I used to have an account with the Post Bank a long time ago. It was my first ever account and was usually always empty because I thought of it as a temporary holding pen for my spending money. I abandoned it after my university allowances stopped coming through. Recently, I found the little pass book and decided to go and find out if I could resume using the account.

I took my old book and my hopes to my nearest Post Bank and the woman at the customer help desk told me the account was dormant and I would have to begin the process to open a new one – complete with passport photos, letter from my employer and note from my LC. I asked why the old one could not simply be reactivated since I had been through the process before and the information was right there on her computer screen. I got a blank stare and a standard useless answer: You just have to open a new one. I hate it when I ask a logical question and get an illogical ‘that is just how we do it’ answer, but that is the kind of customer service I have come to expect.

Does anyone actually train people specifically in customer service? Or do we just trust that the companies which hire customer service people are able to give them sufficient instruction to make them useful? The goal of customer service is to get me to keep spending money on a product or service, yet most companies treat the department like a very distant relative. Unless you know how to work the CHOGM procurement circuit, money is hard to come by. You work and you plan to make every penny count. That is why I write often and with feeling when it comes to things that make me spend my money. If I am going to hand even a shilling over to you, the least you can do is be useful and act like you appreciate it.

Customer care agents often have inadequate information, never have any real power and rarely show initiative with cases they are not immediately able to handle. They also appear to have no supervisors they can consult in the event that they cannot handle your problem. It is not good enough to tell me you don’t know what the problem is with your network but if I wait it will come back eventually. It is not good enough to give some pretty young thing a desk and a phone and a list of 10 answers and then unleash her on an unsuspecting public. If you are going to do customer care, then do it properly or not at all.

Published on Sunday May 23, 2008

My father is chairman of the board of something, and while I am very proud of him I am also very disappointed at the way he fails to utilise the perks of his position.

Just this morning, he told me he was going to a board meeting and therefore wanted to have his breakfast early and his shoes polished and his tie straightened. He did not want to be late. Now I have tried in vain to explain to him about how being the boss means you are supposed to come late, but I am just not getting through.

We have all been to weddings and graduation parties and workshops and meetings where things would not start until ‘someone’ has arrived to grace the occasion. The rest of you are not people until Honourable arrives. And when he/she does, then you can begin to matter again – but only in your capacity as the attendees who clap and ululate for the honourable guest.

You will be lucky if Honourable has dressed to suit the occasion. Usually, they have to say they have come from somewhere else where they were hard at work and they decided to ‘squeeze you into their schedule’ because they care so much about you. T-shirts; sandals; a scruffy African shirt – anything goes. You are just so grateful to have Honourable at your function that you will overlook the way he/she looks.

If the organisers were crazy enough to begin the function without the invited guest (as if the rest of those present just wandered in off the street), then when Honourable does appear, the proceedings must be stopped so that we can all acknowledge his presence. We will clap for him and for his spouse and recognise his offspring too, if they happen to be there. Then when he has said a few words about voting for the right party, you can continue being festive. This is the reason we all want to be ‘big people who are more of people than the rest’.

I have tried in vain to explain these dynamics to my dad, so that one day I, too, can stand up and be introduced as the Honourable’s member of family. However, he is intent on being neat and on time, so I’ll serve the breakfast early and shine those shoes.

But seriously, people. Stop taking the population for granted. We understand that nation building is busy work, but if you cannot organise your schedule and be where you have been asked to be almost a month in advance, then why should we trust you with big things? After all, you are always bullying your way through the traffic; why are you never on time?

Published on Sunday February 14, 2009

Today I was taking some young Basoga back to some Busoga boarding schools. I was going through the whole “did you bring brooms and TP” nonsense, when lo and behold, a big new ambulance pulled up next to my car in the parking lot.

If you are assuming it was an emergency, you are incorrect. It was someone bringing a child to school. Complete with a driver who stayed baking in the car the whole time. (I hate that, by the way. People need to give their drivers slightly more respect and consideration in general).

So anyway, there was a brand-new, probably-donated-by-some-foreign-government, ambulance from Iganga Hospital dropping a child at school in Jinja.

I will not even go into the question of on how many levels this is wrong. I will just say: Only in Uganda.