Shreya Sen-Handley | Complaints: Carping Or Crusading For A Cause?

How many complaints, on the phone, over email, in person, and by post (if you’re of a certain vintage), have you had to make this month?

In a steadily worsening world where greed and selfishness reign, it’s no surprise they now stain our daily existence. Social media is inundated with grievances against the grotesque service we’re persistently peddled – so bad, so often, we’re left with little choice but to complain strenuously to salvage the experience. Our escalating discontent is directly proportional to the callous contempt corporations show clientele. Not only is the customer no longer king, we’re slaves chained to their moneymaking machines, exploited for profit.

“I was charged for made-up purchases of multiple beard-trimmers though I’m incapable of growing one (being female)!”

“I was pee-ed on by a co-passenger and only bad publicity compelled the airline to apologise!”

“A humongous, poisonous spider crawled out of a box of biscuits to perch on my arm (but nowhere on the ingredients was it listed).”

Complaints like these have become so commonplace, they raise neither eyebrow nor titter these days. Yet, considering the huge amounts of hard-earned money we hand over daily, expecting little in return and getting even less, should we roll over and accept this state-of-play?

Doing so not only encourages organizations to lower their already risible standards to Marianna-Trench depths, but to take our acquiescence to their every abuse for granted. Or, can our spirit-de-resistance, drained by the shoddy state of our world and its many shady businesses, be revived, at least in part, to allow us to remonstrate?

If zombies can rise, dazed but determined, from the dust into which they’ve been ground, so can I, I told myself, as I hammered out a series of firmly-worded emails – to two establishment behemoths, whose arrogant ill-treatment of my clan left us deeply inconvenienced, out-of-pocket, ailing and aghast! Because this shortchanging came from companies we’d trusted and patronized for decades, despite their many inadequacies, we felt especially eviscerated.

After last year’s tragic Air India crash and the terrible press they received, particularly in the west, I decided to show solidarity by buying my next seat to India aboard it. Lightning couldn’t strike in the same place twice I maintained (and I was right), but also that the negative publicity was bound to have engendered improvements – how wrong I was about that!

After an uncomfortable take-off from Birmingham, I was served a meal so nearly unfit for human consumption in its straggly bits of chicken floating in noxious oil that I was seriously sick for much of the cramped, smelly, exceptionally turbulent flight. Overcome by the need to violently vomit, but holding it in out of a consideration for the passengers the airline itself didn’t exhibit, I spent the long hours struggling to breathe. That the inflight screens weren’t working (again!) and water gushed from the ceiling, made it even more excruciating.

Arriving in Delhi late, wet and unwell, I was assured by airline staff I’d be compensated. But after my many emails, and their tardy, obfuscating responses to them, a mere measly voucher materialised. Of so little value and with so many conditions attached as to render it unusable (and useless it indeed was, as I discovered soon after on a desi emergency dash), their insensitive sop neither made up for my harrowing experience nor addressed the issues I’d raised. Actually acknowledging how ill I became from ingesting the foul fare on their Birmingham leg, and starting a dialogue on necessary change, would have benefitted ALL passengers and the airlines’ own image.

Misplaced loyalties and middled-aged sentimentality must never cloud the totems of health and safety again, I concluded. A resolution reinforced by the ill-informed, finger-wagging letter from our British National Health Service paediatrician that arrived the same month, informing us of their capricious decision to discharge our child from their care, because of our alleged non-attendance of an appointment.

Penning yet another protest, pointing out we’d let them know we couldn’t attend and their having texted back to say the appointment date would be changed (evidence we attached to our complaint), I plunged into the bigger issue of their blindingly obvious indifference to the health of the kids under their auspices.

With both my children being neurodivergent, we require that tiny bit of expert support to navigate the everyday stuff neurotypicals can do in their sleep…like sleeping! Our kids’ intellectual flair fortunately eliminated the need for further, or more complicated, assistance. The help has been vital nevertheless, and in that light, the sudden withdrawal of medical aid, based on a minor inconvenience of their own making, and their bruised Godlike egos to wit, says as much about the plummeting quality of medicine today, as it does about the decline and disarray of the hallowed NHS. As with the aforementioned airline, another national Goliath, if failing in their service to us wasn’t enough, they proved incapable of dredging up the courage to admit to their malfeasance.

So, should we keep putting our lives in the care of organizations that clearly don’t? Do we even have options, when each is as bad as the other? But if our justified, palpable dissatisfaction with them will not nudge them in the right direction, do we give up on protesting against this endless manhandling? Or, because it’s healthy to vent, should we carry on towards that end, expecting no other result? Or, is it, in fact, something more; a form of activism, and a duty to our fellow hapless human, to speak truth to power no matter how formidable?