Hanging on The Telephone

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Here’s a great idea for you if you feel that your life expectancy is unlimited and you can afford to chuck away some of the time the good Lord gave you. Call the Nationwide Building Society and count the hours as you wait, in vain, to speak to anyone at all. You’ll have more success selling Chinese takeaway at a rally for Tibet.

I realise that as a way of wasting your life, calling a building society isn’t up there with selling ice cream in Siberia or sun cream in Glasgow but, with financial markets in meltdown, you should really should cheer yourself up and try it as The Nationwide has come up with a novel way of not lending money.

Pick up the ‘phone to call them and your enquiry is now being directed by computer recognition software. None of the usual “press one for banking, two for insurance, three for a telling off because you’re poor,” that seems to proliferate everywhere. I swear we’ll find all walks of life using this nonsense soon. “Thank you for calling Dead End Funeral Directors. We’re sorry your loved one has kicked the bucket. Press one for burial, two for cremation…….”

But, at Nationwide, the recorded voice asks you to state what you want, then recognises a word or two and puts you through to the relevant department. So say to it “I’d like a mortgage” and it reacts to the “age” sound and you get put through to the mortgage department. Say something that sounds similar, like “I once slept with Elaine Paige”, and you’ll still get put through to the mortgage department. Then try saying “Whatever you do don’t put me through to the mortgage department” and, you’ve guessed it, you’ll be put right through to the mortgage department.

And here’s the clever bit. After the computer voice says she’s connecting you, the ‘phone goes deader than a Cheeky Girls’ career and you’re left waiting for ever. So, you call back and go through the same process, then make a cup of tea and try again, and before long summer has arrived and you’ve forgotten why you called in the first place.

While other institutions say, outright, that they won’t lend money just now, Nationwide flirts with you like a promiscuous Geisha and then cuts you off, penniless, and with not one single human being getting paid at their end to get involved. I can’t help but feel they could at least stump up a few hundred quid to make it more entertaining and get Morgan Freeman or Barney The Purple Dinosaur to do the voice. It’s a masterful way of pretending that they’re not withholding money, while at the same time giving none away, not even to telephone staff.

I then tried the Abbey Building Society and spoke to a real, live, human being. She referred me to the correct department where I waited for longer than a John Prescott lunch, listening to bland muzak. You’d think by now they’d employ a DJ who could ask you after, say, ten minutes of listening to music from the Big Blands whether you had any requests.

Eventually I spoke with a girl who was from the highly trained, highly bored, school of advisers and who read her script for probably the fortieth time that morning. I’m sure these people start the day full of enthusiasm and enunciate clearly but by the time I get to them they have word blindness as they search their script and elide all the words together. I could just about make out “Ihavetoadviseyou thatthiscallmaybe recordedandusedfor trainingpurposes”, but we then moved on to the next level of speech impairment with
“Areyoucallingregardinganexistingenquiryorareyoumakinganewapplication?.”

I was embarrassed saying “excuse me each time” as she simply sighed and read it again, even faster, and with an air of boredom that made me want to apologise for pulling her away from Hello magazine and spoiling her day. I’m not sure what my conversation with her means I have committed to, but as soon as I get my hands on a Klingon dictionary I intend to find out.

My brother used to supervise call centres and he tells me the most trusted accents are Scottish, Irish and Geordie, so what I can’t understand is why most call centre voices sound exactly like the nice man I call each Friday night at the Bombay Express for my Tikka Massala? I know all the off shoring financial reasons for siting complaints departments, sorry, Customer Service Centres, in India and the staff are invariably unflappable and speak better English than I do. Yet there’s a problem. Because these people are so very polite, I never feel I can get angry with them for the bad service that’s caused my call in the first place and I end up apologising to them instead.

So, I can’t win. If I call someone here in the UK, I end up apologising to some fed up, sighing, script reader for intruding on her day. If I call India, I end up apologising because they’re so nice. Either way I can never get anything off my chest by ranting in a release of frustration and anger. So maybe the Nationwide have got it right in just letting the ‘phone go dead.

I’ll call them back later and shout down the ‘phone anyway, something like “I want to complain about your phone system which hasn’t worked in ages!!”. I’ll then get “You asked for mortgages. I’ll direct your call”.

It's Just My Manner

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I have to confess I’m not a huge fan of bad manners. Not Bad Manners, the 80s ska band fronted by Buster Bloodvessel who, despite their name, were so gentle they probably now run a tea shop in the Cotswolds with half price Wednesdays for pensioners. No. I mean people who just don’t give a hoot about the rest of us.

I first remember my own bad manners making a difference to me when I was around five years old and climbed on top of our dining room table. My dad came in, ordering me off immediately and, as I was scared to jump, he reluctantly promised to catch me. But, as I took off, Dad folded his arms and let me crash to the floor saying “that’ll teach you”. I reckon his bad manners were worse than mine.

Other than the odd childhood occasion, like sitting in the Glasgow Odeon and watching George Banks tear up his kids’ wish list in Mary Poppins, the bad manners of others really didn’t impact on me till I first came across Rod Stewart, the ageless sperm donor with tight trousers and an even tighter wallet. Ask Rod for a tip in a restaurant and he’ll say “remember to floss your teeth”.

Despite now being 63 years old he plays weekend football for Lumbago United, or some such team, alongside the Brazilian left back Viagra. He may be fit but he ain’t classy. I could always sniff that Rod was a bit of an ill mannered git and it’s not that the blond belter broke wind as we were dining somewhere posh or that he blanked me in public, although he did seem to ignore me as I stood singing We Are Sailing at Wembley stadium with seventy thousand other fans.

At school, pals told me about his soulful voice and recommended I buy an early album called Every Picture Tells A Story which contained some classic hits. On the album sleeve notes Rod mentioned a musician who’d played on the track Maggie May saying, “The mandolin was played by the mandolin player in Lindisfarne. The name slips my mind”.

Now Rod must have had weeks to prepare his sleeve notes but the peroxide prat just couldn’t be bothered, preferring to spend his time either on the beach or on the bleach. How difficult would it have been to check? And note the use of “the name slips my mind”, not “his name”, as if Rod couldn’t even remember whether it was a guy, a girl, or a musically talented otter. The mandolin player (Ray Jackson since you ask) remains anonymous to this day on all copies of an album that was recently voted Best Rock Album Ever. I’ll accept that Rod may be a rock act, but he’ll never be a class act.

Since then, in adult life, I’ve come across bad manners most weeks and reacted by, mainly, ignoring them and regretting it later. I once took the bad manners of a band called The Stranglers in my stride in a radio interview and got fired for not slapping them down. And someone double parking on the school run while smirking makes me want to kill, yet I hold back for fear of bumping in to them socially.

But yesterday I had a meeting in London at a very smart club where there is a dress code for business and each table has a reminder card that mobile ‘phones should be switched off. Trying to stay polite and politically correct I’ll simply say that a lady who was a generously proportioned, fat, huge assed barrel of lard, insisted on keeping her ‘phone switched on and, each time a text or call came through, our meeting was interrupted by The Pet Shop Boys singing Go West. I gradually became furious. I mean I could understand a bit of West End Girls as a ring tone, but Go West?

Everyone in the room glared at the over inflated woman with no neck but it made no difference and a smirk gradually made the exhaustingly long journey across her very big face. I stood up and plonked a reminder card from our table in front of her but she just took it on the chins and ignored me. A verbal exchange made no difference so I sat down, defeated. My colleague looked terrified, as if worried she’d sit on him, till he saw the approval from the room and their thumbs up. I should have politely, and very loudly, bellowed “If you don’t switch that off all thirty of us in this room will call for reinforcements and a crane and we’ll throw you out”.

As I left, the waitress asked if we’d had a good meeting so, for the first time in years, I told tales. She went off to get the manager and have the woman rolled out the door.

But life’s too short for this. Why should my life be affected by the bad manners of others? I’m sure even Ray Jackson can now listen to Maggie May without trying to think of smart things he should have said to Rod Stewart, and if he can let go so should I.

To rectify this, and so that I will be happy and content in not reacting, I’ve now bought a book on how to control my reactions to events and turn myself in to the kind of person who lets it all wash over them. I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.

Meantime, as to my bad manners? Well, of course, I don’t have any. Since jumping on tables I’ve become less like George Banks and more like Mary Poppins. Practically perfect in every way.

Cannes You Feel It?

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The words “innocence” and “Paul Coia” haven’t appeared in the same sentence since my mum was told someone had entered hospital and swapped her new born baby for a rhesus monkey with a nose defect.But the innocence of a stranger really cheered me up this week as I travelled for work in France.

I was reminded of the last time I journeyed through the South of the country as an innocent seventeen year old adolescent, gawky, awkward, full of teenage hormones and never been kissed. The lack of lip action may have had something to do with a dodgy beard I was trying desperately to grow in tribute to Scooby Doo’s pal Shaggy.

However, I was full of thoughts back then of sophisticated madamoiselles who missed Quasimodo and were waiting expectantly as I stuffed my whole wardrobe in a backpack and hitched through France. I lucked out in meeting a fellow student who let me sleep in his tent for a few days. Unfortunately he was new to camping and pitched the tent on small hillocks so we woke up each morning in darkness as the canvas was completely covered in black ants. Not a great few days to invite girls back to “my place”.

Those were much easier and more innocent times, so I wondered how I’d feel going back this week as an almost mature adult. No more carefree student days. My beard has long gone, I no longer think that changing underwear every day is a sign of obsessive compulsive disorder, I don’t squeeze my spots – I have a wife to do that for me now - and I’ve stopped believing my pal Benjy who told me that “voulez vous coucher avec moi çe soir” was French for “nice to meet you”. So, would I have as much fun?

Driving through Cannes I was surprised by the street names which included English novelists and poets who, perhaps like me, had backpacked here in the past. I wondered if there was a street named after me from all those years ago but no luck, unless you count the Rue de la Gargoyle.

The whole place looked as I remembered it, and all that was missing was Roger Moore and Tony Curtis belting through town in a sports car with the Persuaders theme blaring out, driving past the wedding cake architectural style of The Grand Hotel, The Carlton and the Gucci and Cartier shops. I looked in the shop windows to see if I still felt as poor as in my student days and the only watch I found that I remotely liked cost twenty thousand euros. Of course I bought five of them.

As this was the Mip television festival, the place was full of all nationalities with laminated passes round their brass necks, careful not to be too animated lest the precariously perched sunglasses, on top of the carefully lacquered hair, fell off. Do these people have two more eyes on top of their heads that need protecting, even indoors?

Further along the coast, Nice was much quieter although it did have a Convention in town – The European Congress of Psychiatry. To watch these misfits wander through wearing their identical back packs with the convention dates and logo emblazoned on top was to seriously worry about ever being mentally ill. I stood behind four of them as they debated in a shop which sweets to take home for friends. “If you give him the strawberry one, that will say you find him frivolous yet the pineapple may say you believe him too earnest”. Twenty minutes of this and I’d decided that if I ever feel really depressed I will certainly cheer myself by visiting a psychiatrist. And shooting them.

As I headed back to the airport I wished I’d had more time to look around for memories of all those years ago - the place where I’d had my wallet stolen, the boarding house I’d sneaked out of without paying because it smelled worse than a village toilet after coachloads of football fans with dysentry had passed through, or the street cafe where I fell in love for the first time. I’ll never forget those croissants.

I had remembered Nice airport as being a bit like the end of the movie Casablanca with shiny propellers turning on planes riddled with rust as couples in raincoats and hats said their fond farewells quickly before the Germans invaded the Duty Free. Now the place is not only much bigger, it is in colour. The area where drivers drop off passengers is named in a way that Bogart and Bergman would have approved of wholeheartedly. They’ve adopted the American tag “Kiss and Fly” but I didn’t hang around long enough to see the difference a French kiss makes to traffic back up.

So, what of the stranger’s innocence that cheered me up this week? He was no more than seven or eight years old and he and his family stood in front of me waiting to check in their bags. His mum was arguing with his grandfather over security and carry on luggage and, as the arguing intensified, she wandered off in a huff. As they arrived at the front, the grandfather asked the desk lady a question and the answer made the little boy smile. He looked across to see his mother coming back.

“Mummy, Mummy”, he shouted so that even tourists in Cannes must have heard. “Don’t worry. The lady says you can take your electric razor in your handbag.”

Innocence. Don’t you just love it?

Mind Your Language

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But for a twist of fate I could have been born American. If my grandparents, who had sailed from Italy, had found decent pasta on Ellis Island they would probably have stayed. As it was, they took one look at the cuisine and rushed back to the docks eighty years ago, taking the first boat out and landing in Glasgow where the local haggis pizza and deep fried Mars bars won them over.

Recently I was in Chicago coaching the executives of a chocolate company, which was handy as I love chocolate and I love Americans too. Any nation that can take a sporting event in which no other country takes part and call it The World Series has got to be impossibly self centred, have loads of chutzpah or simply enjoy a great sense of humour. And that’s humour with a “u” by the way.

Writing this blog means I receive many emails from all around the world, but the Stateside ones usually just tell me off for my spelling. If you have a word processor package and the spell check slips from UK English to American English you’ll know just how different the two languages are. You say tomato, I say marinara.

The fact that the Americans have different spellings from us in Britain is due to a guy named Noah Webster who, in 1828, decided that English was just too posh for him as it was descended from Greek and Latin. Noah hadn’t much time for the classical languages having probably majored in Media Studies and I.T. so, like a spelling World Series, he decided to devise English that was solely American.

His dictionary, bound in Moroccan leather, became hugely popular in America but was ignored by the rest of the world till Hollywood intervened as Hope and Crosby journeyed to Africa with Dorothy Lamour singing one of the worst lyrics in movie history. “Like Webster’s dictionary we’re Morocco bound”.

Noah wanted to plough through the English language with his spelling plow and weed out the U in “colour”, “harbour”, “humour” and “favour”. He moved the actual sound of the words to centre, sorry center, stage and you know I think he was absolutely right. What’s wrong with spelling words in the way they are pronounced? It seems to me that Webster simplified things, unlike Hillary Clinton who coined the word misspeak which has five too many letters as it simply means “lie”.

So where I have problems with the language is not with the spellings. It’s the words. In the UK we travel upwards in high rise buildings using lifts. In The States they’re known as elevators while “lifts” are things Hollywood stars wear in their shoes. Here, bathrooms are rooms with baths in and often separate from the toilet, but over there when they ask for the bathroom the mean the loo. If you’ve ever had to clean difficult stains from your bath after an American visitor has left, you now know why.

In the UK we hold our trousers up with braces but over the water it’s suspenders which hold up your pants. When you think that to Brits suspenders are garter belts for ladies stockings and that pants are underwear, you have the recipe for total confusion and a few face slaps too.

George Bernard Shaw said that we are two nations separated by a common language, and he was obviously right. When I was a student, I worked in a Glasgow hotel as a waiter and night porter. One job was to ring the rooms to wake guests, but our head receptionist, Norma, had worked in a smaller hotel where waking someone in the morning involved knocking on their door. She used to ask people on checking in when they wanted “knocking up” in the morning. Every nationality understood her except for our American friends for whom getting “knocked up” means something completely different. They thought that hotels offering this level of personal service were going a bit beyond their remit.

I love the fact that America has the Statue of Liberty inscription vowing to shield “your poor, your huddled masses, and your celebrities you no longer want.” It’s solely down to their charity that we were able to offload Sarah Ferguson and Paul Burrell who both now make fortunes selling tat in malls and on shopping TV, saving them the indignity of holding garage sales here and getting rocks thrown at them.

They’ve also, graciously, taken to their bosom Naomi Campbell, a woman more unbalanced than a three wheeled Jeep but who could clean up the scary market next Halloween. Seeing her back here from her American home this week, and getting arrested for spitting at policemen as she was arrested on a plane, graphically shows why we should be grateful that The States has such compassion. We now just have to persuade them to take Andrew Lloyd Webber.

So you won’t find me having a go at America even though they have a go at me for my English spelling. Whether I’m doing business in New York, lying by a pool in Florida, or visiting relatives in California, I feel at home and I’m always grateful to be there.

Unfortunately I’ve come to realise, or realize as Webster would say, that you can’t have everything. Their chocolate sucks.

The Land of The Me

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I’ve found myself suffering from celebrity fatigue this week. Reading about petulant stars in the papers every day means you can get too much of a mood thing and find yourself with toothache from chewing over their bitter sweet public lives. They resemble a box of chocolates, all with self centres.

The more outrageous our celebs behave the better their PR people feel, and someone should really call in the parents of all involved and give them a good telling off. Take Mariah Carey, the singer, who once memorably said on the death of the King Hussein of Jordan “I loved Jordan, he was one of the greatest athletes of our time”. She abruptly halted an interview at the weekend because the host underestimated how many albums she’d sold. While you or I would have laughed it off, in The Land Of The Me her self important behaviour gained a thumbs up from her record company and acres of Press coverage.

Last week I wrote about celebrity TV health advisors with their internet degrees which are only useful when rolled up and used for colonic irrigation, and blow me if American celebrity Demi Moore doesn’t come out this week and say she’s on a health kick involving leeches. Of course leeches are nothing new in Hollywood, being tiny slug like creatures who usually get fifteen percent of their client’s earnings, but Moore’s leeches were the real, slimy, jungle bred deal.

The thought of having a creature like that stuck to you for hours makes me feel ill so goodness knows how the leeches felt.

The first rule of Celebrity is never, ever, get any older. Ms Moore is almost twenty years nearer to sitting on fluffy clouds with a harp than her current boyfriend so she’s ripe pickings for any charlatan who promises to make her look younger. If her body’s a temple, the front balconies have already been renovated, the rear porch has been lifted and underpinned, and now she’s looked at the settlement and cracks and has decided the building needs rendered.

Her celebrity ex husband, meantime, is getting his ear hair smoothed by a female who is younger than this year’s daffodils and has fewer lines than a spear carrier in a silent movie.

The story was covered on Sky News, delivered by a new star who looked a bit like their old one, but in a lopsided, distorted, just had a mild stroke, kind of way. It turned out she was indeed the old one back from plastic surgery having been signed off by her surgeon who, I assume, is an unsuccessful cartoonist. The poor woman now looks so plastic she could be swiped at Tesco in exchange for a week’s groceries.

One very well known daytime TV celebrity who brought out a keep fit video recently based on her dancing and trampoline fitness regime, sold it as a way to get the pounds to sail away. In fact they’d sailed away on good ship Surgery as she’d had her stomach stapled and the video company was paying someone to sit all day long in front of her fridge to stop her bingeing.

So why are these people so abnormal? I’m sure the explosion of gossip mags and web sites has made the mystique of celebrity disappear so they constantly have to reinvent themselves and change appearance in order to look interesting. In short, today’s celebrities are all suffering from the paparazzi virus and are going for treatment in ever sillier ways which is all feeding my celebrity fatigue.

I now dread seeing Amy Winehouse’s flaky skin and tattoos, Posh Beckham’s cellulite, Britney Spears’ bald bits or Kate Moss’s anything at all. I no longer want to read about the hundreds of men who have slept at the Paris Hilton or see videos of them enjoying their stay. I want, in short, for our celebrities to go away and shut up.

They weren’t always like this. Rock Hudson kept his sexuality secret through all his career yet if he were alive today he would feel pressured in to clubbing nightly while wearing tight rubber shorts. His screen wife, Doris Day, would be adopting Vietnamese babies, Mae West would be in Hello magazine every week with a new husband, and Bogart and Bacall would have their own fashion ranges.

Even fiction would have to change to reflect modern spotlight life with Sherlock Holmes in and out of rehab for his “habit”, Hercules coming out as a steroid abuser and Frankenstein’s monster wearing sunglasses and big hats to cover the surgery work whilst protesting he’d walked in to a door.

I say let’s ditch these modern day celebrities and look for ones we deserve. The old fashioned type with a bit of mystique and charisma. The unattainable who rationed their appearances and let their work do the talking. No more pretend millionaires existing on overdrafts but back to the real ones carelessly buying up islands and yachts to get away from the public and enabling us to get away from them.

Celebrities! Can’t live with them, can’t live without their millions…….. as Heather Mills might say.