Nervous Breakdowns
Many of you may be aware that ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland has moved headquarters from the west end of Glasgow to Govan. Some of you might also know that we're in the process of demolishing large chunks of our Inverness building and constructing a new bit next to our existing Victorian mansion on Culduthel Road. At the same time, because we're gluttons for punshiment, we've been installing all sorts of new hardware and software that's been designed to allow us to do fancy things in this multi-media age.
It hasn't all gone smoothly. There have been some horrible moments of dead air as we've been finding our way around the new systems. We've been apologising like crazy, but now I realise that may have been the wrong approach. Let me explain.
At lunchtime today I found myself up at the retail park and wandering around one of those big electrical chain stores where the staff wear orangey-yellow shirts. I was prepared to cough up more that £300 for a certain secret Christmas gift (and peripherals) and the young woman at the sales desk could not have been more pleasant. She answered all my questions and we shared a joke or two about Christmas shopping. She then asked me if I wanted to extend my insurance on the said item. I considerd this for a moment and declined. She nodded and continued processing my order.
At that point her colleague standing at the next till decided to offer his tuppence worth:
"Insurance is very important with these items because they use new technology."
I smiled at him and again declined the offer, but he ploughed on, describing the particular internal innovation which would make the extra insurance all the more important.
"You mean it's likely to break down?" I asked.
"No I didn't say that. It's just that it's new technology."
"But you always do this, " I said, "Now I'm starting to think this device isn't reliable."
"It's not that," he insisted, "but the most common problem is accidental damage. It's like vacuum cleaners..."
"So your vacuum cleaners aren't reliable either?"
By now we were on the verge of an argument. Other customers were looking at us and I was going red in the face. At that point the nice woman who had been serving me asked for my credit card and, well, I told her, calmly, that I had changed my mind. I walked out of the shop and noticed my reflection in the automatic doors. I was the spitting image of Victor Meldrew.
So if you think I'm being unreasonable just think about the next time you hear a technical fault on air. It might not be our fault. It's yours because you didn't buy extra insurance with your licence fee. Aye, right.
