December 16th. The Day of Much Fuckwittery.

December 16th. The Day of Much Fuckwittery.

It started well.

I’d been faffing about for ages about whether to build a gym in a shed but finally settled on keeping it in my spare room downstairs. I’d seen some modern home gyms with dark grey walls and ceilings and awesome hexagonal LED lights on the ceiling – so I decided to go for that.

Decorators were quoting ridonkulus sums of money to paint one room, and although

I’m crazy busy, I’m also very working class and no way I was paying that.

So, I rolled my sleeves up and got it done myself. The paint job looks awesome. It just needed the lights.

I’d ordered a set, which arrived while I was at home. Alas. The Parcelforce man didn’t wish to wait for me to answer the door and instead stuffed a blank missed delivery card through the letterbox. Even though it didn’t require a signature. I didn’t actually know it was arriving that day as it seems the annual event of Christmas had caught Royal Mail & Parcelforce out, and they’re overwhelmed. Poor sausages. Can’t blame them. Who could have predicted it would be a busier time of year?

Anywho. The next day I leave a note asking them to leave the parcel in the porch. The parcel did not require a signature. I’d also updated the tracking to that effect.

The Parcel Force man duly comes. Reads my note. Ignores it. Stuffs another slip through the door and sods off with my parcel. It then “got lost”, so I had to order a new one. On a next-day delivery. ’Cos I’d already booked the electrician in.

This is all very faffy, but I stuck with it, and eventually I get the lights, and I’m thinking, Woohoo, new lights!!! My gym room is finished. That’ll be a nice treat.

Nope.

The electrician turned up to fit what was described as “the easiest lights to install”. At which point EE (mobile phone provider) called me.

(I’d had to lodge a complaint after they’d cut my business line off and then lost that number. Which created carnage when I tried to access business accounts that use two-step verification and send a code to your phone). (That lost me a week just trying to resolve that and getting absolutely nowhere. I had to create new accounts in the end. Which is just nuts.)

Anyway. So a lady from EE phones to resolve the complaint but her voice was instantly loaded and agitated. You know when someone uses polite words, but they are spoken at you? It was like that. She said she needed to put me through security and asked for the last four digits of my bank account number.

I was like. “I don’t know it. And I don’t have it to hand.” I was trying to herd my blind dog away from the electrician so I couldn’t grab it easily.

She responded instantly, “I can’t complete security, so there’s no point in continuing.” But it was said like she’d won something. Like it was a victory.

I said ‘Can you ask me something else? Date of birth? Postcode? Phone number?”

Nope. She had to have that one obscure thing.

I said, “Hang on, I wouldn’t give anyone my bank details anyway. Not even one digit of it.”

I was stumped and said what else are they going to start asking for? My PIN number?

“Right!” she shouts. “I won’t tolerate this abuse!”

It wasn’t abuse at all. I simply said you shouldn’t ask people for bank details. That’s what scammers do. They get the last four digits, confuse you, and suddenly they’ve got the whole number, especially if you’ve already given your name and address.Even though the call showed as EE, it still felt scammy, and she was getting ranty, so I just hung up and went back to see how my lights were looking.

At which point the electrician told me the floors upstairs would have to come up to run cables through joists to fit the lights.

Um. What the what now?

Turned out the hexagonal lights were supplied with the world’s shortest cable, even though the fitting bit is at the far end or on an outside edge. Which was nowhere near the light fitting in the ceiling.

I thought this can’t be right. I’d even asked the company before buying if these were easy to fit. They said yes, they’re super easy. And it says it’s super easy install on their site.

I phoned them up, thinking I’m missing something.

A chap answered and launched into technical stuff. I said I don’t understand a word, but do I really have to take my floors up? Am I missing something? It says easy install. This isn’t easy. It’s the opposite of easy.

He then asks me if I’d watched the instruction video.

I said I had, and it was like a music video and totally unhelpful. So this chap then gives the most helpful reply ever. “If you don’t like it, send it back.”

Which, I’ll grant you, is true. But also entirely bloody unhelpful seeing as the electrician (who was on an hourly rate and had already burned through two hours) was still waiting. I said that wasn’t helpful and ended the call to try and fathom a solution.

The lighting company then tried to call me back a few times. But my phone was on silent, and the electrician was telling me his company had only booked him to be with me two hours, and this was a whole day job, and it was all becoming a nightmare.

Then I see the missed calls, so I phone them back with a sudden rush of hope that they’ve got a solution.

Nope.

It was the boss frothing at the mouth ’cos I’d said telling me to send it back wasn’t helpful, especially after they'd rushed an order out for me. But I was trying to explain that they sold it as ‘easy to install’ and nobody said about taking floors up, and nothing on their site says that.

But he’s going, ‘Richard. Richard. Richard,’ and getting louder.

And then I was like, ‘Stop saying my name like that.’

Cue triggered rant #2, with him yelling down the phone and me swearing. Gawd. Not nice.

Anywho.

So, the light had to be boxed back up so I could send it back. Which was another massive faff.

By that point I’m thinking I’ll walk into town and do a simple chore. Which will help soothe all the drama. Right?

Nope.

I had to get some new lightbulbs for another light in my long hallway. It’s a dark corridor with two sets of lights. Each one has four bulbs. One end had been in shadows for months cos the ceiling fell in and had to be replastered. (Old house undergoing renovations.)

I buy the new bulbs and get home and get the steps out to fit them.

But I bought cool white.

And the other one in the hallway has warm white.

So it didn’t match. At all. It looked bloody awful.

Then I noticed that another old LED colour-changing light fitted to the old downstairs bathroom (where I rehabbed gulls) had come on from the sparky turning the fuses on and off. And the remote that came with that light was lost yonks ago. It doesn’t have a switch. It’s stuck on. In yellow light. Next to the bloody hallway that had cold white and warm white. Which is next to my gym, which had no flipping lights. No. It does. But like dining room lights, which look super shit.

I gave up and went for a bath to hide from the world, and my editor texted and said I’d used forward instead of foreword in the Undead Presents books, and I’m like fuck, fuck, fuckkkkkk!!!

Then I get a super angry email about a missing order from my store, and I’m thinking fuck, fuck, fuckkkkkk, who has missed this order?

I end the bath and check, but we’d fulfilled the order the day it came in and sent it out. It hadn’t even been two full days. Fuck, fuck, fuckkkk!!!

Two days, and they were emailing like that! We’d even used TRACKED 48HRS. Royal Mail and Parcelforce are meant to give updates. But they ain’t. ’Cos it’s Christmas. Which, as per the start of this saga, appears to have caught them out.

Thing is, each of these are small events of no great drama, but they’re never just one event. They have a rolling cumulative effect which has created this terrible state of anger within our country right now.

We’re all feeling it.

I felt it with EE. A huge and now faceless organisation that has grown so big it can do what it wants with no fear of consequences.

Our enforcement infrastructure outside of policing insults online has become weak and dire. Big companies can do as they please, and if complaints are made, they muddy the waters to avoid all responsibility.

That woman in EE (if it was them calling) is most likely rewarded because that instant claim of abuse she made when I voiced disagreement means she can write that complaint off.

But the chain effect means without realising it I was agitated and defensive when I called the lighting company. So when the chap said ‘if you don’t like it send it back’ my brain heard that as, fuck off we don’t give a shit. Which he didn’t mean at all. But it’s also true.

So I hung up and that irritated his boss who calls me and we’re all pissing each other off and getting triggered and bang! Another flash point comes.

Of course. In my head I’m righteous and thinking I have done nothing wrong! I am the consumer. I am the customer. It is all these other people creating these issues.

But each person within that chain could say that.

And maybe that EE lady had just got off a genuinely abusive call, and she didn’t realise how she sounded.

It’s the six degrees of separation theory. Which I’d bet is now fewer degrees because of global connectivity.

The EE lady was agitated. She agitated me. I agitated the guy I called. His boss gets agitated and calls me and so it feeds on.

Then along comes that poor customer who’d ordered a signed book but hadn’t got any updates. Which is fair enough. It’s getting close to Christmas. They need to know it will arrive.

But we’re too small to run an automated retail system like that. We tried super hard to integrate automated responses, but they don’t bloody work, and the website company, like EE, doesn’t give a shit. And cos of taxes and cost of living it’s just not feasible to now swap over to another service. All of those things have costs. I went with WIX and it’s a nightmare. But everything is a nightmare. Every company is a nightmare.

Which is why that customer of mine escalated to instant anger and fired an email missile off to us. Because we’ve all become such victims of full-on dystopian predatory companies that we MUST communicate forcefully, or we don’t get heard.

But those companies are made up of people like me and you, and we’re all consumers and providers in that sense. We’re all attacking each other while they make eye-watering profits.

We know that. But when we feel attacked we get put onto a defensive back foot and makes us want to fire our own broadside back.

Why should we get attacked? It’s not our fault.

And so it goes on.

Behaviour breeds behaviour and the angrier and more entitled you get, the more it comes back at you. That’s a fact. We’re all connected to each other, and so really it’s your own peace you are harming when you lash out at other people.

But here’s the thing.

We can break that cycle.

The guy from the lighting company reached out and we cleared the air. We both apologised. He’s under massive strain, as is every small business at the moment. As we all are for every little fucking thing in this country.

I wish I could connect with the EE person, if they were genuine. I often wish I could go back and apologise for many times things have become heated.

Or, better still, I can try and break the cycle when it happens again.

Easier said than done.

Blimey. Dear me. So that was my December 16^th Day of Much Fuckwittery.

I hope yours was better. 

Much love x