During the process of being severely stuffed around (no weak jokes, please) in my recent day-to-day dealings, I’ve found a rather weird exponential scale at work: the hidden tenets of South African commerce.
1. The more unctuous the assurances given about excellent service and attention by large South African business and para-governmental organisations, the shabbier the actual service and attention that eventually you receive. 2. The more appalling the service or attention, the longer the electronic queue you have to endure to speak to an eternally busy “consultant”. 3. The longer the electronic queue, the more overwhelmingly counterfeit the assurances given by some treacle-voiced announcer telling you how much your patience is appreciated. 4. The more cheesy and hollow the emotion, the more glib the phrase used to express it.
As an example of the latter, consider the current Woolworths special: “Enjoy the rest of your day”, projected from behind dead eyes by check-out assistants who’ve had the phrase drilled into them by the Woolworth’s “Lick-The-Suckers-&-They’ll-Come-Back-For-More” customer-relations division. Instead of this palpably synthetic cliché, I find myself actually longing for the day when a Woolworth’s check-out assistant leans over and says something like: “I’ve been standing here for seven hours on my aching legs, watching privileged dickheads like you top up their next 24-hour basketful of hideously overpriced glutton-fodder, then flick their sodding credit cards at me in settlement of amounts in excess of my monthly take-home pay. I really don’t give a blind shit whether you enjoy the rest of your day. Now piss off out of my good sight.” At least that would come straight from the heart.
Here’s another typical “stuff-you” disposition (and there are ugly legions of others), this one “exhibited” by the South African distributors of movies, either in four-wallers or on DVD. Going to a South African cinema these days is a case of being mugged by decor and presentation aligned to the cultural needs of those Voortrekkers who only made it as far as Parow; the last movie house I went into belonged in a soft-focus volkstaat reverie. As I came in they were actually screening snotliedjie music videos. When, eventually, the feature film is shown, you get subjected to sound levels so high they cause actual pain. My hearing ain’t what it used to be by any means, but I have to stuff cotton wool into my ears to protect them from the disco blastings of movies. I asked a cinema manager to have the sound-levels reduced. “The levels are pre-determined,” he told me. “I’m not allowed to interfere.”
Then come the incidental joys of audience members indulging themselves in the delights of their cellphones. Why don’t cinemas ban these instruments from hell? “Sorry folks, we must warn you to turn off your cellphones. If any one of you insists on using one we will stop the film, turn up the house-lights and send in a couple of psychiatrically volatile striking security guards to throw you and your Nokia under the first passing bus.” I guarantee the vast majority of any audience would applaud.
But far the worst ingredient of the “Proudly South African Cinema Experience” is the showing of film ads. When you’ve paid for a cinema seat, you should see what you’ve paid for and, at the most, two movie trailers. You should not be ambushed by advertisements, especially those that have long since died and decomposed on television.
But now, the film ads are starting to appear on DVDs. I rented one recently, distributed by Nu-Metro. First on the disc was a cute little sermon on piracy, through which I couldn’t fast-forward; they doctor the things so that you can’t. After three trailers (through which I could fast-forward) came two advertisements which I had to sit through before I could get to the movie. It took me five minutes of indignant remote manipulation to get to see what I had paid for.
Not that my or anyone else’s complaining will have the slightest effect. Monopolies like our film distributors are akin to their customer-stuffing compatriots in South African big business: they’ve had it so good and easy for so long that they believe they can do anything they like. These are the SABCs or Telkoms or our obscenely profitable banks and all the others cowering behind electronic answering systems. The only difference between those of yore and today is the glutinous treacle-talk with which they smother their ineptitudes.
And now my penance. More here than there, in smaller businesses, you still can get to the real thing, the appreciation of a customer who knows he or she is regarded as something more than a cipher, a statistic on some marketing computer. In preparation for a coming winter blessed with darkness and cold by a combination of Alec “Bolt-Up-My-Tube” Erwin’s and Eskom’s buck-naked incompetence, I bought a couple of gas heaters from a small firm in Retreat in Cape Town. I cannot recall having received better or more genuinely friendly service.
And you know something: not once did anyone tell me to enjoy the rest of my day.