Incompetents

Occasionally, I blog about poor service of one kind or another.

When I worked in a university library, I was aware of working with people who were almost universally conscientious, accurate, and pretty hard-working.  That included just about everyone in the libraryy except the idiot boss at that time, who was more interested in collecting air miles at the taxpayers’ expense than anything else, unfortunately.  The rest of the library staff took pride in their work, and in particular in being accurate in what we did.  We were part of the much maligned public sector, and received no special rewards for a job well done.  Just doing the job well was enough to motivate the staff.

In my retirement, I keep coming across private sector incompetence.  In the past couple of days alone this has included:

A letter from Clerical Medical which refers to something which “…was cancelled on 30 November 2011”.  Eh?  It’s only October 2011.  A phonecall resulted in “…Oh, we meant November 2010”.

A letter with a handwritten address on the envelope from Santander which says I should refer to the enclosed leaflet.  Nothing was enclosed.

Total and utter nonsense, once again, from the Virgin Media call centre.  Unless you get Jackie at Virgin, you are in trouble.

How does the private sector survive such incompetence?

Postscript.  I made an appointment with Santander and met with someone in their Edinburgh office.  That same evening, I received a phonecall asking if I wanted to make an appointment.  I said I’d met with someone that very day.  “Oh sorry, then.”  The next day, I received a letter asking if I’d like to make an appointment.