It is easy to complain about poor service, I have been known on occasion to call for the manager, but you very rarely hear good reports. Santander is an example of the very pits of shoddy behavior, and at the same time brilliant. Last night I went to my nearest cash machine to draw out enough for milk and cigarettes, (as a Santander customer you learn very quickly not to use your card to make a purchase because they will balls it up somehow), only to receive a piece of paper informing me that they couldn’t carry out my transaction because my financial institution was unavailable. That is a grand statement, my financial institution. Unavailable. What could possibly have happened to my financial institution? Will I go to town tomorrow and find a gap where the branch used to be? Would Fred Astaire open a fancy dress shop in the gap and touch the lives of people who most needed some guidance? Will anyone apart from my immediate family get the Fred Astaire reference? I went to Spar, Sainsbury’s, and the Tesco garage and they all told the sorry tale of my financial institution and its unavailability.

It turns out that ‘your financial institution is unavailable’ is a polite way of saying ‘we have fucked up once again’. Arriving home in a bad mood, Mandi left me alone to calm down and phoned the helpline using my details. After that she found me in my office and informed me that I only had five pounds in my account. I exclaimed words to the effect of “oh my flipping goodness, what a to do” for I am not one to get flustered by such occurrences. Okay, I went apeshit is what really happened. This sort of shit never happens during the day when you can just pop in and sort it out with a human being. I thought the exact same thought that goes through every person’s head when there’s a problem with the bank; an Eastern European crime syndicate has drained my account by cloning my card, I knew I shouldn’t use outdoor cash machines but I was in a rush. To rub salt in the wound they left me a fiver, which is inconvenient as you can’t draw a fiver out of a machine.

To test my patience even more, I waited on the phone for an hour. That is no exaggeration; it was an hour of shitty music punctuated with sporadic messages of sorrow for keeping me waiting. Surely if they know they’re going to be talking to someone who has just had all of his money stolen by some shady bad guys, then leaving them on the phone to get really wound up isn’t a great idea is it? Every time that automated apology sounded off I felt my chest tighten, this for all I know could be the last phone call I ever make.

You’re probably thinking that I gave the poor call centre operative a right shouting at when I eventually got through. You’re probably thinking I shouted all the cunts under the sun at him at the top of my voice. Wrong. It is not their fault, we should all remember this simple rule; the person on the front line is trying his or her best to do their underpaid and underappreciated job and they don’t need the likes of us giving them shit.

The truth is that the person who spoke to me (from a UK based call centre) could not have been more helpful, nor could he have been more apologetic. Santander had been experiencing some nationwide spanner in the works which had played havoc with the accounts. He could see that my account was screwed and assured me that every penny would be back in my account this morning (it was). Not only that but he stuck a fiver in for the phone call and added a compensation ten pounds straight into my account for my milk and cigarettes (I’d been very detailed in explaining my predicament). I thanked him and said goodbye and this morning I had my money again.

Santander is brilliant at correcting their fuck ups. They are brilliant at fucking up to be fair, but they do at least correct it. (Santander, you can have that as a poster quote for your next advertising campaign).

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