I work in an Underground station in a leafy(ish) part of north London. I am the ticket clerk - that sun-starved creature you'll find locked behind bullet-proof glass. It's not a great job, but it has its moments. I try to inject some humour into my act, mainly for my own benefit but also to cheer passengers up. It can help when the days pass slowly.
"Is there a cheaper way?" people constantly ask. "Walking," I tell them, "or you could not go at all." They love that. There should be a reference book with a thousand and one bad jokes for clerks to crack (and when to crack them), including such gems as asking people with ?50 notes if they have anything bigger, or when someone hands you a ?10 note and asks you to change it, giving them another ?10 note back.
The ability to distinguish between those who will enjoy a joke and those who won't is more valuable than the ability to think of clever things to say, but it can also be far more elusive. Recently a woman asked me, "What's a return to Warren Street?" To which only one answer presented itself. "It's a ticket that allows you to go to Warren Street and come back," I told her, all pleased with myself. Mrs Misery was not impressed.
"Do you think that's funny?" she asked, appalled.
I was taken aback. "Obviously I do," I said, "or I wouldn't have said it."
Of course, getting a rise out of a customer would hardly be fun if they weren't constantly getting a rise out of you. But in truth, we are at a severe disadvantage. We are like guerrillas, scoring puny hits on a monolithic superpower. We can be rude or unhelpful, but the customer can, and frequently does, say, "Do you call this customer service?" and invariably follows it with, "What's your name?"
A complaint is the one major piece of artillery that the customer has, since he can hardly take his custom elsewhere. And the underground likes to encourage the idea that you can complain. Personally, I feel that a complaint is an admission that the member of the public has lost the argument. Unable to accept it, they go for the equivalent of taking their ball home with them, or running to tell the teacher. Doubtless there are staff out there who deserve genuine complaints, but not too many.
But the public do not seem to see it like that, especially in a station like mine which serves a mainly middle-class area.
"Thanks for your help," one woman said the other day, dripping with sarcasm. This got my goat straight away and I told her quietly, "If I was that sarcastic you'd be asking for my name."
She went away from the window and then a moment later she was back. "I want your name," she said, absolutely deadpan, "to make a complaint."
It doesn't help that some travellers constantly ask absurd questions. "Can you explain why the fares have gone up?" asks one man. "It's our way of sticking our finger up at Newton," I should have told him. Instead I settled for muttering something about inflation. "Bollocks," he told me.
One woman came to me asking why she couldn't change trains at King's Cross. This was news to me, so I looked at the leaflet she was holding. It said, "Please avoid King's Cross if possible during the engineering works."
What are you meant to say? If you're smart, you say, "It's due to engineering works, but you can still change there if you want." But if you're bored and frustrated you say, "Why don't you read the rest of the sentence?" To which the reasonable response is: "What's your name?"
Another clerk tried switching the tables on a customer who asked for his name by asking for hers. "Baroness such and such," she told him, as if that would impress us. "Don't take that attitude with me," he took great pleasure in saying, "I pay your wages."
But these small victories only bring you to a greater defeat. After another gratuitous row with a customer (he started it), my supervisor, for reasons best known to himself, decided to take his side. After goading the customer to make increasingly vehement complaints, he then took it upon himself to call up the manager and get him to come down to have a go at me.
Luckily I got one of the managers who was not angling for promotion and we had a quiet chat and I promised that it was a one-off, an extremely rare occurrence and that I'd keep my head down from now on, which seemed to satisfy him. Unfortunately, while he was interviewing me someone else came in and handed over a letter of complaint about me to the supervisor.
So the next day he was back and we were having a somewhat more serious chat while he asked me about this new complaint. I was unrepentant because, as I told him, the man was a nutcase who could have started a row with a lamppost. This didn't seem to wash with the manager at all.
He looked at me archly. "But this complaint is from a woman." Bang to rights, I could hardly complain when he issued me with an official warning threatening to put me back on the ticket barrier if I kept overstepping the permissible level of rudeness (which for some reason everyone else seems to get away with).
