WORK

My Customer Service course has been bamboozling me with such questions as: 'Describe the organisation's guidelines for recognising customer expectations.' I seem to have answered that question without ever working out what it means. And yet other questions, on the very same page, are insultingly obvious: we are asked how to recognise if a customer is 'angry or confused.' Hmm, well, let me think... Anger, isn't that the one where they ask to 'speak to someone who knows what they are doing', and use such words as 'dickhead'? Confusion, is that the one where they go: 'Durrrrrr...' and drool spills out of their vacantly gaping mouth onto the floor?

We are also asked to describe how we have dealt with 'difficult customers'. At Waterstone's this would be a cinch - I could say: 'I went out the back', or: 'I pretended to be unable to speak English'. In this job there haven't really been any. I am going to have to send out some e-mails just to wind people up, and thus gather some 'evidence'.

I am also asked to confirm that my work station is tidy, a tricky question for me, because - conventionally speaking - it isn't. So I am forced to explain that my approach to work is in fact analagous to an ongoing process of tidying - ergo, what may appear 'mess' to some people is in fact merely work to be done. Were my work station ever perfectly tidy, I would no longer be able to grasp the concept of work at all. I know what my assessor will say to this: 'That's not what's written on my answer sheet.' Of course it isn't, that's because it's a blazingly original thought!