Service with a scowl

MADDIE YORK

I seem to enjoy making social interaction uncomfortable for myself. If there’s an altercation to be had with a stranger, I’ll wade right in, all uppity and crusading (see my disagreement on the P4 bus). Yes, where others keep their heads down, I put my foot down. And yesterday, in the supermarket – which I won’t name; they’re all much of a muchness – in the face of insurmountably appalling customer service, I did just that. And it was exhilaratingly awkward.

I was standing in the queue with my basket – weekend supplies: gin, lime x 2, tonic x 1, Saturday Times, multi-pack of fun-size Dairy Milk – casually observing the customer being served ahead of me. The checkout girl was bungling items through the scanner, not making the vaguest hint of eye contact with the lady customer, and carrying on a conversation with her mate on the next checkout – “You gettin’ your hair dyed tomorrow, yeah? Wicked innit. You goin’ out tonight? Innit, though” etc. – and chuckling away as if we customers were in the way of her social life. This went on for a few minutes, the poor customer looking offended and uncomfortable. I saw red; I could not let this pass.

Upselling: how upsetting!

MADDIE YORK

I’m terribly pleased to see that customer service is on people’s minds at the moment; with Michel Roux’s Service underway on the BBC, and Mary Portas: Secret Shopper starting on Channel 4 this week, it’s clear that we’re finally squaring up to Britain’s abysmal service culture and saying “now look here, this isn’t good enough”.

We have put up for far too long with the “there you go” waiter and the “if it’s not on the shop floor, we don’t have it” gum-chewing shop assistant, and we’ve somehow come to accept that on most occasions the person paid to help customers doesn’t see any particular need to stop talking to her colleague to speak to us, or even make eye contact.

And at the other end of the scale, we’ve allowed obnoxiously over-familiar techniques to become standard: the ‘server’ who bounds up to your table and says “hey guys!” as though he’s known you all his life; the shouty and impatient  baristas barking “next, please!” and “eat in or take away?”, trained to get city lunchers out of the way as soon as possible; and the aggressive and manipulative practice of flogging you more things than you ordered, that crude and hateful sales technique known as ‘upselling’.

“Any coffee for you?” asks the barista, breezily, as you stand ready to pay for the sandwich you’ve selected from the chiller and brought up to the counter. “Err, no, thank you, just the sandwich, please,” you reply, aggrieved, wondering why she couldn’t have just waited for you to order the coffee if you wanted it. “Any cookies or crisps with that?” Pause, while you sigh, yet more aggrieved. “No, as I said, it’ll just be the sandwich today. Thank you.” And it feels as though you’re holding up a shield to deflect all the gratuitous muffins, crisps and chocolatey extras being shoved in your face and heaped on top of your order. And you pay and leave with the uncomfortable feeling of having been brazenly manipulated, wondering when on earth it became acceptable to be so openly money-grabbing.

“It irks me because it’s just so insultingly obvious. Do they think they’re Derren Brown all of a sudden?”

The waiter’s once-simple task of listening to a table of customers make their order has turned into an elaborate upselling opportunity. “Any side salads with that? Fries? More drinks?” No, no, and no. I have no problem with a waiter asking a broader, polite question to round off the order, such as “will that be all?” A question of that ilk is useful; it lets the customer know that there’s no rush, there’s still an opportunity to add something else before the order is closed. It’s the offering of specific extras that irks me: salads, fries, muffins. It’s rude because it’s presumptuous; the waiter or barista shouldn’t presume that a muffin is the ideal side order to accompany your sandwich. What if you’re allergic, or simply cake-averse? Gently asking “is there anything else you’d like?” is entirely appropriate, but wading in with suggested bonus items – and let’s get real; it’s so that you’ll spend more, not because they care about creating the perfect meal for you – is intrusive and rude.

It irks me also because it’s just so insultingly obvious. Restaurants and cafes must have a very low regard for their customers if they think we’re going to be taken in by such a blatantly manipulative sales technique. Do they think they’re Derren Brown all of a sudden? That we’ll hear “any muffins with that?” and mysteriously not be able to control our urge to buy a muffin we didn’t know we wanted?  

I’d have thought that the first rule of retail and customer service would be to presume a certain level of intelligence in your customer. It’s charm, flattery and politeness that do the work in encouraging a customer to spend more, not crude retail techniques that she can see straight through. Sadly, customer service in Britain is largely utterly charmless, rude and insulting, and upselling is one of the worst features. It’s got to the point where I’m considering pre-empting it as soon as I get to the counter, sticking my hand up and saying “hold the muffins! I just want this sandwich! This. Sandwich. Alone!” Read more by Maddie.

Best wishes to Michel Roux Jr. and to Mary Portas, both of whom are flying the flag for better customer service – and we’re right behind their missions.

Image: Paul, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Give up my elasticated waistbands? Pull the other one!

MADDIE YORK

I start this new year with an admission, which I hope you might applaud in the manner of a group therapy session: I’m Maddie, and I wear trousers with elasticated waistbands. I’ve simply never managed to be comfortable in actual trousers. Leggings, yes; tracksuit bottoms, natch. But actual fitted, designed trousers with buttons, a zip and proper seams? Definitely not.

I have a very bad history with trousers. I hate them; they seem to hate me in return. Shopping for them brings me out in a rage that ain’t pretty. And if I do actually buy any and get as far as wearing them, I become so uncomfortable I end up crying ginfully and ripping them off my poor compressed torso which sports the red marks left by buttons and bands that have dug into it all day.

Yes, I’m only 25 and I am already showing a preference for the elasticated waistband. And this is not some sort of ironic ‘young fogey’, geek-chic fashion statement – I don’t live in Shoreditch, you know – but rather a strategy that has come about by necessity and concern for my health: I physically can’t get through a day wearing any of the trousers that are on offer in shops these days. I can’t breathe properly in them, and I can’t sit down without them digging into my reproductive regions. I don’t care enough about fashion (I don’t actually care at all about fashion, truth be told) to give up my right to get through my life being able to breathe, eat, sit down, and one day bear children.

Modern trouser design shows a flagrant disregard for women’s real shapes, persisting in pushing the infuriating notion of the ‘hipster’ waistline, which fits and flatters precisely no woman who ever existed. The anger I experience as I shop for trousers – trying on pair after pair and going up and up and up the sizes, still not managing to get the blighters to go over my hips and actually do up without gaping at the back – is not caused by feeling bad about my own body, but by the outrage that the poxy shops are getting away with flogging us their stupid, unfeasible designs season after season.

 

I’ve given up attempting to align myself with any sort of retail-friendly dress size, because they’re all bollocks – especially with trousers and skirts and any item that has anything to do with the bottom area. I’m a completely different size from one idiotic shop to the next. Standing in front of a mirror in my birthday suit, I’m not unhappy with what I see; I’ve got some curvy bits and some bulgy bits, quite thin legs and a bit more going on in the upstairs area, but generally I don’t wince or weep or start thinking of drastic diet plans. All in all, I’d say I’m quite slender. This translates, ridiculously, as an 8 or an unfathomably vague ‘small’ in some shops, and a 12 or a ‘medium’ elsewhere. And that’s for the tops and shirts. For trousers, I’ve tried on anything from an 8 to a 14 and still not worked out what the hell my size is supposed to be and, no matter how many sizes I try, I still leave the changing room almost in tears and clawing about for the nearest cocktail.

When are shops, or designers, or buyers, or whoever is responsible for these matters, going to change the sodding record and try something new for us – something that allows for the fact that a woman has an actual stomach, some hips and a reasonable desire not to reveal her underwear every time she sits down? Until that happens, I’m left with no option, if I want to preserve my dignity, my ability to breathe, and my fertility potential, other than schlumping around in leggings with elasticated waistbands. Here’s another admission for 2011: I’m Maddie, and I think modern trouser design for women is a load of tosh. Read more by Maddie.

How many plumbers does it take to fix a leaky sink?

MADDIE YORK

Oh, how I wish I were simply about to tell you a lame joke. Sadly, frustratingly, all I have for you is yet another story of my being caught up in a customer service farce. And this time we’re talking plumbers. Several of them.

I’ve got a leaky sink, see. Nothing particularly unusual about that, is there? Nothing you’d think would be beyond the capabilities of a man who basically did a NVQ in Sink Studies (that might actually exist, for all I know), a man whose sole aim in his daily working life is the fixing of things that leak. Mending stuff wot spurts water out of the wrong bit. Master of leaky pipes and whatnot. Leaky McLeakerson.

Yet, somehow, this elementary task has proved too arduous for not one but three plumbers who have been called out on my behalf by my letting agency. Two plumbers have been, botched and buggered off, while the third is yet to bother turning up; perhaps he took the Distance NVQ in Sink Studies and presumed he’d never actually have to turn up in person, even once qualified.

Two men have knocked on my door, had a cuppa in my flat, messed about with ‘parts’, tightened various pipes, stuck bits of tissue and glue in places under the sink, and then sauntered off, assuring me that their work here is done, only for the dripping to resume its slow and steady erosion of my sanity as soon as I do anything that requires the use of my water supply.

Yes, it’s all very marvellous and mended for a short time after each plumber has had his fun; the leaked water having been mopped up, and a pipe vaguely tightened, things look jolly good on the surface. The First Plumber even had the gumption to say to me on his way out, “I wish all my jobs were as simple as this one!” Ho ho ho, we chuckled, feeling all glowy and satisfied. Then, an hour later, I thought I’d like to make a pot of tea; I’ll run the tap to fill the kettle. Oh. Wonderful. Even more dripping. Absolutely nothing has been fixed after all.

The Second Plumber was rather less talkative and chirpy than The First Plumber. Apart from a request for a glass of water, and the sound of some tool or other, I heard nothing from The Second Plumber, despite my best efforts to engage him in small talk. I can’t bear making small talk with tradesmen (“Have you come far?” or “Been busy today?” or “The weather’s turned, hasn’t it?”), but it’s just what one does; it’s far less uncomfortable and rude than sitting there in silence as though he’s a servant who doesn’t deserve to be spoken to. This chap – think Michael ‘Lurch’ Armstrong from Hot Fuzz, but even less articulate – refused to indulge me even a few small comments. His legacy in my life was nothing more than a clump of white glue and kitchen roll stuffed down the pipes; a depressing, entirely useless mess that melted and flopped away onto the kitchen floor gradually that afternoon, allowing the leak to persist.

So, my hope now rests in the absent hands of The Third Plumber, who is already my least favourite, and the least effectual, of my Three Stooges, simply for failing to turn up. He was requested three days ago, and he called me yesterday to say he’d come round today. And now it’s today. And he hasn’t made his entrance. I called the letting agency and they’re chasing it up for me. Incidentally, isn’t it immensely annoying being a tenant rather than a home owner, and having to go through an agency for every tiny thing?

All I can do now is keep mopping the leak, keep pouring the gin to take the edge off my irritation, keep the earplugs in to block out the dripping sound, keep sighing, and keep hoping. I simply need a man who knows about sinks to come and fix my sink. It ought to be so easy, the most basic of customer service interactions, a short sketch with just two characters, me and The Plumber, and a very simple plot. Instead I’m locked into a seemingly endless, terribly unfunny joke. And nobody is getting any laughter from me when the punchline finally comes. Read more by Maddie.

No, we will not be frollicking in the park, thanks

MADDIE YORK

I so agree with Sam: summer is so difficult. I really cannot be doing with it. For starters, it’s too hot. It’s TOO HOT. How am I supposed to function when it’s like this? Oh yes, I’m supposed to eat silly too-cold food, wear silly clothes that look like underwear, and I’m supposed to do a lot of silly lounging around in public areas.

Forgive me, but if you sat about on a bench in winter, just lounging, even on your day off or on a bank holiday, you’d be distinctly frowned upon. People would think you were a tramp, frankly. But when June rolls around, the whole of Britain suddenly has twice as much time and starts lolling about eating 99s or freeze-pops (or, if you’re posh and called Sebastian or Tilly, strawberries and bubbly). And everyone’s suddenly spending four hours spreadeagled on a lawn, as though hot weather gives us a licence to to behave like we’re at Glastonbury. (Don’t even get me started on Glastonbury – or festivals, generally.)

I am just not someone of sunny disposition. Not by any stretch. I get a buzz from heavy rain, especially when it starts with that end-of-the-world-ish darkening of the sky and then – KABOOM! Fantastic! I like being inside, see, either all curled up with a paper or book or something, or at my desk. I actively choose that sort of indoorsy lifestyle at all times of the year, so it’s not as if any so-called ‘bad’ weather’s going to get in the way of my life. If anything, bad weather helps me function.

So, when TV weatherpeople start warning us in their pretend-sad voices to ‘carry an umbrella’ or ‘remember to pack the fleece this weekend’, I don’t react in the way we’re supposed to. I don’t feel remotely disappointed that I won’t be able to skip off to the park and eat lollies, wearing flip-flops and later cooing ‘Ooh, typical me, I’ve caught a bit too much sun’. Instead I think: perfect, I’d prefer to stay inside anyway, and now I’ll get that rainy-thunder soundtrack that I have actually considered buying on a CD because I love it that much.

Those inevitable invitations that come flying at you from all sides at this time of year, to go and relax in your bikini in a park on a Sunday afternoon, just because we can, are awfully hard to say no to – you just end up sounding like a total happiness-hating freak.

And if you start to address your reasons for not joining in, you come across all repressed and awkward. Try confessing to any of the following: I feel uncomfortable sitting on a lawn for that many hours because I tend to get lawn bum and lower back pain; I don’t know how to arrange my legs without ending up lying down completely which seems quite anti-social; I don’t like using public park toilets; I get squinty in the sun but don’t like it when everyone wears sunglasses because that inhibits my reading of facial expressions; all my summer trousers are white and they’ll get grassy; I’d rather have a normal lunch at home than eat silly dippy-sticky food I would never normally choose.

Exactly! If you say any of that your friends just laugh at you – believe me, I’ve tried – and make withering, superior comments such as ‘Oh, you really don't know how to live, darling.’ So you end up having to make lame excuses or pretending to be busy, all the way through to the end of summer when everyone comes to their senses and realises they’ve been lying about in public wearing garments that are not actually, when you think about it, any more decent than a BRA AND PANTS.

Then, as a windswept Peter Cockroft (someone bring the poor fellow down from the BBC London roof, for goodness’ sake) strains to warn us that the nights are drawing in, I shall light the candles, pour a glass of blood-red wine and growl happily, ‘shut that door’. Read more by Maddie.

The ladies' room: how can it go so wrong?

MADDIE YORK

How can it go so wrong? All that’s required is a toilet that flushes, a door that has some form of secure lock, enough toilet paper, somewhere to place your coat and bag, a sink nearby, some soap, and something that dries hands. Yet, for some reason, women’s public toilets are, 9 out of 10 times, barely tolerable, lacking basic provisions and cleanliness, and so awkward to navigate that you emerge, 15 minutes later, damp (“Please, please, please let people realise I just splashed water from the sink on my skirt, rather than wet myself”), flustered and annoyed.

It’s all wrong right from the moment you start looking for the toilets in a pub or restaurant. You meander around the establishment, looking for a sign or symbol to show you where the facilities are, and eventually you see something on the wall: a drawing of a hand pointing the way round a corner and up some stairs, and you follow the hand and find the room labelled with something the establishment thinks is a quirky, modern, perhaps even feminist, way to distinguish the ladies’ from the gents’, just in case we’d be offended by the old, reliable stick woman with a skirt on. Increasingly you get just an absurd “W” or “F” painted on the door, or a vintage drawing/photograph of a woman. Just give me the damn stick woman. I know her. Women have trusted her for decades; we’re seriously not about to hold her up as a symbol of female objectification.

So you’ve established it’s the ladies’ and you go in, to be confronted, usually, by two or three schoolish cubicles. You pick one; it’s the one with the broken lock, obviously. Sometimes the lock isn’t just broken but has been removed completely. Who, please, are the people who break the locks and steal them? Why would this be a fun thing to do? What is going on with that? Anyway, so you go into the next cubicle and that one has a lock that works. Good.

But, oh, hang on, where do you put your bag? There’s no hook on the door and no flat surface of any kind. Other than the floor. Which is slightly damp. “Please, please, please, let that just be splashed water, not wee,” you think as you gingerly put your bag down.

And you sit down on the loo. I won’t dwell on this particular detail, but the experience of sitting down on a wet toilet seat is one that will happen in a woman’s life hundreds of times. And a woman never, ever gets used to it, or finds a way to convince herself that it was just water splashed up by an over-zealous flushing design, rather than another woman’s ... ugh, fluids.

Glossing past the lack of toilet paper – so annoying, so inevitable, and so simple to fix, I can’t be bothered to moan about it – we’ll now move over to the basins. Right, the sink’s in one location, the soap is all the way over there on the wall and the hand-drier is all the way over on the opposite wall. And, unsurprisingly, there are trails of gloopy (often lurid pink) handwash and water marking the distances that countless women have attempted to negotiate.

Oh, I should also mention that there isn’t anywhere to put your bag down at the basins, either, so you have to clutch it under your arm, which makes washing your hands into a very careful stunt: in order to avoid covering yourself in water and dropping your bag, you can move only your forearms and vaguely rotate your wrists under the water. Which comes out in a big, badly-plumbed explosion, and gives you a wet patch just where you really don’t want one.

You get to the hand-drier which, if it works at all – how many times have you stood there waving your hands under it, to be given nothing and resort to drying your hands with cheap toilet paper that flakes wetly all over you? – gives a pathetic, rasping air that gets absolutely nowhere near sorting out your hands, particularly if it’s one of those that only blows out air in one-second bursts so you have to keep either pressing the button or waving your hands under it in order to keep it going.

Finally, mission accomplished, you can leave and return to your friends. But not before reaching into your bag for your antibacterial hand gel which you feel compelled to use, either because the soap dispensers were empty or because, even though you did manage to wash your hands, the door handle you had to touch on the way out was wet with some horrifyingly unidentifiable liquid.

So I return to my question: how can it go so wrong? The criteria for a workable, pleasant public bathroom are not particularly difficult to fulfil, are they? But it is infuriatingly rare to find one that manages to combine sensible design (individual soap dispensers above each sink, and bag hooks inside each cubicle, to name two very easy and obvious features), with cleanliness and plentiful supplies of the fundamentals (loo paper, a hand drier that actually works).

What establishments don’t realise is that, for women (I can’t speak for the men. God only knows what they have to put up with in the room marked “M”), the state of the room and the experience that lies behind that stupid little “W” is important enough to affect our opinion of the entire place. Regardless of how good the food, how cheap the drinks, how lovely the atmosphere of the place, how confusedly feminist they think they’re being by taking away the stick woman with the skirt on, if the establishment can’t provide something as basic as a clean bathroom that doesn’t leave us huffing and puffing with irritation and disgust, we’ll be taking our custom somewhere else, thank you very much. Read more by Maddie.

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I am not your 'love'. I am your customer.

MADDIE YORK

There are some things I simply can’t let wash over me. Having strangers, especially customer service people, call me ‘love’ is one of those things. I mean, how dare they? Who do they think they’re speaking to? Their mum? Their grandma? Their girlfriend?

Well, I’m none of the above, and being addressed in this over-familiar way by complete strangers irks me to my very core. My very core, I tell you!

It happens so often, and each and every time it makes me flinch. “That’s two-pound-fifty, love,” says the man at the ticket office in my train station. “Where to, love?” asks the taxi driver.

Today I was reminded how much this offends me, when I answered a call from somebody attempting to get me to sign up for one of those makeover and photoshoot days at a studio and was greeted initially with a casual “Hello, love.”

If a complete stranger calls me, on my mobile, at a time that suits them not me, and they’re trying to sell me something, how dare they, for one single solitary second, think they are entitled to address me as ‘love’?

I didn’t say anything in objection the first time and allowed the guy to give me the spiel. (This wasn’t a cold call as such; back in December I got sucked in by a special offer for a haircut with this photography deal built in. I had the haircut straight away and promptly forgot about the shoot, so the studio was calling me to check if I still wanted it. Fair play, really, but still.)

I soon gathered, though, that they were asking for more money over the phone, as a deposit for the shoot. I’d gone off the idea completely, truth be told, and the whole deal only cost me the price of one of my usual haircuts so, you know, nothing lost on my side. I certainly didn’t want to get caught up making another payment to them for something I didn’t really want. “I’ve decided not to go ahead with this, actually,” I told my ‘gentleman’ caller.

“Oh, why’s that, sweet?”

‘Sweet’? Had he actually just called me ‘sweet’? A man I don’t know. A person engaged in a conversation geared towards taking my money. A man talking to a woman in a customer service scenario. Yes, yes, I’d heard him correctly.

“I don’t have to explain to you why I don’t want the service. I’m a customer and I’ve simply changed my mind,” said I, a bit trembly in the voice now on account of the irritation.

“You might as well do the shoot, love, as you’ve already paid for it.”

Well, that was it. Hit the roof, didn’t I?

“You should not call me ‘love’ or ‘sweet’. You don’t know me and it is completely inappropriate. Please count me out of the whole deal and strike me off your list of contacts. Thank you. Good BYE.”

I really resent the fact that there is no way to slam down a mobile phone to end a call. There’s only so much dramatic statement to be made from pressing a button really hard.

I’m not asking to be called ‘madam’ or ‘miss’. That’s probably going a bit far. But, in customer service interactions and sales calls – in fact, in any interaction with someone I don’t know – I definitely expect the person to be polite and vaguely aware that I’m actually not his best mate or his girlfriend, and that we’re not having a chat on the sofa.

It should feel a bit stiff and awkward, because it’s a business interaction and our custom is at stake. They should damn well address us with courtesy and formality. Presumably they think, if there is indeed any thinking behind it and it’s not just laziness and/or sexism, that being chatty and forcing us to engage with them in a personal way will win us over and make us feel comfortable.

Well, it does not. It makes me see red. I’m sure men get called ‘mate’ all the time, too, which must be equally aggravating.

Actually, I’ve just remembered I got called ‘mate’ several times by an electrician once. I was so baffled by the fact that this man apparently interacted with everyone, male and female, as his ‘mate’, I totally forgot to be offended by the rudeness. Until now. Read more by Maddie.

Let's rescue the king of beverages

MADDIE YORK

Oh, tea. It really is quite a drink, isn’t it? It has such a marvellously comforting quality, particularly when it’s just right. For me that means real leaf tea heaped in a chunky teapot filled up with water just at the moment it boils in the kettle, stirred, left for a few minutes to brew with a tea cosy on, on a tea tray with gorgeous cups, a tea strainer, milk, sugar for those partial, and a spoon. Then, it’s poured into the cups through the strainer, milk is added, stirred gently, and it’s ready to drink, all steaming, strong and powerful.

Yes, there’s quite a lot to making the perfect cup of tea in my world. I’m OK with teabags, just about, and there are certainly ways to make the most of a teabag brew so that it creates almost the same effect as the real stuff. Putting the teabags in a pot and leaving them in there to brew helps, for starters, instead of allocating one bag per mug and doing that vaguely depressing thing of prodding the teabag about in the water, scooping it out and plopping it in the bin or, worse, on the sideboard so that it sits there sweating its sad little cold life away.

The way you involve the milk is crucial, too. With a teabag brew, the only acceptable way to do it is to get the tea to the full strength – whether that’s through said prodding/plopping action, or through brewing it in a pot and then pouring it out – and then, only then, adding the milk. Sorry, but that thing people do where they add cold milk to the teabag before pouring the boiling water in? I don’t know what to say, actually. It renders me aghast.

Tea is ritual, first and foremost. It’s not actually a functional drink. Fine, it’s hydrating, but its purpose is so much more than that. If you’re thirsty, drink some water. The whole point of having tea is that it’s more fun. It’s about mood. And it’s about sharing, getting together and having a chat while it brews, pouring it out from the communal pot, and then going back for a second cup just because you can, and it’s nice.

So, office tea rounds really are one of the most depressing things I’ve ever encountered. And, actually, they are one of the principle reasons I don’t slot easily into the office environment. There’s just no place in the corporate world for a girl who wants tea time to involve pots, strainers and cosies, is there? Unless you make the bold decision early on to be the office nutter, winning yourself an irritating tea-based nickname like Loopy Leafy and being sent incessant internal emails and YouTube videos that have any slight ‘hilarious’ reference to Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties for however long you stay with the company which, because of the tedious tea nutter role you’ve assumed, will feel like approximately forever.

The worst thing about office tea rounds, for someone like me who is massively controlling and prescriptive about how tea should be made, is having to relinquish control to the person doing the round. I can’t say “Oh, that’s fine, you make everyone else’s; I’ll do my own” because that’s just rude, selfish and sounds nutty, and you certainly can’t follow your colleague into the kitchen and hover over them giving pointers and complaining when they’re doing it wrong. And you can’t always be the one to make the tea because you end up looking like the company skivvy. So, you either have to opt out of tea rounds completely, or allow the tea to be made for you in full knowledge of the atrocities happening behind the office kitchen door.

And eventually your tea arrives on your desk, and you just know from its appearance that it’s had almost no attention paid to it. It’s quite clearly a drink that’s been bunged together: bag, plonk, milk, slosh, done. It’s got a slight film of unstirred milk floating on its surface. It’s pale and not steaming: you suspect the milk’s gone in before the water. Horrifying. Instead of flavour – you’ve taken a sip to give it a chance – it has the sad non-taste of a drink prepared almost with disdain, as though the person resented the time it took even to brew it for 10 seconds. And you drink half of it, out of politeness, and if the tea maker passes by your desk you make a big “Oh, what am I like?” pretence of having innocently forgotten it and let it go cold.

Dear, oh dear. It really is unbearable. I just can’t see the point of drinking tea unless it’s made properly. I seriously think the office workers of this nation may as well just do water rounds and have done with it. At least there’s less room to make mistakes in preparation. I wonder: would everyone start jealously guarding their own particular water glass: one person with a tumbler, one a pint glass and another a hi-ball? I’m sure office politics would ensure that even water rounds would become a ridiculous song and dance, possibly leading to memos from HR about how best to transition an effective water preparation strategy going forward to ensure hydration buy-in from all team members.

But, it would still be preferable. Frankly, anything to protect tea, the king of beverages, from this ongoing, needless abuse. Read more by Maddie.

Image (teapot): Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image (mug): www.freeimages.co.uk

Why overpluck? Don't we need our eyebrows to form expressions?

MADDIE YORK

There is a serious issue that needs to be debated, chewed over, by society. It might be good if someone could arrange a slot on Question Time. Yes, Dimbleby’s input is definitely needed. Actually, let’s go the whole hog and throw this issue onto the agenda at PMQs. Politicos (and politicas) out there, I call for your help in bringing this issue to the jaded attention of Broken Britain.

It is, of course, the nationally important matter of women overplucking their eyebrows.

I’ve been bothered by this for many, many years, ever since girls at my school began sporting thinner and thinner eyebrows until, by sixth form, there was less actual brow than brow pencil to be seen. Occasionally this preoccupation of mine takes over completely and it’s all I can think about. I simply stop seeing the women behind the eyebrows – all I can focus on is their inexpressive curves of ex-hair idling ineffectually atop their brow bones.

Why, why, why do women overpluck? I scream to myself, as I observe yet another woman who has tweezed, threaded or waxed her way through these most necessary of facial features, giving herself that unmistakeably porny look of blank, doll-like, hairless non-womanhood.

I guess at some point in recent generational transitions – from our hairier, less bothered grandmothers to our younger sisters and daughters who are attempting, poor sods, to grow up in a society that markets depilation as a way to ‘reveal the goddess in you’ – many women have become convinced that hair and sexiness are mutually exclusive.

But, these are our eyebrows, girls! They’re not a sex feature! They’re a lovely bit of facial hair that actually adds something to your face! Do you see how mad it is to think of them in the same category as other hair on your body that you routinely remove?

We all like a tidy pit, a smooth leg and a moustache kept under control. But, please, develop a sense of perspective about this. Eyebrows are facial hair, yes, but they’re a crucial component of any expression. And keeping full, normal-shaped eyebrows does not make you ungroomed and unfeminine. I can’t believe I actually have to argue that as a point!

I have many problems with Keira Knightley, believe me, but her eyebrows are not one of them. They are fabulous. Keira is the poster girl for women’s eyebrows. They’re tidied up a bit, sure, but she’s kept their natural shape – lovely, dark, full (like the one pictured, but that’s not her) – and she looks intelligent, characterful and beautiful. Anyone think Keira looks unfeminine? No, I didn’t think so.

The fact is: the fuller your brows, the classier and more intelligent you look. I hate to make it a class thing, but almost every time I notice a woman with overplucked brows, she’s of a distinctly chavvy persuasion. Usually with her hair dyed a colour way too garish for her complexion, probably prompting her to thin out her eyebrows which now look far too dark and prominent against her fake hair colour.

So, what’s it going to take to stop women savaging their eyebrows? They’re everywhere, these women who’ve plucked so mercilessly for so long that they’ve killed the follicles and ended up having to draw them on completely! If even the fame, attractiveness and success of full-browed Hollywood actresses can’t convince women to take a more moderate approach to plucking, then I struggle to offer anything that might do the trick.

Perhaps all it would take is for eyebrows to be talked about a bit more in the women’s mags – and the teen mags, catching girls before they buy their first pair of slanted tweezers or get taken along with their mums for that first thorough threading.

It’s sad, is what it is (and with that, I frown). Maybe these girls agree that it’s sad, but you can bet their eyebrows would struggle to show it. Read more by Maddie.

Image: m_bartosch / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The disappearing customer

MADDIE YORK

I have always been a person who manages to get overlooked, and frequently forgotten entirely, in customer service situations. I’m that person who arrives, hopeful, at the theatre box office to collect my definitely booked tickets and is told: “We don’t have a record of your booking.” I’m that person who phones up the bank, gets put on hold for 15 minutes and then hung up on because they’ve simply forgotten I’m on the line. Give me a customer service situation – anything – and I’ll be forgotten at some point during it. Guaranteed.

I ordered the mini cheese and ham toasties in Starbucks for lunch today, handed over the money, was told to find a table and wait while the toasties heated up, did so. Did the toasties appear? Did they buggery. The barista had listened to my order, taken my money, watched me sit down, then allowed me to completely disappear from her brain. “Are my toasties ready?” I was forced to ask, in a mortifyingly small voice – Hell, I wish I’d ordered something with a less ridiculous name – nearly 10 minutes after I’d sat down. “Ohh, sorry!” said the barista, laughing. Oh, yes, you’re right, taking money and then promptly forgetting your customer – yes, that’s side-splitting.

Seriously, though, this happens to me all the time. For whatever reason – I don’t know, maybe because I’m polite, posh and female – I am apparently somebody who instantly gets lost in the system just as soon as I’ve entered it. I constantly have to repeat orders in restaurants and cafés, watching as umpteen other tables get their food within a sensible length of time and mine doesn’t materialise. I’m getting mighty fed up with having to ask for everything twice, or more, and hearing my own pathetic voice saying things like: “I’m so sorry, but ... about that coffee I ordered half an hour ago ...?” or: “I’m really sorry, I’m sure it’s nobody’s fault, but I’ve been sitting in my freezing car on my own in Herne Hill for hours and nobody’s arrived yet to change my tyre.”

Yeah, I’m still raw about that last one – it only happened last Saturday night. And it really was a perfect example of this problem I have of being a disappearing customer. As soon as I discovered my flat tyre, at 5.30pm, I rolled unsteadily into a dark residential street in Herne Hill, and called the rescue service. It all seemed to go swimmingly: a polite voice answered, chuckled gently with me about my tyre-based misfortune, took all the details and location, booked the rescue vehicle and assured me somebody would be there by 6.28pm (nice and precise, exactly what you need in a slightly anxious situation), wished me well and Happy New Year and recited a reassuring limerick to me – well, not quite, but you get the picture: it was darned efficient, hunky dory and on track to be a thoroughly successful customer experience.

They even sent me a text to verify the booking! (she screamed) It read: “Dear Miss York” (ooh, my name; nice and personal), “a rescue vehicle will be with you no later than 6.28pm.” Excellent, there’s that reassuring precision again, and with a “no later than” added in for extra cushiony comfort. Brilliant, I thought; they’ll probably zoom over and be here before 6pm, even. Gold stars all round. I put my hazard lights on, swung my legs up to rest on the passenger seat, and began texting my friends to tell them of my dramatic situation.

You’ve guessed what happens in this story, of course, but sssh, I’m telling it anyway, for catharsis. At 6pm there was no sign of them and, considering they did boast “no later than”, I decided to phone up, in a non-confrontational way, just to check progress. I ought, really, to have realised something was amiss at this point, because I was greeted and spoken to – different customer service rep from earlier, unhelpfully – as though nobody had heard of my case. Disconcertingly, I had to restate rather too many of the details of my original call. It could have just been for security reasons, or whatever, but with hindsight this would seem to have been my opportunity to make a bit more noise to check they had actually registered my existence. Eventually: “Oh, yes, Miss York, we have 6.28pm as the call-out time.”

I rang off. Hmmm. As I waited through the next half an hour, getting very cold and a bit blue around the lips, I reflected mournfully on the situation. The second person was not nearly as reassuring as the first. He clearly didn’t actually bother contacting the rescue vehicle to check where it was – he simply glanced at a computer screen and threw that fast-approaching 6.28pm at me and hoped I’d shut up and disappear from his life.

6.30pm. Their bright, shiny, precise 6.28pm had been smashed to smithereens. I called again. The first voice answered, thankfully. She put me on hold so that she could call the rescue vehicle, and then came back to me: “We’re so sorry, Miss York. They haven’t been able to set off just yet, actually, as there’s been a serious delay at the base. It’s going to be another 45 minutes.”

What I should have said to her is this: “What sort of delay exactly? Late afternoon tea and biccies for the drivers? Lady, tell them to cease their dunking immediately and get their lazy good-for-nothing bums to Herne Hill and rescue me, your customer, because I’ve been sitting in my car, which is now colder than a witch’s tit, for an hour. And tell them they’ll have some explaining to do when they arrive because I am one angry lady driver. And also, your customer service sucks. Don’t make promises you obviously can’t keep. And it really wouldn’t hurt to read customers a reassuring limerick once in a while.”

Instead, I quietly said: “Oh, ok. But, was there possibly any way somebody could have informed me of that situation an hour ago ... you know, when you ... sort of confirmed that everything was on track and that I’d be rescued within the hour?”

With no explanation or apology from them beyond a pathetic “we can’t always keep to our promised times”, I sat there, teeth alternately chattering with cold and grinding with irritation, until the rescue truck eventually rocked up.

Seriously, what is it? What is it about me that means I end up in situations where I’ve ordered something I need, only for my request to be immediately lost? What actually happens behind the scenes? Is someone just scribbling my details on a bit of loo roll and then flushing it down the loo straight away? Are they not even scribbling them down in the first place?

I know I’m a bit repressed and full of pointless apologies and pleasantries, but I’ve learnt to be that way because somewhere along the line something convinced me that politeness makes people want to do things for you. I’ve spent 24 years as a polite person, living by the assumption that being a bit too bolshy and demanding in a restaurant will get you nothing except spit in your soup.

Well, clearly, that theory can go to hell. Apparently customer service types – who, understandably, get into a sort of trance sitting in their depressing little booths or open-plan offices that smell of body odour and hot computer wires and coffee, or shuffling around their restaurants lost in a reverie about the acting or writing career they should be enjoying by now – need us to actually bark our requests at them in order for them to wake up and notice.

Fine, if they want the whole thing to be less polite and even more unpleasant and difficult than it already is, I’ll give it a go. I’ll yell my initial order for my ham and cheese toasties and make the barista jump out of her (probably) Starbucks-branded skin. Anything to stop myself disappearing and having to say the word toasties more times than is dignified for a woman of my calibre. Read more by Maddie.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

MADDIE YORK

When you think about it, shoe shops are ridiculous, and they have somehow got away with it all this time, sniggering at the ease with which they managed to convince us punters that putting only half of each pair of shoes on the shelf is a perfectly sensible way to sell something. “They’ll never fall for that one, fellas,” giggled Barratts to Clarks all those years ago. Well, sadly we did fall for it, and we have let it go unquestioned for TOO LONG.

Shoes are the only thing sold on the basis of half of the item being on display to the customer. No, I don’t care if it’s technically two items that make up a pair of shoes. Two shoes make ONE thing that can be purchased. Therefore one shoe is HALF the item for sale. Somehow we’ve accepted that in this particular shopping situation we don’t mind seeing only half of what we intend to buy. It’s to save space, they tell us, and to allow us to look at the shoe we like and then ask for it in the correct size. OK, OK, in principle I get it, but it’s still ridiculous and it really doesn’t make the process of buying shoes easier or more tolerable, neither for customer nor sales assistant. In fact, it makes the whole thing downright farcical.

You wander about, eyeing up all the single shoes – always the right foot – thinking that some of them are quite nice and might possibly be the ones you want, but your heart sinks at the idea of having to initiate the whole process of approaching an assistant and sending her out into the back room to find the left foot. You know that as soon as she’s gone through those doors into the vast unknown world of left feet that you’re committed to trying on the pair when she comes back, even if you’ve changed your mind in the meantime about that pump or that boot because you can’t very well turn down her shoes after she’s foraged into the stockroom for you.

But you do approach her, steeling yourself for the little play that you know is about to start in which you and she feign a sort of camaraderie as you negotiate the size you need and you ask for the next size up as well to avoid having to send her out back again later. And she goes, and you sit on one of the chairs and wonder whether to take your shoes off in preparation for her return – and you do take them off, but she takes ages so you’re sitting there in your socks in a public place feeling absurd and vulnerable.

And then she’s back and taking shoes out of the boxes for you, taking bits of tissue out of them and loosening the laces if there are any etc., and inside you’re screeching “just give me the damn shoe!”, and then she stands with you while you try them on and you feel as though you HAVE to make little sounds of contemplation and prod your toes, dragging the whole thing out as a courtesy to her, when in actual fact you decided you despise the shoes long before she came back, or you noticed that they pinch like hell the second you put them on, or, really, you wish she’d just bugger off for five minutes while you have a chance to walk around in them without somebody watching your every move.

“Are they OK for you? How’s the fit?” she asks, and you finally have to break it to her: “They don’t fit, I’m really sorry”. There, you’ve apologised – you’ve actually apologised to a shop assistant for not being able to fit your own feet into her stupid shoes which you really hate now simply for having had to try them on in this absurdly public way. Read more by Maddie.

Image: J Fry / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Look left, right, left again. Oh, just bloody cross the road!

MADDIE YORK

Being a pedestrian in London is pretty much unbearable, what with the zillions of crossings you have to contend with on every road. If you’re actually trying to get somewhere on foot – as opposed to just mooching about, as so many people in London – cough, tourists – seem to be doing – you actually have to add on about 10 minutes just to allow for the huge, exasperating faff of having to get across roads.

Firstly, there’s the fact that you always, without exception, arrive at the crossing just as the green man is being swapped for the red – that absurdly long ‘safety’ period in which it would actually be perfectly possible to cross, comfortably even, but you end up hovering there at the curb while car drivers stare at you like you’re a total idiot for waiting. I’m just never quite confident I have enough time to get to the other side, so the cars and me are just there, at a standstill, the green man having disappeared from view but the red man having not yet made his appearance.

Then there’s the terrible situation when you have chanced your luck and stepped into the road during that ‘no man’ period, but you’ve left it just that little bit too late due to a few seconds of stupid dithering, so you end up starting to walk at exactly the same moment that the cars move off. Do you break into a silly little run to get to the other side? Do you retreat? I’ve tried the retreat before and actually ended up backing into another person who had also risked crossing, and that person became a sort of bumper, bouncing me back into the road again, leaving me with no option but to dash across and make an exhibition of myself, causing cars to brake to let me across.

What about when you approach a crossing to find a clump of moronic fellow pedestrians who, due to absurdly strong group dynamics, are all just standing there waiting, blocking your opportunity to dash across if you found a gap in the traffic? I’ve been known, many times, to duck through the clump and dart into the road, self-righteously and quite rudely – ugh, if anyone pushed past me in the way that I do other people, I’d be writing them a strongly-worded letter for sure – leaving all the timid people behind on the curb while I relish the feeling of having used my individual initiative. Usually, though, I’m punished for my self-righteousness by finding the road not actually as clear as I thought, and having to trot the last few steps to avoid getting run over.

But, even if you do misjudge it occasionally, isn’t it better and more intelligent to make your own decision about when to cross, using your own eyes and brain, for goodness’ sake, than to just stand there like a total lemming until some poxy little green man says ‘go’? We are built with legs and brains; getting across a road is elementary human instinct! It’s just so irritating when crowds of people are utterly obedient like this, gawping up at the traffic light for a signal to take action, rather than just looking and bloody going.

And don’t get me started on diagonal crossers. Oh, it makes me bristle! It happens on zebras, mainly. You get the picture: man starts into the road beyond the corner of the zebra on one side, taking big strides right across the middle on a diagonal, gradually squashing over everyone else who has been waiting at the curb, so now everyone’s unavoidably crossing in a big, diagonal wave when many of them want to be walking the other way.

It’s all just unutterably irritating. Of course, if I look at pedestrian crossings from the point of view of a driver, I get thoroughly annoyed by these arrogant pedestrians who think they can attempt to cross when they don’t have a green man. But then that’s exactly the prerogative of a Grumpy: anything that irritates you is wrong, unless it’s you that’s doing it. Read more by Maddie.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk

The bitch in my belly

MADDIE YORK

I would seriously like to confront whichever numpty came up with the name Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Since it’s a condition that affects so many of us – as many as one in 10 people at some point in their lives, actually – you’d think someone could have thought to give it a name that’s slightly less humiliatingly ugly and ridiculous to say in public or to your nearest and dearest. “Sorry if I’m a bit quiet tonight, darling one, my bowel is super irritable tonight.” Fabulous. Why not ‘sensitive colon’? ‘Grumpy gut’? ‘Traumatised tummy’?

Actually, that last one is not acceptable, and I retract it, because it taps into the annoying tendency for anything bowel-related to be portrayed in the media as childish, a silly little nothingy affliction of the ‘tummy’. Nobody above the age of eight should ever say the word ‘tummy’. I’ve said it many times, and I hang my head in shame. “I have a funny tummy tonight.” How stupid does that sound? We all know what we mean. And it ain’t funny, that’s for sure.

Advertisers of medications for bowel troubles seem to be in a constant panic attack about how to address issues of the bowel, with each different marketing angle branching out into yet more ridiculous imagery, in some preposterous attempt to avoid offending anyone’s sensibilities with the actual science of it.

“Restore your natural rhythms,” we hear, while watching a woman dancing the salsa. How does this translate to our everyday communication about constipation? “Sorry, boss, I can’t come into work because my natural rhythms are simply all over the place.” I think we all know that wouldn’t go down well.

Even worse is when they try to suggest that talking about your bowels with your friends is the most natural thing in the world, as in the advert in which a group of women chat about their hard stools over cocktails and show each other the tablets they carry around in their tiny bags along with their credit cards and tampons.

Then there’s the whole arena of probiotics as a digestive aid, and the advertising of these has always based itself on the juvenile notion of ‘friendly bacteria’, as though we are children who might be a bit scaredy-waredy about the rumblings in our tummies and cannot cope unless we look at probiotics as friendly little superheroes who have come to the rescue.

Look, you can’t make bowel trouble funny and silly, because that pisses off the people for whom it’s a regular blight on their lives. Equally, though, you can’t be too scientific about it because there is definitely still a taboo around using words like ‘bowel’ in polite conversation. We’ve all had that situation where we’ve been unwell and someone’s asked “what’s wrong?” It’s not at all embarrassing to say you’ve got a headache or a bad back or a cold, but what do you say when it’s been a terrible bowel problem? You just can’t utter the necessary words, so it’s “Oh, you know, just a bit of a funny tummy, really.”

Since I was diagnosed with IBS as a teenager, I’ve been through the requisite stages: embarrassment, intolerance (emotionally and nutritionally), grief, defiance. For some time now I’ve been at the stage of acceptance. She’s in there, my bowel that doesn’t work properly, and she isn’t just irritable, she’s a right mardy old bitch – the bitch in my belly – and she’s clearly not budging, so I may as well just learn to live with her and give her what she wants.

Sometimes she can take dairy and actually wants chocolate; sometimes she simply says “girl, oh no you didn’t just give me milk”. Generally she’s better when she’s fed with gin and hot meals and she doesn’t like cold stuff very much. She takes one look at the medications I swallow down to her in the hope that she’ll shut up for a while and she says “Nu-uh, ain’t no helping me. You just gotta wait till I’m ready to calm down.”

There you go; there’s my personal image of my bowel and the bitch that she is, and I feel that she’s a character I can use when talking about my problem. “Sorry, darling, I’m feeling a bit rough tonight; it’s just the bitch in my belly.” That’s more like it. Read more by Maddie.

Here come the girls

MADDIE YORK

Groan. It’s that time of year again, when we young, sprightly females are supposed to get all excited about the impending party season and start planning a vast wardrobe of outfits. Or, if we’ve been following the tips from the exceptionally condescending Gok Wan and from various women’s magazines and shop windows, we will be very busy building a sort of ‘capsule work-party wardrobe’ that can take us effortlessly ‘from office to bar’ with just the addition of some damagingly high heels and an itty-bitty clutch purse.

YUCK. Yes, the adverts on telly have started, showing gaggles of 20-something women all looking essentially the same, tarting up in tulip dresses of various colours, hair straightened, pins polished, trotting along to a Christmas party. “This is your time, gals!” the adverts seem to scream. “Get your legs out and have a little dance!”

I hate this. I hate it because it suggests that we are all the same woman. And that woman is trapped at her desk in her office all year round, wearing her work clothes, having a boring, repetitive life, until she gets released and becomes her ‘real self’ or, as one advert says, her ‘party me’.

Look, I like a party as much as the next woman. I even like getting dressed up and feeling glamorous. Of course I do. But I totally object to this image of young womanhood that seems to become prevalent around Christmas, showing us all giggling and wobbling about and thinking about nothing but sparkly clothes and hair, as though the rest of the year has been a constant round of serious tedium.

For me, the build-up to Christmas seems like the worst possible time to go out to more parties than usual. I mean, for one thing it’s blinking freezing outside. Gok Wan wants me to show flesh in a little dress? I can’t see that looking very attractive when my knees start trembling with the chill. The girls who do fall for the image of the ‘party girl’ are the ones we see teetering about town centres with no coats on – because they don’t want to waste their tequila money on a club’s cloakroom fee! Gosh, whenever I see one of those girls I just want to rush over and wrap my big coat around her.

For another thing, television is so good around Christmas. Who wants to go out in an uncomfortable outfit, stalking around in the cold, spending loads of money, when you could be snuggling down for Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor or I’m a Celebrity...?

In my world, the Christmas season has no room for partying. Far from wanting to slip into some killer dress and go out and seduce, my aim is to thoroughly indulge from the comfort of my own home: eat lots of fabulous, seasonal food, drink well, sleep well, enjoy the company of my family, and keep warm. Ho ho ho. Read more by Maddie.

My hat differs from your hat

MADDIE YORK

My biggest bugbear in language at the moment is the seeping in of the construction ‘different than’ instead of the correct ‘different from’. I think it’s an American usage, as I’ve heard it on US TV shows many times and also have a feeling my American friends say it. In UK English, it is incorrect and sounds so lazy it makes me flinch.

‘Different’ is starting to be used as though it’s a comparative word, where in fact it’s just an adjective, based on the verb ‘to differ’. So you’ll hear that something is ‘better than’ something else, which is correct, but then you’ll hear that it is ‘different than’ something else. It sounds horrible! “My hat is different from your hat” sounds so natural and neat because, of course, what I’m saying is: “My hat differs from your hat.”

I’m also grumpy about the ugly but increasingly prevalent ‘fed up of’. I actually saw this used in The Times the other day by a columnist I like and respect. It’s an expression that uses a literal concept of being fed with something to the point where you are full and feel jaded by it (picture feeling fully fed after a roast lunch) to express a figurative idea of having had enough. If you take the expression literally, you would never say: “I am fed up of roast chicken.” You would say: “I am fed up with roast chicken.” You have literally been fed with roast chicken. Roast chicken is the food with which you have been fed.

If I could convey to people who use this expression wrongly that the reason it’s a nice expression to use is precisely because of the visual imagery of being actually fed with something up to the limit, would they see that saying ‘fed up of’ is simply not doing justice to the expression? Read more by Maddie.

The idiots on the bus go round and round

MADDIE YORK

Ugh. Having an altercation with a stranger in a public place is just awful, isn’t it? Sometimes, though, we Grumpy Young Women feel this irrepressible need to tell someone that what they’re doing is unacceptable. We don’t half make life awkward for ourselves, that’s for sure. Most people just get their heads down, keep calm and carry on.

This story takes place on the P4. Know it? All the way from Brixton to Lewisham. It’s a miserable place at the best of times, but it was also caught up in traffic and taking longer than usual, quite crowded because it was full of people going home after shopping in Brixton on a Saturday afternoon, and it was also pouring with rain, causing everyone to be sort of steaming and more irritable than usual.

This woman got on with her kid, sat down in the double seat next to me, and promptly switched on some kind of music player. Full volume. No headphones. The P4’s got this new sign up, next to all the ‘feet off seats’ and ‘keep free for the disabled/elderly’ notices, saying ‘do not play music out loud’, and this girl was sitting directly in front of the sign, blatantly contradicting it.

After about 10 minutes, I had really had enough of the jangly R&B thing she was playing - apparently to lull her kid into being calm and quiet - and I said to her: “Do you have any headphones?” She replied “No”, so I said: “In that case, would you mind turning your music off?”

Now, you might think I’m a moaning middle class idiot, and you’re quite right about that and I don’t care. If you don’t stand up to this sort of anti-social stuff then eventually it just wins. She was the one in the wrong.

“What’s the problem? Everyone’s talking on the bus.”

Interesting one, this. So her theory went that playing her music out loud was just a small extension of the general hubbub of people’s voices and therefore was perfectly acceptable. So, if I drink booze on the bus, I could defend that with “What’s your beef? Everyone drinks water on the P4”, or, if someone decided to have sex with their boyfriend on the back seats, they could pipe up with “Chillax, man, people kiss on the bus all the time.”

“Sorry, but this is a public place, and not everyone wants to hear the same music as you do," came my rather cringeworthy reply, after which I swiftly buried my head in my scarf and hoped we’d come to the end of this interaction. Unfortunately she began to mutter defensively at everyone else in the bus, and I caught one of her remarks: “She’s the only one complaining. She’s probably drunk.”

Would you have let that go? I’m afraid I did not. I turned and flashed my eyes at her. “I haven’t had a drink actually,” I began, lying of course. I’d had a Chardonnay at the Brixton Ritzy. “Why would you say that?”

“Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me,” the woman replied, in potentially the most defensive tone I’ve ever encountered as a direct response to something I said. What do you say to that? If I’d started saying something I’d have got another “Don’t talk to me”, so it was pointless. I turned, hid and fumed.

“Thank you,” she said. She might as well have added “I win”.

It took her another five minutes but eventually I noticed the music had stopped and the bus was quiet. Woman on bus: 0. Grumpy Young Woman: 1. Read more by Maddie.

Image: www.freeimages.co.uk