RE- POST LEAVE ME ALONE

apologies for errors in first post

NO!

A brief ejaculation of irritation, for free…

High on the list of reasons to loathe the internet are the presumptions of intimacy it facilitates - ‘Hi. Howard, hope this finds you well’ - followed by solicitations for an online review of a service of such small significance you have forgotten it by the time the solicitation for the review arrives.

‘Hi, Howard, hope this finds you well. How was your taxi ride? Hi, Howard, your opinion matters to us, tell us about the delivery of your parcel. Hi, Howard, our records show that you bought a second-class stamp from us. How is that working out for you?’

I was recently asked to review my experience of buying socks from a sock shop.

‘I bought a fucking sock,’ I wrote back.

‘You sound angry,’ they replied. ‘Are you making a complaint? PS - We don’t sell individual socks.’

PS?! See? Now we’re in amicable correspondence. Soon they’ll be inviting me to sock parties.

I’ve encountered similar intrusions and discourtesies from travel agents, taxi companies, florists, booksellers, a shirt company, an ophthalmologist, a hotel with a spa of whose services I didn’t avail myself (‘Why?’), a jeweller, a mortician (I was making enquiries for someone else), a sex club (ditto), and a physiotherapist from whom I received largely investigative therapy for an injury to my typing finger, the causes of which I’d rather not discuss but which, left uninvestigated, would have rendered me incapable of writing a review of the experience.

Experience! The new buzz word. We no longer eat out, we have a culinary experience. We no longer go on holiday, we have an elsewhere experience.

A friend was recently asked to review his experience of open-heart surgery. ‘Hi, Justin, hope this finds you well,’ the letter of request began. Then it asked him the following questions.

a) Will you recommend us to your friends?

b) Did you enjoy our choice of background music during the operation? If you’d rather not have had Black Sabbath’s cover of Verdi’s Requiem, which band would you have chosen?

c) Did you find our after-care tea-and biscuit service to your satisfaction?

d) Assuming we kept you alive, are you satisfied with the procedure you underwent? (Respondents who are no longer alive need not tick this box.)

PS - Might you consider using us again?

You think I’ve made that up. Maybe I have. Go with it. Think of it as a mendacity experience.

So what’s happening? Why this rage for reviews from reviewers whose bona fides we have no way of checking? When I accept a commission to write a review of someone’s play or novel I do so on the shared understanding that my judgement will be schooled and so of value. But who cares what I think of the shirt I have just bought online and indeed have just returned?

‘Since you ask, it was not fresh and tasted not so much like a blini as a cardboard box,’ I wrote, mistakenly sending the review of a restaurant I’d recently been to. The Shirt Extravaganza couldn’t have been nicer about it. They thanked me and suggested that if I ever bought a shirt from them again I shouldn’t eat it.

In this they were unlike the restaurant which opined that the collar was too tight because, as the Maitre d’ and several of the waitresses noted on the night I’d dined there, I snuffled at my food like a pig. ‘PS - how did I find the chewy brownies?’

PS - A neat way of concluding this short expression of vexation would be to ask you to review the experience of reading it. But I am not going to do that. Next thing we’ll be hoping it finds us well. And I don’t want to encourage unthinking chumminess. The simple knowledge that you’re reading me is enough. . .

PPS . . . and of course learning that your generosity has extended to a subscription.