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Recently it began to occur to me that these infernal questionnaires are asking all the wrong questions. For a start, all this business about ‘customer satisfaction’ is nonsense: we’re British and as such we’re never satisfied about anything. If they insist, far better to have one box for us to tick marked ‘Mustn’t grumble’ and have done with it. Or why not survey us to see what the evening was really like? Was the waiter a) genuinely French, b) clearly a culinary ignoramus, or c) a patronising bastard? Your delivery van driver, was he a) casing the joint for valuables, b) eyeing you up in a way that was singularly age inappropriate, c) caught me in my dressing gown at 11a.m., whatever must he think?
The other appropriate and genuinely useful time and place for customer satisfaction surveys might be after events that really do matter, for people you really would like know your mind. After your promising first date with a prominent barrister who has a good career in front of him and who was also something of a looker, but who then failed to call you afterwards as promised, were you a) a little disappointed, b) suicidally depressed, c) seething with fury and determined to get revenge on the sucker? Truth be told, I’m extremely dissatisfied with quite a few of the swains who have wafted in and out of my life and would very much like to fill in a customer satisfaction survey on the subject to be emailed straight to their inbox. Couldn’t someone somewhere organise this?
And then there’s that unhappy childhood you never really got over. Did a combination of parental neglect and unsatisfactory schooling a) make you determined to succeed (that’ll show ’em, they told me I’d never amount to anything and now I’ve got a Porsche), b) scar you to such an extent that you have never been able to form a committed relationship, c) give you some excellent material for your latest novel or d) leave you emotionally undisturbed because there are faint indications you might be a psychopath? If we could routinely leave feedback for our parents, we wouldn’t have to turn to alcohol to repress it all.
And what about life itself? Is the way things have turned out for you a) very satisfactory indeed, thank you, b) mustn’t grumble, c) not at all satisfactory, actually, no one told me this was how it was going to turn out or d) mine’s a treble, please. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone cared enough to ask?
There would be a downside to existential customer satisfaction surveys, which is that just as we were evaluating everything in our lives, so everyone else would be marking us up or down, as lovers, parents, friends. Perhaps then c) best stop whingeing and leave well enough alone.
Because you read about modern manners
Also by Virginia Blackburn
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