Need To Know Basis

“Gentlemen, for your information, I have a question to ask you”.
Samuel Goldwyn


I don’t know if you feel similarly, but it seems to me that I am becoming more and more frustrated by the number of questions I am being asked, often repeatedly, in order to allow an organisation, or a person, to have an easier or more cost effective existence, yet seemingly at my personal expense.
For a period I had the most wonderful learning experience working with a leading sales training organisation in Australia, called at that time, Mercuri International. Their director of quality was an extremely enthusiastic and brilliantly skilled man, Rob Davie, someone who to this day I hold in high esteem and who has tremendously enriched my life, and particularly my children’s lives, by virtue of the learning I experienced. During what was a most extensive induction program, I recall vividly two statements that he made
“Why is it, when we know what we know, that we do what we do?.. we do what we learn”, and
“The information you give is as good as the information you have, and the information you have is only ever as good as the questions you have asked”.
These statements are incredibly profound and they seem to pop into my head on an all too regular basis, whenever I find myself being virtually interrogated for no good reason whatsoever.
What is it about the modern world that causes us to be subjected to treatment where our time and money is liberated from us, and usually in ways that are underhand, surreptitious, and often with no choices at all?


We regularly avail ourselves of products and services in all manner of ways, yet despite the ‘Customer First’ programs that companies have in place, in their vision (more like plight) to bring the customer into the centre of the organisation, as they call it, I feel I am treated worse today than ever.
I mean, come on corporate executives! I get to experience what your organisation is like from the cutting edge – and I am paying for it - and you have the audacity to suggest you want to bring ME into the centre of YOUR organisation??? Teams of wild horses couldn’t pull me in that direction, especially as you have no regard for me whatsoever, other than what comes out of my wallet. Look at how we are treated these days by most corporations.
When was the last time you rang a large organisation’s customer service function, and actually got to initially speak to a human being?
We get a machine instead, don’t we? And then we get to wait on the phone for a month while some crazed loon’s idea of a service menu is reeled off, in some attempt to be able to direct your call to ‘the most appropriate agent’. I am always tempted to just press 7 anyway, because 007 was always my favourite agent.
‘Thank you for calling the hiring human beings avoidance strategy and cost reduction ploy hotline. Your call is important to us, that’s why we fired all the staff that used to take it.
‘For English, press 1’.
‘If you were an only child, press 2’
‘If you are menstrual or menopausal, press 3’
“If you have recently been abducted by aliens, press 4’
‘If you are suffering from a short attention span, press 5’
‘If you are suffering from a short attention span, press 5’
‘Short attention press 5’ Etc., etc., etc.


For the less than enlightened, this automated answering system is called an IVR, or Interactive Voice Response system.
Most to the time I just want to be able to speak to a person, not after hearing the menu, but directly. If I wanted a menu I’d go to a bloody restaurant, wouldn’t I? I certainly don’t want to wait to hear a range of options before I get to know whether the ‘operator’ or ‘customer service agent’ is attached to which button, whether it’s 8, 9 or 0. Isn’t it funny how the option to get a human, albeit a generalist, is always last? Like DUH!
You call and hear the reference to XYZ customer service hotline in the opening message, and then you have to wait until the end to get a customer service agent? What if you select an option between 1 and 7? Do you not get a customer service agent then? So why not just skip buttons 1 through 7 altogether? Why not just let me talk to a person?
Why can’t a service provider with vision actually staff customer service hotlines with people who either have, (or can immediately access), information regarding all the company’s products and services? Is it really that hard?
Maybe, and this is just a wild stab in the dark, maybe customers would actually choose this service or product provider, because the are treated more personally and experience contact with the service provider that is not only worthwhile… but with an actual person. AHA! A clue Sherlock… market share gains? Revenue growth perhaps? Client Satisfaction Improvements? Like DUH!
I was brought up, rightly or wrongly, to make the judgment that people who talk to, or have any form of engaging communication with inanimate objects, are largely out of their tree, and are probably in line awaiting having their temples shaved prior to being plugged directly into the National Grid.
I want to know if customer service hotline people emanate from the same place as the Sex Pistol sales people.


Is their some bizarre experiment going on somewhere to genetically produce some master race or other, and the throwbacks are immediately placed in customer service or retail sales roles? Is ‘Baldrick’ an alive and well retail employee and have Richard Curtis and Ben Elton hatched a cunning plan for real?
So often you end up talking to a service person and you are more knowledgeable about the product or service than they are… I mean, they work for that bloody company don’t they? And aren’t they being paid to provide at least some level of value to you?
Yes you have reached an actual human being (in the loosest sense), yet half the time you would have to wonder if this ‘person’ would amass even double figures on any reputable IQ test.
If you are less than familiar with Intelligence Quotient testing, in 1910 Henry H Goddard proposed three categories for feeble minded people, based on their IQ tested score… Moron (score of 51- 70), imbecile (score of 26 – 50) and idiot (score of 0-25)…
What do you call a less than skilled customer service agent with an IQ of 18?
Twins, perhaps? Relatives, maybe? A Team?
Of course there are some fabulous customer service people employed around the world, but I seem to hear that people are getting a mere smidgeon of that prowess on an all too regular basis.
These automated response systems are often geared towards directing your call to an individual who can access, and to some extent retain information, about one of the service providers’ areas of offering, (yet hasn’t the cognition to handle much more than one). This means that, should you have more than one query, in more than one area, the likelihood is that the initial person you speak to, (one of options 1 through 7 probably), can’t deal with the second query.

PLUS, to guarantee maximum fun during your exploits, they probably can’t transfer you either. Guess what, you have to call the IVR again and press a different button. By this point the service provider is certainly beginning to press my buttons…
“good afternoon, how may I help you”
“I hope you can, I have been dialling non stop for the last hour”
“I am sorry to hear that sir, I wonder why?”
“Well, it may be because I am a customer of yours, I spoke to one of your agents earlier, and after that experience the Samaritans have been unfortunately engaged.”
It’s enough to make you want to scream at times.
Try and order a pizza and retain your sanity… I challenge you to do this.
It’s enough to drive you totally off your trolley. In the Philippines the Pizza home delivery hotline is staffed by people who I can only imagine have been educated from birth by rote methods and have the cognition of a single celled life form on a particularly wearisome day. Either that or they are forced to adopt business processes that only the most skilfully adept, socially detached and malicious sadist could have developed.
I think there should be laws about allowing stupid people to interact in customer service situations, whether designing the system or staffing the hotlines. If your parents are proven to demonstrate congenital idiocy, and haven’t got a breeding license, from an approved IQ testing facility, then you shouldn’t be able to even get interviewed, let alone get hired, in a client facing situation.
These ‘pizzagents’ (ok, you can pronounce the letter z as an s if you like), are obviously programmed to go through a clearly defined script that takes about a week and effectively renders their delivery performance guarantee somewhat redundant.

By the time you finally order the pizza, it’s the following day and the kids have just got back from school and are telling you they are having a sleepover somewhere else anyway.
And you can’t try and interject by giving them the information quicker than you could ever be asked it, with the obligatory pauses for your verbal confirmation at the end of each line of customer information on their computer screen.
What happens if you interject? Well their process is screwed up and they start again from the beginning. I’d prefer to state my phone number and name and immediately tell the automaton on the other end of the phone that I haven’t moved house since my last order and that my house is where I would like it delivered.
Of course, that isn’t possible because it doesn’t fit their system and processes (which indirectly I am paying for).
It’s best to let the robot go through the motions and avoid the ‘does not compute’ or ‘exterminate’ error message.
They ask you your phone number and then
“is this Mr XYZ? Do you live at the following address…? (line by line rendition, including postcode). Do you still have the white gate?”
This is so unbelievably mind numbingly ridiculous. They ask you your street name, then the village name, and proceed to get your confirmation that it is in the same city?
“and is that still Muntinlupa City?”
Ah well, you asked for it I suppose…
“No – and here’s the weird part – I am sure you have seen this on the news. Due to a freak shift in the continental plates last night, our entire village is now apparently in another province. In fact I am surprised the phones still work. Presumably your pizza delivery people are used to air travel?”

Stunned silence follows, virtually non compos mentis, in real terms. After you have actually told them that your village hasn’t been relocated en masse, and outlined what kind of pizza you would like, in comes the upselling spiel…
“Today we have mojos, curly fries and many other promotions, would you be interested?”
What sort of question is that? How can I be interested if I don’t know what the many other promotions are?
I just feel compelled to confuse them, and once you do anything that causes their script to fall apart, they are to all intents and purposes rendered vegetable or mineral.
“I’d like one of your promotions please”
“Certainly sir, which would you like”
“How about Chief Executive Officer?”
The silence is deafening until they eventually twig, (and this takes an alarming amount of time)… “So that’s one party sized, thin crust…”
I live in a reasonably nice neighbourhood in the Philippines, and at the entrances are security gates and guards. Once it gets past midnight, and until 6 a.m., only the main village entrance is staffed and open. Apparently, around a year ago, some people decided it would be a good idea if they liberated some vehicles from their owners, and two Mitsubishi Pajeros and a BMW 5 series were stolen.
The would-be thieves couldn’t get out of the main gate though, so they dumped the Pajeros and rammed another unmanned gate with the BMW to escape. Smart thieves huh? I mean, you wouldn’t use a Pajero to smash the gate and then drive the BMW out, now would you? Maybe they were confused? Maybe they were trying to deliver a pizza.


Readers have probably caught on to the fact that I love the game of golf, and each Saturday morning I play at crack of sparrows fart which means I need to leave the village at around 4.45a.m..
Since this incident of car napping, every time I leave the village to play golf, I am asked a variety of questions. I always have to state my name and address, and this information is manually handwritten into a log book, along with the registration number of my car. At no point has anyone asked me to prove who I am or that I live at the address I tell them. I thought this was mildly ludicrous, a typical example of a process being enacted to satisfy a management need, yet with predictably no thought whatsoever as to its effectiveness in execution.
I figured that this was a bit strange and the first time I drove out of the village I gave them genuine details. After a few weeks, and especially since I am Caucasian, a fairly large Caucasian, and have a 4 wheel drive car that’s slightly less embellished than the Queen during Trooping of the Colour, I thought they would get used to the fact that I left at this time every week… maybe the questions wouldn’t be necessary any more? How many 6 foot 3 inch Caucasians are there leaving the village at this time, every Saturday morning? Not too many.
After several weeks, the regular provision of this data began to grate on me. I decided to see how far I could get with substituting my name for others, albeit at the same address…
“Early, Brighton” “Christmas, Mary”
“Meoff, Jack” “Stroker, Willie”
“Cleavage, Seymour” “Humpyu, Ivana”
“Bin Stealin, Ivor” “Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus”
“Arroyo, Mike” (Filipino husband of Philippines president)
“Bush, George W” “Di Caprio, Leonardo”

The above are totally genuine, and it sometimes takes all I can muster not to burst into hysterics. And the full list is actually way more extensive than this, as the above are but a mere sample.
I wonder, if and when I choose to sell my off road pimpmobile, (as a good friend of mine affectionately calls it), I will be able to increase the resale price through the documented list of its prior owners? I guess we’ll see. Check out EBAY for further details.
The techniques we use to ask questions provide us with so much of what we know, yet it seems to me that few people are often capable of asking good ones.
From a young age children are often taught that asking good questions is a less than great thing. Parents are responsible for messing up how kids think in a big way – not deliberately, in the main, but nonetheless the impact can be substantial and lasting.
How often do we hear parents instruct children…
“For goodness sake will you please stop asking questions?”
When a parent issues an instruction such as this, what do you think most children will effectively do?
Stop asking questions by any chance? And if the instruction is issued often enough, then perhaps the child thinks that asking questions is not a good thing… PERIOD.
From a teaching perspective I was always taught that cognitively, if you hear things several times, then the brain begins to assimilate the validity of the statement based on each repetition…
Once – interpreted as an event
Twice – interpreted as a coincidence
Thrice – interpreted as a pattern, and
Four times – indisputable fact.

The kids will conclude that asking questions isn’t good for them, especially when no explanation as to why the child should stop asking questions has been provided. Parents really do say the dumbest things to their children that in my view only serve to inhibit their learning. How many times do parents answer children’s questions regarding why this or that isn’t possible or allowed, with the retort
“Because I said so”.
What possible value does this offer a child? What can they learn from this? It is a pointless response that effectively communicates “I can’t be bothered to tell you why, so let’s assume I am Nike – JUST DO IT”.
“But why?”
“I am your (mum or dad) and I don’t need to explain myself to you.”
So the child now has a perfect understanding of the situation? I think not. They are aware, however, that questions get them into trouble and that their parent(s) is/are a poor source of information and learning.
Brilliant!
Children often have a tendency to misplace their things, all manner of things, and often get dreadfully upset when they cannot be located. They will often come to parents in tears, explaining that xyz is lost, and then the parents reply with a question that ranks as one of the dumbest questions of all time…
“Well, where did you leave it?”
I appreciate that the parent is trying to formulate a past referenced strategy for establishing where the child has been with the lost item, but this question just doesn’t get to first base, does it?


I would imagine that if the kid had the answer to that question, the missing item may not actually be lost? However, this conclusion is a mere wild guess on my part.
Parents seem hell bent on either asking or telling their children the most ludicrous things. It strikes me that it is no accident that, when adults go into therapy at any time, a lot of the issues and challenges hark back to childhood experiences. It’s hardly surprising, is it?
I recall when my parents were angry with me for what ever reason, (and I seemed to be expertly skilled in providing ongoing and evolving reasons for them to be angry, over time).
A classic example is when parents want children to stop doing something or other. Inevitably the statement begins
“DO NOT……”
So here we have DO, which is a language pattern for affirmative action, followed immediately by NOT which renders the DO ineffective, on a neurological level.
So the command “DO NOT jump into the pool” effectively becomes “Jump into the pool”.
Brilliant! Then parents say
“How many times do I have to tell you not to do XYZ?”
Parents are unaware that the language pattern they are using is basically instructing the child to continue with their behaviour, unless something else is provided to evidence the real message. Parents are rarely good at providing evidence, and my parents regularly made statements that were so totally confusing, you really didn’t know what to do except be afraid, BE VERY afraid.
“Just carry on like this my boy and I will separate you from your breath”.


This is a difficult concept for a primary school kid to get their head around. The tonality from the parent is enough to make you cease all activities for the rest of your life, just to make sure you don’t get chastised in a life ending way, but the consequence in this statement is a tad bewildering. I recall wondering if somehow my lungs were going to be removed. I was about 9 at the time.
Many other messages I received were just as bewildering…
“And you can take that look off your face as well my lad”.
What does this mean? What look? Is there something on my face? Had I better go and wash? This is very confusing.
“You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when I have finished with you”
I recall actually going to mirrors as an infant school attendee, just to see if I could actually laugh using only one side of my face. I wondered if this was a trait I had that most other kids didn’t.
There were times when you would ask the most innocent question and a parent’s response was delivered purely on the basis of their mood or temperament at that moment in time. I can only imagine that the mood was often that of insanity, or the brain cells controlling decent communication had been leased out for that day.
“Can I have some cereals before I go to bed?”
“Cereals. Bloody cereals? I’ll give you cereals. It’s already 8.30.”
Of course that response meant you wouldn’t get cereals and there wasn’t even the remotest chance of that occurring. The trouble is though, to an infant school aged child, the parent just told them they would. In fact, because it was already 8.30, perhaps this means the delivery of cereals is late?


Maybe you should have asked earlier? Why didn’t you ask earlier, silly lad?
So the child waits expectantly.
“What? Are you deaf?”
The child then wonders is something else was said that they missed.
“Why? What did you say?” (a perfectly reasonable response).
“Don’t you try and get funny with me my lad or you’ll feel the back of my hand”
What the heck is going on now?
I didn’t tell a joke, did I?
Maybe I did and didn’t realise it. If I did then I have to feel the back of their hand. What does that mean?
The tone of the voice means I am an inch away from getting the crap beaten out of me, maybe even my lungs removed as my breath is separated somehow, I know that much, but what is actually being said? What does all this nonsense mean?
Half the time you didn’t know what to think or do so a look of total bewilderment was probably in play. The trouble with this though, is that many parents do not understand the subtleties of facial expression too well, and a young child definitely hasn’t mastered facial expression at all. So inevitably whatever ‘look’ is on your face, it will be misinterpreted compared to your intent…
“Do you want me to wipe that smile off your face my boy?”.
How can a child possibly process a question like this? Firstly, what smile, and secondly, how do you wipe off a smile? Get a towel? Kleenex?
“Just carry on behaving like this and see if you don’t get a backhander”


Now what on earth does a young child make of that? What is a backhander? I used to play table tennis in adult leagues when I was a kid. A backhander is maybe a backhand drive? Is my dad going to teach me a new stroke?
Maybe my dad is corrupt and trying to bribe me? His body language suggests otherwise though… he won’t bribe me through buying me something, the incentive appears to be different. The bribe is not getting the living daylights knocked out of you.
An infant doesn’t realise that this means your parent is running out of tolerance and is about to rearrange your features with an extremely blunt instrument, or one which, during application to your backside, will provide for many onomatopoeias should the scene ever be described.
Sometimes a parent will totally lose the plot and decide that a firm beating is in order. I remember my father chasing me around the garden on many occasions (we had quite a large garden).
He’s running after me, armed suitably with some weapon of ass destruction, which is scary enough as it is and must provide for amusement for any neighbour that may be taking in the scene.
I am doing my level best Carl Lewis impression with extreme gusto, am legging it, and Warwickshire athletic sports scouts are beginning to get phone calls of recommendation from observers of the avoidance strategies I am using in this imminent one sided melee. What does my father say next?
“You’d better not let me catch you my lad”.
All I can think is, ‘well, if that’s true, and you know this already, why are you chasing me? If it’s better for you not to catch me, then I would have thought running after me isn’t entirely appropriate?’


“Come here, I just want to talk to you”.
How should I interpret that I wonder?
‘Yeah right, and so does the cane you are holding… and I have little fluency, or desire for fluency, in talking in the language of screams and pain.’
One of my dad’s favourite expressions whilst I was in the company of others was
“Children should be seen and not heard.”
I always struggled with this. I knew it meant that if I said anything, then it was time for my lungs to be relocated again, or some other sick act of retribution. I always felt my parents dragged me all over the place, which was fair enough.
But then when I was out with only my dad, and he was meeting someone else deliberately, or accidentally, then the ‘seen and not heard’ comment was always ever present.
After a while I started to think to myself ‘if I am to be seen and not heard’, what the hell’s the point in me even being here?
Just bring a photograph of me. Why not just let me be seen and heard, somewhere else?
When my mum and dad were discussing this or that, and the direction of the conversation started to go into an area I shouldn’t hear, then another classic statement always ensued from my dad “Little pigs have big ears”.
This comment wasn’t made because the content of whatever they were discussing might have compromised me in any way… this was always said because if I repeated what they were saying, it might compromise one, or both of them. The funny thing was that, as an only child, and whose father worked night shift regularly, I tended to read quite a lot.


This was an activity guaranteed not to wake him, and so lung redistribution could again be avoided. However, in reading a lot, they were unaware just how much of what they were saying I actually understood, which was most of it, to be honest. So to keep up the pretence and allow me to hear privy information, I always played along with consummate ease, and as I got older enjoyed winding him up.
I didn’t like the fact that I was being oppressed in conversation all the time.
I distinctly remember having pretty much the following dialogue…

“So why do little pigs have such big ears then?”
‘They’re born like that I suppose”
“Why wasn’t Noddy’s best friend a pig then?”
“What best friend?”
“Big ears”
”Because he was a rabbit”
“So why don’t you say little rabbits have big ears then?”
“Because that’s not the saying”
“What saying?”
“It doesn’t matter”
“It does if you are a little pig or a rabbit”
“But you are not a little pig or rabbit”
“Do I have big ears dad?”

OOPS!!!
The things parents say to their kids and the questions they ask are excellent preparation for a lifetime in sales or service stupidity, don’t you think? Children at a young age do not understand phraseology, idioms, expressions and the like.


During infant school, I was never exposed to Ladybird books that dealt with that subject matter, and nor did those by Enid Blyton, or the other kids authors either, as I recall.
I didn’t read
‘5 go to the library to make sense of Adrian’s parent’s phrases’.
Nope, that wasn’t on our reading list. Nor did those picture books with all the word associations in them have a graphic for ‘being separated from one’s breath’ or any of the other stupid statements.
The kids’ stories I read or was exposed to didn’t have any of the other myriad confusing statements either…
‘Once upon a time there were three bears, Mummy bear, Daddy Bear, and Baby bear, (who’d just had the smile wiped off his face, presumably by the back of someone’s hand).’
I don’t recall reading that. Nor do I recall reading…
‘Fee Fie Fo FUM,
I smell the blood of an Englishman
There’s some strange person in my place
He’ll smile on the other side of his face’
I didn’t get that one either. Maybe my parents just read different kids books to me?
With all this nonsense being indoctrinated into us, it’s a wonder we can make sense of anything at all. And our skills don’t seem to improve into adulthood, in the main, either.
During any sales or customer service training seminar, attendees have been taught the difference between open and closed questions since time immemorial.


Basically an open question solicits information, because they do not provide for YES/NO answers. Open questions typically contain the words who/what/when/where/ how/which/why?

“I keep six honest serving men;
they taught me all I knew
their names are What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who”
Rudyard Kipling

Perhaps Rudyard Kipling didn’t like stories with witches? He appears not to like ‘which’s’, in any event.
Closed questions, conversely, are geared to confirm a statement that has already been planted, and deliberately evoke a YES or NO answer.
What amuses me is how these so called chat show hosts ‘interview’ their guests. Take a look at this and see how many questions begin with Do you / are you / could you / will you / can you? Etc, etc. Effectively the guest isn’t being interviewed at all. The interviewer has decided what the audience would most like the guest to say, and then embarks on the most obvious directionalised process of closed questions you can imagine.
When the guest is one from whom you would actually be interested in what they have to say, it’s really frustrating to hear that person utter the interviewer’s opinions or thoughts through responses to led questions.
Whenever I am being asked really bad questions I deliberately try and cause the ‘questioner’ to realise the error of their ways. This is particularly true of market researchers who are, at the end of the day, paid to glean information from the public.


“Can you tell me what your experience was like at the XYZ hotel?”
“I suppose so; it is within the realms of possibility, yes.”
There is always a period of silence whenever I answer this way, yet in fact I have responded to the question appropriately. You may feel I am dealing with semantics, but less face it, we all in our time have gotten up to some antics, haven’t we?
The researcher’s question was actually phrased in such a way so as to gauge whether or not it was possible for me to tell them about the experience at a hotel. That probably wasn’t what they meant, but it was exactly what was said.
The words we use and the way we use them have tremendous impact. For example, you might see advertisements in a local newspaper
Wanted – a table for a lady with curved legs.
Alternatively
Wanted – a table with curved legs for a lady.
Same words, yet a different meaning entirely.
Usually, when I choose to answer the service person with an appropriate answer for their inappropriate question, the interviewer gets totally flustered by the first response, and then follows up the question with another doomed question
“So will you tell me what the experience…”
“perhaps”
Whoops! (Confused looks at best to follow).
Wouldn’t it be so much easier if the interviewer asked the question…
“How was your overall experience at XYZ hotel sir?”

You may interpret this scenario differently, but I find it annoying when someone is already eating into your available time, you have agreed to be helpful, and then they subject you to nonsense that wastes time because the person who assembled the questions is totally clueless about communication.
I generally don’t feel obliged to have to critique the quality of a question, analyse its intent, and then respond accordingly as if the question preparer or interviewer had gotten it right to begin with.
If they can’t be bothered, then why should I? I’ll waste their time, in fact, and just make fun of them.
And then at the end of this service interview, or face to face questionnaire, how often do they ask you something totally ridiculous like
“In your own words, what three changes would you make in order to improve the service delivery?”
In my own words indeed! I remember Billy Connolly talking about a similar scenario when I saw him live in Hong Kong, and often borrow his slant in this regard…
I may be reasonably intelligent, but do you really think I have my own language, my own set of words? Really? You do? Well ok then…
“Flinken staw, nast votry eingor, zunsitle sak fugnat ale midgur sep wung”
“I beg your pardon?”
“well, you did say in my own words, didn’t you?”
I really don’t get the point of service quality research if you can’t be bothered to get the questions right. Then there are the market researchers who stop you inside the mall, and that’s quite often these days, and their smarmy approach just gets my goat.


When I feel that these people are so arrogant that they really think I ought to want to give up my time to speak to them, then I satisfy their misguided beliefs… fully.
I know these people are charged with the task of collecting a certain volume of questionnaires, so I just happily help slow their progress. I feel inspired to have a bit of fun with them.
Of course the conversation is different every time, but the following is an ‘as best as I can remember’ recollection that I had fun with, when the largest Marks & Spencer’s was opened in a shopping complex close to Leicester, called Fosse Park.
This blonde enamelled lady, around mid 20’s, extremely nice figure, and decidedly overly animated, in a totally predictable ‘wow – can you see all of me if I move like this’ type of way, approached with some verve, as if to be firmly convinced there was no way I wouldn’t want to talk to her (yes – I admit it, sex sells).
However, without exception, this misplaced arrogance tends to drive me nuts… she was kind of like a blonde Tyra Banks, with a clipboard, but without the talk show, yet equally annoying and even more naively presented.
I just had to wind this girl up like a carriage clock.
I put on an upper class slimy vicar accent, the kind you hear on the radio when some priest is talking to, presumably, children. A voice similar to Mr Burns from the Simpsons, a drawn out type of voice that’s virtually moribund… the kind of voice that someone would use on their deathbed, as perhaps their final breaths are escaping them (the one’s they are being separated from, presumably?).
“Good morning sir – may I take a few minutes of your time to ask you some questions”


“Ooh… goodness gracious me. I would love that. I haven’t had this much fun since reading AA Milne’s combined works. A real conversation at last, with meaningful outcomes? Do go ahead young miss”.
Befuddled looks.
“Tell me, how often do you come to this shopping mall?”
“Well, it all depends on so many factors really.”
“Would it be once a week, twice per week, three times per week, or more than that?”
“Ooh… it wouldn’t be more than that. Mrs Wilkins only comes in three times per week you see and Fido just wouldn’t get fed and walked”
“So would it be once per week, twice or three times per week?
“Three times per week for sure, and she always takes him for a good long walk”
“No sir, I meant do you come to the mall once, twice or three times?”
“Oh, I see. How silly of me. I come here almost every day”.
“I thought you said you come here when your lady comes to the house”.
“Not really my dear… Fido only has an appetite on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so the other days I am completely free.”
“Hmm. Ok then. I am going to ask you to rank a series of things in the mall, as very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not satisfied, irrelevant or don’t know – is that ok? That’s very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not satisfied, irrelevant, or don’t know… ok?”
“OK then young miss.”


“Question 1, how satisfied are you with the provision of toilet facilities in the mall” “(remember you can select very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not satisfied, irrelevant, or don’t know)”
“Ooh, that’s a hard one. I suppose I would have to say, with appropriate give and take, weighing all the implications and possibilities, without prejudice, that they are irrelevant”.
“Are you sure you mean irrelevant sir? Toilets aren’t important to you?”
“Not since when in the army I got shot and my sergeant major said, ‘you know your urethra? Well it’s underneath ya’ and since then I have a colostomy bag miss. But it doesn’t leak. ”
“Oh dear. Ah, tell me how satisfied are you with our food court?”
“Hmm … another tough one. Are you talking in the past or as of now, more recently as it were?”
“Well, this is a new complex, so more recently”
“well in that case then it’s irrelevant on account of having my stomach stapled. I used to weigh 312lbs… you wouldn’t believe it would you?’
By this time the interviewer would have ordinarily finished the questionnaire and would be on her way home. Naturally she gets fed up, mortally pissed off actually, and it’s all I can do not to crack up seeing the total desperation and angst fleet across this ‘God’s Gift’ person’s face. Finally she skips all the remaining tick box questions, or ticks them herself later perhaps, and asks the last question
“May I ask you sir what are the top three features that make this mall appealing to you?”
“Ah – I thought you might ask me something like that. There are so many things actually, but I suppose you only want what I think are the best three. I probably have five, but I’ll do my best to stick to three…


That’s not to say these are in order you understand, if that’s ok. I could come up with ten, but I’ll keep it down to three for your benefit. Now let’s see…
It’s kind of hard, because once you have seen one shopping centre; you’ve seen a-mall. But anyway…
I think the best thing about this shopping centre is the ability to steal things, so I would have to say
lack of security cameras throughout
lack of security guards to catch shoplifters, and
the ease with which people here can steal your time, by wasting it.
I hope that enlightened you my dear, good day to you”