HOW TO COMPLAIN

   Mr. Los Angeles would always tell me that I went about complaining in the wrong way.

       “You sound too aggressive,” he would say. “Aggression doesn’t get you anywhere. You need to be laid-back and friendly, like me.”

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

       Mr. Los Angeles is indeed laid-back and friendly when issuing a complaint. But then Mr. Los Angeles can afford to be. Mr. Los Angeles is blessed with a mellifluously booming all-American male voice and a commanding male personality, and, when complaining, so very laid-back and friendly does Mr. Los Angeles find himself able to be that he will end up making best friends with the people he is complaining to, who will scurry to shower upon him solutions for his problem, bounteous gifts of redress, and a stream of winning lottery tickets delivered by Margot Robbie lookalikes driving vintage sports cars (OK, I made that last part up but people are pretty darned nice to him anyway).

       “How do you do that?” I would ask him in awe.

       “It’s easy,” he would say. “Just be nice.”

       Well, it is one thing for Mr. Los Angeles to be nice. I, on the other hand, come bearing female chromosomes, a foreign accent and an instinctively sarcastic tongue, a combination which, if left unchecked, does me few favors in these situations. I have also inherited from my late and sainted mother, along with passable ankles and the dubiously useful ability to memorize poetry by the yard, a blazing Irish temper, which is the bane of my life and which, when unleashed, does me fewer favors still. To be clear, I am not actively horrible: upright citizens do not throw stones at me in the street, nor do small children cower into doorways at my passing. But the fact is that administrative people are not as nice to me as they are to Mr. Los Angeles, for the simple reason, he says, that I am not as nice to them as he is.

       One day, I decided to try being nice. I was having an issue with an airline, someone on whose staff had made an error at an airport which had cost me a substantial sum of money which I needed to have refunded: the facts of my case were not in dispute, I had the date of the event, the details of the event, all of the appropriate documentation of the event, and simply wanted my money back. However, this was proving hard to make happen, and at last I was directed to the Head of the Customer Relations Department, one Mr. Wright, to whom I calmly and pleasantly explained the situation.

       Mr. Wright appeared to be a gentleman of the old school. He listened to my story and tsk-tsk’ed disapprovingly. That should never have happened, he told me. (I refrained from agreeing with him that it most certainly should not). He must assure me that it was not how his airline was in the habit of treating its customers. (I squashed the impulse to point out that, habitual behavior or not, it was, demonstrably, precisely how his airline was treating me). My money must be refunded, he said. (I did join in then, to affirm, calmly and pleasantly, that I very much hoped that it would be). He would simply have to get an approval from the Reimbursements Department, he said, and then he could move the matter forward. The problem, he added, was that the Reimbursements Department were nowhere near as efficient as he would like them to be, so I should be prepared for them to move slowly. (Somewhat heroically, I said nothing).

       Are you from England? Mr. Wright asked me then.

       Calmly and pleasantly, I confirmed that I was.

       Mr. Wright liked England, he told me. He’d once spent a week in London on his way to Europe and had a most enjoyable stay there. He felt a particular affinity for England, he said, because his mother’s family had come from Nottingham.

       There was an old English saying, I told him, that the prettiest girls in England came from Nottingham.

       As I had hoped it would, this pleased Mr. Wright. Not that his mother had ever mentioned it herself, he added, but then she was never a woman to seek attention, he thought that was a British thing, wasn’t it?

       It certainly was, I agreed. Now, about my refund …

       “Leave it to me, Miss Donnelly!” he cried. He would confront the Reimbursements Department, extract that approval from them, and take it from there! I should expect to hear from him in two days, or three at the most.

       That would be wonderful, I told him, calmly and pleasantly, and went about my day feeling really rather pleased with myself. It seemed I could carry off this niceness business after all.

       I did not hear from Mr. Wright in two days, nor did I hear from him in three. On the fourth day, I called him again.

       “Oh, Miss Donnelly,” he sighed. “I haven’t been able to do anything about this yet because the people at the Reimbursements Department haven’t gotten back to me yet. It really is too bad of them.”

       Firmly repressing the reply that immediately sprang to mind, I channeled my inner Mr. Los Angeles. I knew exactly how Mr.  Wright felt, I commiserated. I had myself been in his shoes many times, I confided. Some people, I observed, could be frustrating to deal with, could they not?

       Miss Donnelly had hit the nail on the head. It was extraordinary what a level of inefficiency he was required to confront these days while trying to do his job. It wasn’t like the old days, was it, when people took a pride in their work?

       It certainly wasn’t, I agreed, still calmly and pleasantly, and he was to be congratulated for keeping his cool while dealing with such thoroughly irritating co-workers. I could not, I said, thank him enough for sticking to the task until between the two of us we had wrested from the Reimbursements Department the authorization for the money which was, after all, (was it not?) incontrovertibly mine, and which I was, in fact, by now, as I was  sure Mr. Wright understood, quite looking forward to receiving.

       Mr. Wright chuckled softly. Keeping his cool must be a British thing, he said. He’d continue to keep his upper lip stiff and make his mother proud, and the money would be in my account within two to three days.

       Four days later, I called him back.

       “Miss Donnelly, you’ll never believe this,” he said. “But those people in Reimbursements still haven’t gotten back to me. What can you do about people like this?”

       It was a conundrum, I agreed, and we discussed grit, determination, the bulldog breed, Winston Churchill, and the fact, as I calmly and pleasantly pointed out, that no one was disputing that this was a refund that was owed to me, and that was, as I calmly and pleasantly mentioned, by now considerably overdue, before he departed, stating most confidently that two, or just possibly three, more days should see my money.

       Four days after that, I had him on speed dial.

       “Miss Donnelly, it’s extraordinary,” he announced. “These people don’t even seem to care, not about their work, not about the wellbeing of our clients. I’ve never known anything like it – they’re just impossible to deal with.”

       Still clinging amid the tempest-toss’d waves to my life raft of pleasant calm, I clucked sympathetically.

       “And it can’t be much fun for you,” I then continued, allowing possibly just the eensiest little bit of an edge to creep into my calm and pleasant tone. “Having an irate customer calling you every few days asking what’s going on.”

       Mr. Wright issued a comforting chortle.

       “Oh, Miss Donnelly,” he reassured me kindly. “You don’t sound at all irate to me.”

       Which was when it became plain to me. Mr. Wright was enjoying this. Mr. Wright was delighting in his conversations with the calm and pleasant woman with the British accent, talking about Britain, and the old days, and the sad decline of the work ethic. Mr. Wright was even looking forward to them, maybe imagining Miss Donnelly and himself as part of a subplot in a Downton Abbey movie, being served tea and cakes in a tea room by an undernourished waitress wearing a pinafore and cap. In fact, so thoroughly agreeable a time was Mr. Wright giving himself with these exchanges with Miss Donnelly, that his interest in curtailing them by addressing Miss Donnelly’s problem was, to put it kindly, tangential.

       “Well, please know this,” I told Mr. Wright, still calmly. And described, succinctly and in words of his ancestral plain Anglo-Saxon, the exact nature and scope of Miss Donnelly’s emotions at that particular hour of that particular day.

       When I had finished, there was an appalled pause.

       “Do you understand me?” I asked Mr. Wright.

       “I do,” said Mr. Wright, his voice frosty with disapproval. “But I didn’t expect to have it expressed in … those terms.”

       My money was refunded shortly afterwards. However, I’m still waiting for those winning lottery tickets. Maybe I should contact the Reimbursements Department to see where they are.