all meaning. Same goes for "Have a nice day."

"How would madam like her money?"

Perhaps because "Have a nice day" has become so widespread and somewhat meaningless, it appears that many shop assistants have decide to up the ante, or perhaps simply decided to inject some variety. "Have a wonderful day" now appears to have found greater favour, or "Have a great rest of the day" if the hour is late. "Enjoy your day" (or "the rest of the day") are also gaining ground. Thinking about this recently I was at first somewhat condescending towards it, thinking it trite, meaningless, insincere, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder what else are the shop staff or waiters going to say? Even if the customer has been impolite or overly demanding they can scarcely say what they actually think, which may be altogether less kind. It is merely a social convention and one which should not really irk us (or more specifically, me) as much as perhaps it does.

The same goes for the "Sorry to keep you waiting" that one gets greeted with after standing in a queue for what seems an eternity. Are you really sorry? No, but the cashier or shop assistant has to say something to acknowledge that you've been standing there while they serve other people. The response one normally gives, "Oh, that's OK" is as insincere as the remark it responds to, but again it is convention.

What still annoys me, however is something that more usually comes within a conversation with a call centre. After the inevitable button pushing through a series of menus that become more and more labyrinthine, after answering the predictable security questions, after listening to the inevitable muzak while on hold, and having finally reached a human being, one asks one's question or makes one's request. Sometimes this ends well, sometimes not, however even when the person at the other end of the phone has not been able to assist in any way whatever, they then say "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" Anything else? Anything else? You didn't help me with my original query, how can you help me with anything else if you haven't helped me already?

Going back a bit, to the bit before the shop assistant or whoever, says "Have a nice day," there is the greeting. If one has queued up to be served at a bank counter then the likely greeting from the cashier is hopefully something like, "Good morning (or afternoon), how can I help you?" Again it is convention, it merely opens negotiations and it is the sort of thing that I uttered thousands of times in a past life. At a till in a shop the likelihood is that one merely wants to pay for something so the "how can I help you?" can be a bit superfluous, but it is nice to hear "good morning" or "good afternoon" not the "alright?" that appears to have become more and more common, particularly in the dimly lit, nightclub style stores that play music at deafening volume and seem to be organised more for the convenience of their employees than their customers.

Queuing is something which we British are supposed to be good at, which we endure come what may, but research shows that many people are now more likely to abandon transactions if they have to wait too long. Apparently six minutes is the tipping point; wait any longer than that and we are likely to ditch our purchase and walk out. Sometimes we don't have any choice if we have an urgent transaction in a bank or building society. I always used to find the Abbey National particularly annoying on that score. I would go in, join a queue of three or four people and find, what seemed an eternity later, that no one had moved, that all of the cashiers were engaged in lengthy and complex transactions, not taking in cheques or paying out money, but discussing mortgages, opening accounts or attempting to resolve a query on an ISA. Part of the problem is the removal of back office processes from banks and building societies; it saves time and money for the organisation to have the customer facing staff complete the whole of the transaction but boy does it frustrate the customer stuck in a queue who simply wants to pay in a cheque.

Perhaps I am being too critical. Serving customers is a repetitive, often mind numbing task that can sometimes be immensely unrewarding. For the customer the transaction is a one off, for the person the other side of the counter it is just one of hundreds in the day so it may be hard to remain fresh, cheerful and sincere and not descend into platitudes, cliché and banality. I suppose that a cheery "Have a nice day," however artificial, is probably preferable to unfeigned indifference.

Have a nice day!

Walking In Flip-Flops

Living, as I do, on the cusp of East London and Essex, the weather is fairly unremarkable. While other parts of the country may get blanketed in snow, even as close as twenty odd miles away over the Thames in Kent, we will probably get away with a light dusting. Yes, we get our fair share of rain and in the summer months it gets hot and in the winter it gets cold(ish); a couple of nights ago the temperature dropped to a degree or two below zero. Like I say, nothing remarkable. But it is quite cold at present, so why are so many people dressing as though it is summer? By the by, and I'm not sure whether this is because I'm getting older or because of the tablets I take for my high blood pressure, but I seem to be noticing the cold a lot more this winter. Seeing people so underdressed makes me feel even colder!

I first noticed the phenomena a week or so before Christmas. I walked up to the shops one Saturday morning to buy a newspaper and there was a man wearing shorts, flip-flops and a short sleeve t-shirt. Now it wasn't freezing that particular day, but it didn't strike me as the weather for clothing more appropriate for a heat wave. Shortly afterwards I noticed a significant number of men in Tesco and other shops and generally ambling about, wearing shorts. This culminated last weekend in seeing a man clamber out of his car at the petrol station wearing a thick padded jacket, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Apart from the inadvisability of wearing flip-flops while driving, his outfit struck me as outlandish; above the waist he must have been comfortably warm, while his legs must have been freezing - bizarre. I have noticed a couple of reports on Facebook from people in other parts of the country spotting men in shorts, even commuting by train, and given the age of the men so dressed, I don't think the phenomenon can be put down to teenage rebellion.

Jacket...

 

...flip-flops. The internet apparently does not have a picture of both of them together.

This trend reminds me of my school days in a way. Back then, when Crombie or sheepskins were the overcoats of choice for the more "laddish" element at my school, those who favoured them had a tendency to wear them during Autumn and discard them during the depths of Winter, when they would, if possible also cast off their blazers. Presumably this showed how hard they were. The more bookish of us would, had our mothers had their way, have been dressed in overcoats, scarves, gloves and balaclavas. I managed to draw the line at the balaclava, having successfully convinced my mother that wearing one was the quickest way to get beaten up by someone who wasn't even wearing a blazer.

Last year postmen were banned from wearing shorts in bad weather. No one told this man.

Thinking about my school days  I recall that hardly anyone came to school by car in those days. For those for whom it was too far to walk there was the bus, for everyone else it was Shanks pony. I just looked up my route on Google Maps; it was one mile, although it seemed a lot further then. A mile is about 2,000 steps according to the nhs website and the nhs are recommending that everyone walks 10,000 steps per day, because apparently this will have a significant, beneficial effect on your health. The average person walks between 3,000 and 4,000 steps per day, which means that there are some people walking a lot less than 3,000 steps  and while there are obviously some groups of people, the elderly, the infirm and the disabled who would fall into that category, there are presumably a lot of able bodied people who could easily walk a lot more who simply are not.

This made me wonder how many steps do I take each day, so I dug out a pedometer and started keeping a record. Last Sunday for instance I didn't really walk anywhere, just around the supermarket getting some things for dinner; otherwise it was simply walking around the house. I accumulated 8,419 steps. On Monday, merely walking about the house (including a lot of up and down the stairs while doing the laundry), I managed 8,828 steps and on Tuesday when I actually ventured outside and walked into Romford (a distance of about 1¾ miles) I completed 11,631 steps...and I wasn't really trying. It is true that a gentle amble round the house, amassing a few thousand steps over the period of a whole day is not quite what the experts envisaged, but it strikes me as being yet another indicator of the way society has changed for the poorer that anyone needs this sort of thing pointing out. Sadly it still has to be pointed out to people that an excess of salt and sugar laden junk food combined with a lack of exercise can lead to obesity and poor health.  I look back to my childhood when convenience food was a rarity, when eating out or getting a takeaway was a singular treat, the majority of our diets consisted of home cooked meat, potatoes and vegetable and there was little obesity. I dug out a school photograph circa 1969 in which there are only two children who could even marginally be described as overweight (one of whom, if memory serves me correctly was the son of a local butcher). We ate healthily because there was little choice and we exercised more, again because to some extent there was little choice.

Now, since my pedometer indicates that I have fallen way below my daily step quota while I have been writing this, I must go for a walk.

Water, Water Everywhere

"Thank you for your prompt payment, as always," said the chap in the plumbers when I went to pay my bill recently after we had had some new taps and a shower installed. It occurred to us both that I had become something of a regular customer.  "I don't know why," I said, "but everywhere I've lived I have had water cascading through the ceiling at one point or another. Perhaps I ought to move to a bungalow."

Looking back to when I lived with my parents, I can never recall any drama with the plumbing beyond the odd dripping tap. As soon as I married and owned property however, it appears that rarely a month has passed without some sort of water related emergency, or if not emergency, some sort of incident that requires the visit of a plumber.

When I married June our house had no central heating, something we addressed pretty quickly by having it installed, and at the same time we had the bathroom brought into the twentieth century, which included a new bath, toilet and shower. Not long afterwards we were awoken around dawn by a loud bang and the sound of water pouring from a burst pipe. Cue dash to turn water off at mains and frantic phone call to plumber. The first time someone used the shower water poured down the wall in the lounge. This taught me a valuable lesson (obviously unknown to our plumber), that when applying mastic around a bath tub, it is preferable to do so with the bath full of water. If you do so when the bath is empty, filling the bath causes the mastic to stretch and crack and for gaps to appear so that when you use the shower, water runs down the tiles, through the crack, down the wall and into the room below.

We moved house and it was while we lived there that June died, consequently I spent little time at the house, moving back with my parents for a while. On one of my occasional visits to the house I went into the dining room and noticed a water stain on the ceiling. Venturing upstairs, I found that the tank was leaking and the carpet in the back bedroom was saturated. I phoned a plumber I found in the Yellow Pages. Someone turned up; I hesitate to call him a plumber as he had no tools of any description. I lent him a torch and a screwdriver (with which he picked in a fairly haphazard manner at the jacket round the boiler). He said he would have to go away and call back with a quote for the work. An hour passed, at which point I correctly deduced that he would not be calling back, so I plucked another plumber's number from the directory and was rewarded by the visit of someone who not only had tools, but knew what they were doing.

Even Mario has his own tools, my plumber didn't!

Having remarried, that house was sold, and with Val, I moved into another property. At this property the boiler gave up the ghost and had to be replaced by our now regular and reliable plumbers. Except, when they put in the new boiler they failed to tighten one bolt adequately, and guess what? Water through the ceiling. Still, that was fairly easily sorted. Then we had the kitchen gutted and new units and appliances installed. All went well until one Sunday morning when rainwater began bucketing through the ceiling. The workmen went up on the flat roof of the extension where the kitchen was but could find nothing amiss. That night, in the teeth of a gale, there was a loud crash that upon investigation turned out to be a drainpipe detaching itself from the wall. The cast iron pipe had corroded so badly that at the point where it met the roof there was a gaping hole through which water was pouring.  That was fixed, but shortly afterwards (and for not the only time at that property) we could smell gas. This turned out to be a poor connection to the gas hob, which was easily rectified but just as well it was done quickly otherwise the consequences could have been catastrophic.

We then moved to a house that was, when we bought it, only two years old. Now you would think, or at least you would hope, that plumbing problems would be some time in the future. Unfortunately it was only a few years after moving in that I noticed a water stain on the kitchen ceiling, immediately underneath the shower in the en suite bathroom. Tentative investigations could not identify the source of the leak and on the basis that leaks don't get better on their own, we got someone in to rip out the shower and remodel the bathroom. Since then we have had intermittent leaks from the same source and have had a whole army of plumbers traipsing through the house without being able to definitively identify the source of the problem. Even now there is the occasional drip.

Been there, seen it and if there were a t-shirt, I would have it.

New builds being what they are (lowest cost, lowest common denominator) our house has, in the fifteen years we have lived here, required a new fence (wooden fence posts rot), a new conservatory and a new central heating boiler along with the remodelled en suite. One year the boiler went progressively more and more wrong over a period of a few months, culminating in a complete failure just before Christmas. What an interesting Christmas that was, huddling round the gas fire in the lounge for warmth and bathing in a couple of inches of water decanted from kettles into the tub.

I have concluded that while hot and cold running water is for most people an amenity that can be taken for granted, it is something that I can never have total faith in. As often as not the running water in my house is not confined to the places it should be and is determined to run through ceilings, down walls and over floors. I have further concluded that when I left school nearly forty years ago and with no clear idea of what I wanted to do (hence my drifting into banking and staying there more through inertia than anything else), I really ought to have got into plumbing. I probably would have earned at least as much as I did in the bank (almost certainly more) and my goodness it would have saved me a bob or two!

Sticks and Stones

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That was something my Mother would say to me if I came home from school and complained to her that someone had said something hurtful to me. It has to be said that it's a bit glib and not much comfort to people who are on the receiving end of bullying taunts on a daily basis, and now that cyber bullying is sadly such a common phenomena, even less helpful as a response to victims, but...

I rather fear that society these days has got its proverbial knickers in a twist over the differences between free speech, personal insults and hate crimes. The right to freedom of expression that we enjoy in the United Kingdom is rightly balanced by exceptions on the grounds of  threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress or cause a breach of the peace, various prohibitions on the grounds of indecency, incitement to racial hatred, incitement to religious hatred, incitement to terrorism including encouragement of terrorism and dissemination of terrorist publications, glorifying terrorism,  treason,  etc, etc. So far, so sensible, but...

What we seem to rushing headlong towards is a state in which anything that is said can, if enough people so decide, turn out to be an abuse of our freedom of expression. There have been some recent examples, not all I would argue, treated consistently. Prospective Ukip Parliamentary candidate Kerry Smith made homophobic, racist and obscene comments and was promptly dropped by his party. Ukip leader Nigel Farage appeared on radio and tied himself in knots, on the one hand defending Smith's use of the term "Chinky" by saying "If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you're going for?" but then telling the interviewer that he himself had never and would never use the term. Sorry, Nige, I don't believe you.

Farage, tying himslef in knots on radio.

Then we had Wigan Athletic owner using the same word for a Chinese restaurant, being forced to apologise and being banned from football for six weeks and fined £50,000 although the Football Association said it was "satisfied" Whelan "is not a racist" and did not intend to cause offence by his comments. On that basis one might ask what exactly his offense was. Whelan is of a generation that undoubtedly were casually racist, sexist and homophobic; you only have to watch the majority of British sit-coms made in the Seventies to see that. On The Buses, Mind Your Language and the execrable Love Thy Neighbour perpetuated all sorts of stereotypes and attitudes, attitudes that remain common among people of my parents' generation. Not that I am defending these attitudes or language, but it is more a case of times changing but people not, rather than anything more sinister. Attitudes and behaviours that have been ingrained over a lifetime are difficult to change; imagine if a word that is now considered benign, like socialist, or democrat, suddenly became proscribed, do you imagine that everyone would suddenly stop using it, even absent mindedly?

The Love Thy Neighbour cast

Then there is Katie Hopkins. Hopkins is a weekly columnist with The Sun and a former contestant on The Apprentice. She holds some fairly controversial and somewhat unconventional views and is wont to tweet many of them when not holding forth in the press or on television. Her recent remarks, unfortunate at best, about the Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola after working in Africa, have seen her described by Adam Hills on TV and Twitter as "a professional s***stirrer" and compared with a convicted paedophile, to which the Twitteratti responded favourably. So it is perfectly acceptable to be as offensive as you like in countering someone who you think has been offensive? So much for reasoned debate.

 

Katie Hopkins and a typical example of her Twitter output.

Now I hold no brief for Katie Hopkins, and I'd better be careful that I don't fall into the trap that other people who have started sentences like that have, and end up agreeing with her, but this last week she was also accused of a hate crime after calling someone fat.  The "victim" called the police, who chose not to attend the scene of the crime. Actually, what she said was that the person in question was unhealthy because of the weight she was carrying and  while that is a quite personal remark, one which some people might take offense at it, is it a hate crime? On balance, I don't think so, especially since the remark was made on a television programme that the "victim" was appearing on, voluntarily presumably, called My Fat Story. If our "victim" was so sensitive about their weight what in heaven's name were they doing appearing on such a show?

And as for Russell Brand...Actually I cannot abide him or his humour, but that is a matter of taste. I admit to having had a laugh when he called Nigel Farage "a pound shop Enoch Powell," recently but now he has described Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls as a “clicky-wristed snidey c***” on Channel 4's Big Fat Anniversary Quiz. The Enoch Powell remark was a relatively witty analogy and was at least directed to Farage face to face, whereas the insult aimed at Balls was spiteful, offensive and unfunny. I think it perfectly reasonable to describe it as a hate crime under the current definition, but should any action be taken? Categorically not, unless impersonating a comedian is now a crime. After all, Ed Balls is a high profile politician, so as the saying goes, if he can't take a joke he shouldn't have joined.

Russell Brand

Ed Balls

Of course hate crime (and how I dislike that expression, borrowed as it has been from Orwell and overworked to the point where it loses any real meaning), is often merely the precursor to a crime of violence against the person or of criminal damage and however we look at "hate crime", violent crime that results is a serious matter. What concerns many people is that crimes that have a "hate" element will be prioritised by the police and treated more severely by the courts than identical offences where there is no "hate" factor.

And while we are on that subject, which is more of a hate crime anyway, describing a Chinese restaurant as a "Chinky" or a fellow human being as a “clicky-wristed snidey c***”? Why does society find the latter more acceptable than the former? 

The Amateur Drinker

I like pubs. I make no bones about it, I like them a lot. I like country pubs with exposed beams and roaring fires, I like City pubs with their pin-striped clientele,  I like "the local" with its cast of characters, I even like the slightly disreputable back street boozers you find in the East End. There are a few pubs I'd go out of my way to avoid, or at least not visit a second time, but generally there are more I like than I don't like. As far as I am concerned, I'd much rather go to a pub for a swift half than drink at home. Except at this time of year.

From the middle of December until New Year's Day the pub becomes something of a no-go area for me and there are two reasons for this. One is down to the pubs and publicans and the other is to do with the customers, or a particular subset of customers. My gripe with pubs and the publicans is (or was, I've not been to a pub on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve for over a decade so things may well have changed) the way in which the entry policy suddenly changes because it is the festive season. There you are, popping out for a drink with friends on one of these occasions and suddenly the pub has bouncers who won't admit you unless you have a ticket. As I say, I may well be completely out of touch on this, but it was a common policy years ago that for Christmas Eve (lunchtime and evening) and for New Year's Eve you may be required to purchase a ticket in advance to gain entry. This ticket would sometimes include a "free" drink and perhaps a charitable donation as part of the price, but while it probably helped publicans manage the number of people in their establishment, it played havoc with the arrangements of their customers.

One Christmas, it must be about twenty-five years ago I was a regular Friday night patron, along with a few friends,  of The Ship in Gidea Park. As the holiday season approached we asked the publican if he was issuing tickets for Christmas Eve and he said that he wasn't. When I arrived on that evening I found my entrance barred, "Ticket only," said the guy on the door. Apparently the publican had done a U-turn a couple of days before Christmas and decided to issue tickets. This being before the widespread use of mobile phones, I had no idea where any of my friends were. I hung around for a while, saw no one I knew and ended up back at home in front of the television. Not a happy experience. But more annoying yet is the sort of pub goer that appears largely at Christmas (although they can be spotted at other times of the year), the blasted nuisance that is The Amateur Drinker.

The Ship, Gidea Park

The Amateur Drinker is totally ignorant of pub etiquette and completely oblivious to the annoyance that they cause to other drinkers and bar staff. These are the people who cause the regular pub goer to have to wait, seething quietly, an extra ten minutes to get served, these are the people who cannot understand that although there is no visible queue, there is an order in which people expect to be served. The best bar staff in the best pubs know exactly what order customers got to the bar in, if they err sometimes the etiquette among regular pub goers is to defer to the person who was actually first. A pub I frequented when I worked at Midland Bank in Threadneedle Street was The Cock and Woolpack, a tiny but extremely popular place where the bar staff were renowned for serving more than one person at a time and, would verbally, or sometimes merely with a nod of the head, indicate the order in which they would serve their waiting and thirsty patrons. No anxious waiting to see whose eye one could catch behind the bar there. The Amateur Drinker has no concept of this.

The Cock and Woolpack. The entrance to what was Midland Bank is immediately to the left (very convenient!)

Like birds of a feather, Amateur Drinkers flock together, although occasionally they may have a seasoned drinker in tow, who unless they have been able to take charge of the group, will be cowering in embarrassment as far from the bar as is possible while still remaining on the premises. Having attracted the attention of a member of the bar staff, the lead Amateur Drinker will, having first finished whatever hilarious anecdote they were relating, turn to the group and ask, "Right, what is everyone having?" Several minutes of negotiation now take place while the group decide on what they are all drinking and the barman or barmaid smiles and inwardly sighs and the waiting drinkers wonder whether they might be better off going down the road. It amazes me that this happens, after all the lead Amateur at least knows what they want (or one hopes they do), so why not order that while everyone else decides what they want? Better yet, why not spend the time they were waiting to be served to determine their order? The Amateur Drinker also has a tendency to attempt to order drinks that are not normally served in many pubs. Tea and coffee are popular choices for the Amateur (although in fairness, many pubs do serve these beverages nowadays), along with more obscure drinks like Cranberry juice or Diet Ginger Beer. It is perhaps inevitable that after the Diet Cokes, half of lager shandies and J2O's have been ordered that the last drink to be requested will be a pint of Guinness. Anyone doing this deserves all of the opprobrium that can be heaped upon them.

Order it last and you WILL get the pint on the left.

Having completed their order, the Amateur Drinker must now pay for the round. Buying in rounds is an alien concept to the Amateur Drinker, so when the barman says, "That's £24.78 please," the Amateur turns to his (or her) friends and says, "Shall we have a whip then?" Cue much scrabbling for purses and wallets.  £10 or £20 notes are proffered, except by Geoff from Accounts who has come out without any cash ("Can I pay by card?") and Donna from Reception, who is only drinking Coke and wants to pay for her own. The transaction, which ought to have taken just a few moments, now appears to be entering its second hour. Alternatives to the terror of the whip are the resolve of everyone in the group to pay for the whole round, "No, no, I insist. You can get the next one," they all parrot, thus extending the time it takes to complete their drinks order still further.  Most terrible of all is the insistence of some, or all, of the party to pay for their drinks individually, "How much was the Goji Berry Juice? And the Coke?" To make matters worse, the Amateur Drinker actually believes that by paying with a £20 note and assorted change to the value of £4.78 (which takes ages to count and sort) they are in some way speeding up the transaction by saving the barman from giving them 22p change from a twenty and a fiver.

 

"I've got the odd £4.78 if that helps?"

Because the round is such a difficult concept for the Amateur Drinker to grasp, another tactic is for the group to not only pay individually, but order individually too. Thus the lead Amateur Drinker will order their drink, pay and then defer to Amateur Drinker Number Two, who orders, pays and then passes the by now suicidal barman on to Amateur Drinker Number Three. At this point the regular customers begin to lose the will to live and wonder if it's worth trying that dodgy pub on the High Street, the one that has just re-opened after the drugs bust.

About now, with luck, the Amateur Drinkers  will go into hibernation. Once that happens it is safe to go back to the pub. Cheers!