Apologies my arse!

The most meaningless, abused and pathetic word of the English language, must be, by far, the word apology and all its various derivates, such as apologies, my deepest apologies, please accept my apologies (what if I don't?), please let me first apologise... used countless of times by the most incompetent companies that I had the misfortune to deal with.

Recently, I went to Woolworths where I have asked for a Virgin phone card but I got a Vodafone card instead. I complained to the cashier about it but she replied to me in a I am not bovvered attitude that I have asked for a Vodafone card in the first place. Her manager was incompetent as much as her colleague, so I forwarded a letter of complaint to the Head Office. What did I get? An apology, you guessed right. Did I get my money back? Of course not.

Secondly, I have asked the Southwark council to shut down the hot water in my block for a few hours so I could carry out some work in my flat. I have sent an email and phoned the department in charge of this and I was told I would get an answer in a week.

A week passed and nobody called me, so I decided to speak with the council in person. Guess what? Apparently, the email I have forwarded them didn't reach the person in charge ... how crap service is that? And you guessed right again, they did apologize for the inconvenience. Wow, I felt so much better, all of a sudden, instead of wishing to have a machine gun with me, I would happily swapped it for a tiny machete.

The clerk didn't admit it was a crap service, no no no, apologies yes, admitting to be a bunch of underdeveloped human beings unable to send an email from A to B, no way. Did I get then the work carried out straight away? No. Did they speed up the process? No, again. Did they get the person who screwed up (Carly , I wrote her name down when I made my first enquiry) and kicked her in the shins? The clerk immediately replied that we don't know where it went wrong. Ignorance is blessed, always will be.

But the most horrible thing in this supposed customer service apology rubbish is that you cannot raise your voice because otherwise they don't want to deal with you. And why is that? They are the ones that screwed up in the first place and you have the bloody right to raise your voice, clinch your fist and tell them to go where the sun does not shine.

But no, instead you have to keep your calm and use the only weapon allowed: sarcasm. They can't do anything against sarcasm because it is an indirect, childish, silly and apparently perfectly gentleman's way to deal with a situation. I don't know why sarcasm in this country is so overrated, I guess it's another side of the politically correct culture that is intoxicating our society.

So I asked the Southwark council clerk: "How long do you reckon it would take to sort out my enquiry? She replied that it was difficult to say.

"A week?" She shrugged her shoulders.

"A month? A year? Before or after London 2012?" I re-asked.

Silence.

She was just waiting for me to go away, satisfied with her word APOLOGY stuck right up my arse.