Are You Being Served?

The Americans don't put up with shoddy cutsomer service. In fact, they've made an art form of it. We had dinner in a restaurant as Salford Quays a couple of years ago. It was before we had Ella, in the days when we could pitch up early for the theatre and have a bite to eat to pass the time before the performance began. An American couple at the next table were amazed at the level of service and courtesy extended. Their food was a bit cold, the drinks bill was wrong. They complained loudly. "It wasn't like America".

In many ways, Australia is more like America than Britain. Certainly, they seem to admire the yanks more than they admire us, which might explain the crap grid systems and endless American drivel on the telly. They still show "Are You Being Served?" though. They even reported the death of John Inman. We don't get much other British news, but John Inman dies and wham, they're on it. They show so-called "comedy classics" like Benny Hill as well.

Anyway, unlike in America, the service in the shops here is very Grace Brothers, without Mrs Slocombe's pussy. In fact, I think there's a department store in the city called exactly the same. The person scanning your supermarket shopping also packs your bags, it takes them ages to do it because they stop and examine every item they put in the bag as though they are mentally sorting out tonight's dinner. It's like when the checkout girl in Sainsbury's reads the front cover of your magazine as she scans it and reads it for just slightly too long so that you want to tell her to get her own copy (or is that just grumpy old me?).

In Sydney shops, nobody is in a hurry, nothing really works properly.

A couple of weeks ago I bought some stuff in a shop called David Lawrence. It's a clothes shop a bit like a cross between Wallis and Jigsaw. It was one of those occasions where you find something you like so much that you buy two of them (in this case, a black tank top). Anyway, they rang the two tops through the till twice, thus charging me four times. Afterwards they couldn't sort it out. They couldn't void the till. No matter how hard they tried, I still appeared to owe them the best part of $400, even after they'd called the manager (at home). In the end they suggested I go away and draw some money out of the cashpoint instead and when I refused they got out one of those old-fashioned carbon-paper machines and ran it across the credit card, blackening their hands.

They filled the slip in by hand, meticulously. Then they rang the bank to get an authorisation code. The bank put them on hold for over five minutes. I asked what the problem was. The problem was they didn't really know how to work the till. I wished I'd gone to the ATM.

Yesterday I went into an optician to buy some contact lense solution. Mine has almost run out now so I took an empty bottle in to show them what I need. "It's a hydrogen peroxide solution" I said. "I haven't got any of that" said the optician. "You'll have trouble finding it". Before I could ask any more advice she disappeared into the back room shouting something about how her contact lenses had been playing her up all day. She left me standing at the counter next to a man trying on his new prescription specs. She was also gone five minutes with nobody to cover.

It's not what I'd call efficient.