Ideally I only ever want to come across the word ‘system’ when it’s used by an astronaut and sandwiched between ‘all’ and ‘go’.
Ideally I only ever want to come across the word ‘system’ when it’s used by an astronaut and sandwiched between ‘all’ and ‘go’. ‘All systems go!’ has a chirpy, optimistic feel. Eliminate ‘all’ and ‘go’ however and you’re left with no hope. I know I never want to hear ‘the system’ uttered by anyone sitting in front of a company computer or in a position of authority. ‘I’m afraid the system won’t allow me to,’ is nothing short of a polite brush-off. A convenient, modern-day euphemism for ‘I can’t be arsed to help any more — sod off.’
Blaming the system is an attempt to use the get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s the wimp’s way out, and by implying ‘the system’ is a savage beast acting beyond human control we are expected to hate the sin yet continue to love the sinner. Mr System has become Big Brother’s fall-guy. Nameless, unreasonable, near-impossible to catch out and therefore seldom held to account.
When my son recently applied to Westminster Council for a resident’s parking permit they ran his credit card through their machine three times by mistake and overcharged him by £240. It was the anonymous system that prevented the council from immediately rectifying this human error. It took five long weeks of pointless paperwork for them to give him back the money they’d unintentionally nicked — an interminable delay that caused Archie’s frugal budget to spiral into free-fall. Direct debits were presented to the bank and rejected, his mobile telephone was disconnected, he couldn’t afford to pay a parking fine on time and our fridge door was littered with IOUs.
Trying to change a ticket I’d booked with British Airways — wanting to substitute my daughter for my husband — I too fell foul of the system. Unlike dear old easyJet who don’t give a toss if you’ve undergone a complete gender realignment prior to take-off (providing you cough up and pay the penalty of £22.50), BA acts like a big girl’s blouse. They would ‘like’ to help but ‘the system’ doesn’t allow them to. The only way for them to beat their own system is to cancel the original booking and reissue a completely new ticket. A simple enough procedure, except it’s actually a bit of a money-making scam. Cancelling the ticket automatically releases my prepaid seat to a standby passenger, and as the flight is already overbooked this leaves me with no choice but to buy a new (invariably more expensive) ticket.
Although it’s possible to transfer my original ticket to another date, we now live in a world where it’s technically beyond an employee’s remit to simply change an initial. The personnel are all sympathetic and willing, yet the system has rendered them totally impotent and unable to give good customer service. The poor things are manacled to their keyboards and the dumb constraints imposed by bureaucracy.
I’ve never grasped the intransigent concept behind the old adage ‘If I break the rules for you, I’d have to break them for everyone’, because it’s patently just a cop-out. Not everyone needs or indeed wants rules to be broken, and one of the reasons all systems ultimately fail is because they don’t ever allow for mitigating circumstances. Enough. All systems — go.