Can't get the staff
From Fit Lt Gavin Outteridge RAF Sir: As an Oxford graduate and RAF officer with substantial experience, if not of cleaners, certainly of scouts and batting staff. I must take issue with Catherine Maskell's upsetting article (`Class slobbery', 30 August). While I can offer her a little sympathy, having roomed next to a Warwick graduate for some months, I do think Miss Maskell should look primarily to her own poor behaviour. Her initial error, from which much badness may well stem, was to attempt to be both above and below stairs in the same house, as I am sure Mary Killen would recognise.
Foolhardy social experiments aside, the rest of her report on life as a cleaner disappointingly reinforces the lamentable state of service generally in this country. Miss Maskell clearly thinks that simply turning up for work entitles her to her pay and that actually doing anything — dusting a chap's bookshelves, say — should require some extra effort on behalf of the gentleman involved.
To be fair, some fault must lie with her employer. 'We were told that we were not providing a service for the students but maintaining company property,' she writes. If, then, it was about business rather than personal service, it should not have surprised Miss Maskell to have a potential customer go through details of the contract with her; a contract that is most unlikely to have contained the legally dubious phrase 'and a quick flick on a Friday'.
By way of analogy, imagine the scene in Iraq earlier this year had one of my Royal Air Force Police corporals addressed me thus: 'Well, sir, I can patrol and make notebook entries daily, take statements twice a week and do a quick nick on a Friday. Fight terrorists? No, sir, not in my I terms of reference.' Ah, yes, the concept of dutiful service... .
Gavin Outteridge
Royal Air Force Henlow, Bedfordshire
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