The customer is always a nuisance

Private enterprise is all very well, says Theodore Dalrymple, but big banking is an even greater menace than public service

Everyone knows that private enterprise gives better service to the customer, client, patient or whomsoever, than any government department. The explanation is simple enough, though profound in its implications: as Adam Smith observed, it is not to the benevolence of the butcher and baker that we look for our meat and bread, but to his self-interest.

Of course, the public service is supposed to serve the public; but in practice the public is rather like the wrong crowd that so many of my patients claim to have fallen in with, no member of which I ever actually meet. And just as I never meet a member of the wrong crowd, so the public servant never meets any member of the public, only Mr Jones and Mrs Brown, who are quite unworthy of his serious consideration. The public truly exists only for private enterprise.

Such at any rate is the theory, or perhaps I should say the dogma: private enterprise good, public service bad. But just as all art aspires to the condition of music, so all private enterprise aspires to the condition of the social services, in the sense that every private enterprise hopes one day to reach the size when bureaucratic sclerosis sets in, and it becomes so powerful in the market-place that it can afford to treat with impunity its customers with the prepotent contumely with which social services treat the objects of their ministrations.

Which brings me to the subject of the banks. It is easier, on the whole, to speak to a named person in the social services department, or even the housing department, than to speak to someone who works at the branch of the bank where one has held an account for upwards of a third of a century.

'Hello, Donna speaking, how may I help you?'

That is what you get when you phone the number suggested at the top of your bank statement. Donna, of course, is in Gateshead or Gwent, two places you have never been to, nor has she ever been within 100 miles of where you live.

`Donna who?'

'I'm not allowed to tell you that.'

'Why not?'

'I'm not allowed to tell you that.'

It is amazing how many people think repetition is an explanation.

'Then there's not much point in telling me you're Donna, then, is there?' 'How may I help you?'

Donna keeps her temper because our conversation is being used for training purposes. The banks record so many conversations that they must go in for a lot of training, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

I make my inquiry, but before the question can be answered I must name my favourite place, the place I once, about eight years ago, named in case this question was ever asked.

'I can't remember,' I say. `Cartagena'?'

'No. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you something else. You wrote a cheque on 17 July. What was its number?'

I remember a film by Satyajit Ray in which a candidate for a clerical post in Calcutta is asked the weight of the moon.

'I don't know.'

'I'm afraid I can't give out the information over the phone,' says Donna, with the nearest to satisfaction that her job affords. All my offers to provide other information about myself, for example to state all the organisations for the membership of which I have standing orders, are of no account. Unless I can tell Donna the number of the cheque I wrote on 17 July, I am not really me as far as the bank is concerned. It seems to have a pretty rigid conception of personal identity.

Sometimes the bank telephones me at home and leaves a message when, like a very large proportion of the population, I am at work, Could I call Steve as soon as possible? But as soon as possible turns out to be never. I try the number — engaged. I try again — engaged. I try during the day several times. Then I forget for a while. Then I try again. 'Hello, Donna speaking, how may I help you?'

'Hello. Could I speak to Steve, please?' 'Steve who?'

'I don't know. He just said he was Steve. He wanted me to call him back.'

'What's it in connection with?'

'I don't know. He didn't say.'

An organisation as large as my bank employs 3,895 Steves. In the end, therefore, we just have to forget it, Donna and I. It can't have been very important anyway, because Steve never rings back. He was probably calling only to read out some questions about customer satisfaction.

Actually, I am about as satisfied as the average council tenant is with his landlord. I suppose the personal touch (never very personal, though I have carefully preserved my personal letter from the manager of 36 years ago informing me that I was now .E4 12s 8d overdrawn, and what was I going to do about it?) has been abandoned in the name of efficiency, but I have not noticed any increase in efficiency — only an increase in bank charges.

I should have thought, for example, that the transfer of money from one account to another was now almost instantaneous, thanks to the wonders of modern information technology. I discovered recently, when I attempted to transfer what were for me large sums from an account here to an account abroad, that on the contrary it took several days, at least as long as in the era of mere telegraphic transfer, or possibly even a little longer. The money disappeared from my account instantaneously, of course, but did not arrive at its destination for several days, no doubt each of the two banks involved in the transaction taking its cut of the interest earned while my money was in the financial equivalent of limbo. As to the actual whereabouts of my money during this period, it is an interesting metaphysical question, too difficult for me to answer.

It is not that I doubt the validity of Adam Smith's argument. My fishmonger proves it day in, day out. Our relationship of mutual advantage is also one of perfect trust and civility. If! order something, he knows that I will collect it and pay for it, and that I would go to considerable trouble to avoid letting him down. In return, if I select something that he thinks is a poor choice, he'll say, 'Not today, sir, I wouldn't advise it.' His pride in giving satisfaction — philanthropy plus 5 per cent — is obvious.

How rare is our kind of relationship, though! Dealing with commercial monopolies, or monopsonies, is often not so very different from dealing with government departments, particularly in England, where the customer, far from being king, is a bloody nuisance, whose importuning has the grossly unjust effect of interrupting Donna's daydream of next weekend's Saturday night clubbing, which as we know is the real, indeed the whole, end of human existence.