I left Ely/Little Downham nearly a year ago and I miss it a great deal. I am now living on the Isle of Lewis in a very remote village. The weather is beyond awful and I can’t remember the last time I was warm. The worst thing is the fact that nothing grows here. All of you living in the Fens should make the most of the fact that vegetables and fruit (we even had grapes just before I left) grow well in the rich soil and are not regularly blasted by force 9 gales. On the plus side up here we have a wonderful selection of wildlife and interesting rocks…..when you can get out to see them!

On the shopping front if Anne de Bondt thinks Ely is bad, we have the equivalent here, in Stornoway. Forget trying to buy clothes, you only need a basic winter wardrobe or oilskins. Nope, the main fight here is to get your hands on fresh fruit and veg, especially if the ferry doesn’t make it in bad weather. Oh well, at least I am not spending 3 hours per day on trains.

How snooty and assuming of this Anne woman waffling on in her snobbish tone about how she got some bad service in an electrical store. Diddums! It does make me angry when people put all service industry workers down to being lowly and brainless. But how wonderful of Mary to step in there with her words of wisdom - well done!

One, I used to work for a simalarly large, amorphous organisation and the difference between, say, two teams of people in a call centre doing exactly the same job could be huge. They were all people like us, the difference lay in how they were managed.

The reason the lad didn’t know about the way the camera worked was not necessarily because he wasn’t NASA material, trust me, if my own experience is anything to go by he’s probably two years into his English degree and only works part time. Nope, it’s much more likely that the problem was caused by a complete absence of any training on the part of his employer. Either that or they are training him about their range of fridges and with characteristic aptitude have put him on cameras because they’re short staffed. Doubless he had never been briefed about that particular product - he probably didn’t even know they stocked it until you pointed it out to him and began to ask questions. Doubtless he hadn’t been shown how it worked, either and so he was trying his best to help but genuinely didn’t know about it, beyond the point and shoot basics. That’s not his fault, that just makes him somebody who doesn’t know about cameras, it doesn’t make him an idiot but it does mean his employers are MORONS. It also means his line and store managers are unlikely to be the kinds of people who could manage their way out of a paper bag - let alone manage anything else.

Two, on a more general note, but kind of leading on I’d like to say this. Judging by the way members of the public have treated me in my various “service industry” jobs - with something between disdain and outright loathing - it’s no wonder a lot of “McIdiotsâ€? can be a little defensive to customers.

I was absolutely gobsmacked at how unpleasant people were to me for absolutely no reason other than that they disliked the organisation for which I worked or perceived my job as being “lowerâ€? than theirs and treated me accordingly. Cambridge is especially bad for this kind of behaviour - hence the extra surleyness of our “service industry” employees.

As a result, no matter how polite you are, yourself, as a punter, you may well find that a lot of people in “lowly” (I use the term advisedly) jobs are conditioned, by their previous experiences, to assume all customers will be rude and condescending - rather in the way many of us find that we are conditioned, by previous experience, to assume that they will be surly idiots. They have no pride in their jobs - another thing which bad management takes away - so they already care little about customer satisfaction. Worse, as customers, our low expectations may be subtley reflected in our behavour or our tone of voice, putting them on the defensive before we even start.

Short of sacking all their managers and starting again there’s no real cure - all you can do is try to put yourself in their shoes and treat them the way you would want the customers to treat you if you were unlucky enough to have their job.

Sales people are rude where ever you go as a rule. The trick is to play the game…

Ask a member of Curry’s for a Vindaloo, or someone from boots for some knee highs,

Ask if they have it in ‘Extra medium’

Or… Go into Burger King and order a Big Mac, when they get upset ask to see the ‘McManager’