BACK IN THE DAY, long, long ago before multinationals took over the world, there used to be a business concept known as ‘looking after the customer’. It involved the simple acknowledgement of a baseline quid pro quo – you need my service/goods, I need your money.

Shopkeepers would even run you a line of credit, also known as tick, in order to keep you coming back for a side of hairy bacon (yuck). They would also exchange pleasantries with you for free and they were prepared to order in something for you even though you were the only person for miles who would eat sardines in tomato sauce (yuck again).

People developed strong brand loyalties based on their first purchase of some household indispensable if the salesperson handled it right. This was how my father came to believe that Odearest was the Valhalla of beds, that Ford cars were suspect and that Bush TVs offered a superior viewing experience. Maybe it only seemed so, but back then your shopkeeper, car dealer, pharmacist, draper, meter reader might actually behave as if they valued your company and your custom. You could feel that you were more than a walking monetary unit to be shaken down and dispatched within a certain pre-ordained time limit.

And if you happened to be displeased with a purchase, you could write a letter of complaint. This was a deadly serious, formal way of you, the customer, showing you meant business. You got out your pen and your blue Belvedere Bond notepaper and wrote “I would like to complain in the strongest terms” (I seem to remember that you could learn in Civics or Business class to write a letter of complaint). In the course of this letter you would demand satisfaction (like in the old days of the duel), enumerate the many ways in which the dud purchase had inconvenienced you, your family, your neighbours and your budgie and demand reparation by means of replacement, credit note or refund. If you were feeling especially indignant you would also demand a goodwill gesture – a replacement radio and complimentary batteries. Then you sat back and waited.

The stories are legion about what could happen in response to a good letter of complaint. For instance, you could get summoned to a department store, meet the MD, get a profuse apology, a replacement product, and a free cream tea. Sometimes, a replacement item needed to be shipped in from abroad and a flurry of letters would ensue so as you got to know Nora, the MD’s secretary on first name terms and when eventually 6 weeks later, you turned up to collect the replacement, the whole office would be delighted to see you and you’d be delighted too. You could brag to your neighbours about insisting on and getting your rights, and a free soft toy as well.

Yes, they were simpler times and, though you might not think it, I’m suspicious of looking backwards in a misty-eyed way. It was the ’70s, we were pretty hard up and living through one of the worst fashion periods in history. We looked grey-faced and knobbly-kneed and our haircuts said recession. But, by and large, when we complained after shelling out our hard-earned, we got listened to.

Nowadays even the thought of having to interact with the thing called Customer Care sets my teeth on edge. I’m cross before I even pick up the phone. I’m cross because I have a complaint and I’m cross about the fact that Number One on every customer care menu asks you would you like to pay a bill. (That would be Company Care, no?) The thing about Customer Care, wherever it’s given that name, is that it’s there to frustrate you, piss you off and make you and your complaint go away. It will do this by means of an info@ address or by means of a very nice young man called Colin.

“It’s hard to hold on to your humanity”

Colin will greet you quite perkily and ask you for your name, account number, postal address and the answer to your secret security question. Only after this will he ask how he can help you. Once Colin hears your complaint, he will instantly adopt the stance of never having heard of such an issue arising from the product’s use before. He will take your contact details and promise that the problem will be “looked into” and you know that’s going to be the end of it because Colin is only a slightly more human form of the automated menu. If you press your case with the likes of Colin – say, ask for something extreme like your money to be refunded to your credit card (in the case of inaccurate billing) – you’ll be told that it’s not company policy to issue refunds in this way, then he’ll give you an address for the company HQ in an industrial estate somewhere and no contact name and recommend you write there.

The thing about the Customer Care experience is that it goes on and on and on. Phone calls, letters, emails, and every time you interact with the company, it’s groundhog day. You’re confronting another blandly amiable customer care operative, and must tell them your whole story, right from the beginning, all over again. It almost reduces me to screeching, incoherent rage – if you can remotely access my computer and move files around as I watch, why, why can you not use my Case Number and update it after the call is over, so as when I phone tomorrow with the same problem still unsolved, you will understand why I’m rather upset?

But customer care quality isn’t the fault of the people who work those phones and PCs. I’ve worked in such a setting and it is the equivalent of being a human battery hen. The reason Colin sounds bland and politely unhelpful is because that’s what he’s been told to do and he’s regularly monitored by a supervisor to ensure he’s not being quantifiably nicer than that. He sits in a gigantic warehouse call centre at a beige desk with a beige chair, under fluorescent light that makes everyone look ill, and his nearest colleague’s mouse mat abuts his elbow. There are monitors attached to the ceiling letting employees know who has taken the most calls that day – there are bonuses going for this quantity over quality approach – and toilet and meal breaks are rigorously timed. It’s the sort of place where it’s hard to hold onto your humanity and it’s true that customer care agents grow to hate customers. This though is mostly because the agent and the customer are locked together in this uniquely frustrating, dishonest palaver. It is an abuse of dictionary definition of care and demeans both the customer care agent and the customer.

I continue to be flabbergasted about how companies actually get away with this cynical wheeze. Banks, airlines, computer companies, telephone service providers, mail order companies: some very big players are involved. At the top of these companies sit men and women whose job, once upon a time, would have been to make their company the best goddamn computer/phone/banking company in the world. Now their only job is to grow profits across trans-national borders and to shake down the chumps who wander into their nets.

Next time someone tells you it’s not their company’s policy to give you a refund, ask for a supervisor and tell them it’s not your policy to spend money pointlessly, or be drawn into a surreal charade of care provision. Keep on repeating varieties of this statement in bland and even tones. Play ‘em at their own game! It’s worth a shot.

Yvonne Nolan has worked in television and radio for over 20 years. Currently working in factual TV, she is also a freelance literary critic and a sometime contributor to the Irish Times book pages. She blogs at How We Live Now.