Belgium

Have I mentioned that it is the 175th anniversary of the foundation of the Belgian state? To celebrate this, let me tell you a little anecdote which gives a flavour of life among the linguistically fractious Belgians. During the week I met my friend the orchestra director for lunch. She used to do policing in Albania but she turned to orchestra directing when work there dried up – now there’s a woman with a second string to her bow (no pun intended, she plays the French horn, since you ask).

Anyhow, her orchestra has been doing a bit of work for the conservatoire – helping them out with their conducting exams. The session is run like a real rehearsal and the student conducts, stops, offers advice and suggestions and conducts some more. The conservatoire used to use the Belgian National Orchestra for this important work but they found my friend’s orchestra more satisfactory. Picture the following scene, if you will. Nervous student conducts BNO. Pauses and makes comments on playing. Trumpeter raises his hand and asks coldly “Can you repeat that in Flemish please?” You can see why the poor students might be put off.

Belgium is not a consumer paradise. The shops are closed on Sundays. They do not open late.  And I like that.  I find Sunday shopping/24 hour shopping and all these things a bit depressing.

However, I have my limits.  The Belgians do not believe in customer service and I do not like that.  The motto of the Belgian shop assistant is “the customer is never right”.  The flagship service in this regard is provided by the Innovation department stores (this service extends to their website which I cannot find using google – yes, I was going to put in a link for you, but they stymied me, they are so thorough).  All of the employees in Inno, as it has rebranded itself for hip young things, are ladies over 60.  All of them have a gimlet eyed stare.  All of them have lots to chat to their co-workers about.  They see their role as threefold 1) to depress pretentions in customers 2) to dash any hopes that customers might have that they might eventually be able to pay for goods and leave 3) to discuss the appalling decline in modern manners.

While the Inno group leads the way in customer service, other smaller outlets contribute their mite also. Consider, if you will, these two vignettes from the past week.

I went to a jeweller on the swanky Avenue Louise to get a watch repaired.  As I waited to be served the couple in front of me asked the gimlet eyed, elderly and bejewelled shop assistant whether she stocked silver bracelets.

She gave them the gimlet eye and said firmly “No, we don’t stock silver jewellery.  You will find that no high quality jewellers do.  It oxidises too easily.  Good day to you.”  They departed, quashed.

She turned to me.  I asked whether they repaired watches. “Yes” she said “but what kind of watch, it may not be worth your while paying for repairs to a cheap watch” and she snorted audibly as she looked me over.  I handed over the watch.  She looked at it in some surprise “that is a good watch, yes, I suppose it is worth repairing…”

And this from just yesterday, when Mr. Waffle went out to get a vid from our local video rental shop. The shop has this stupid rule that you must queue up to return your video; you can’t just put it in a pile or in a box or something, oh no you must hand it to a shop assistant.

Mr. Waffle witnessed the following:

Woman comes running into shop and heads to top of the queue and puts two videos on the counter. Severe assistant says to her that she must go to the back of the queue. Woman says “look I’m just returning and I’m very badly parked” and runs out of the shop while the shop assistant shouts after her “that’s it, you’re barred”. Mr. Waffle is baffled.

Mr. Waffle is still in the queue and another woman tries to return a video by leaving it on the counter. Shop assistant tells her she has to go to the back of the queue. Woman protests feebly, she’s badly parked etc. (a common complaint in Belgium). Shop assistant says ferociously “either you go to the back of the queue or I’m rescinding your membership; I’ve already expelled two people today”.  Good grief.

My friend Kim would probably have said something along the lines of “now that you mention it, it is a good watch and it is used to service with a smile, I think I’ll take it to a higher quality jellewer where the staff don’t feel they have to belittle the customer”.

It is cold right now in Brussels. Very cold. And foggy. All in all, not an ideal time for your boiler to break down: cold bedrooms and no hot water. I called the landlord – he suggested we go to the basement and press the button on the left. I said I had done that. He said he didn’t know what else we could do (to be fair to him, he set about calling a heating person but nothing had happened by the time we went to bed).

The weird thing was that none of our neighbours seemed to notice, even though the boiler serves the whole building so we were all affected.

Neighbour A is a DIY enthusiast and we tried to enlist him to help – it was news to him that there was a problem. Clearly he doesnÂ’’t feel the cold.

Neighbour B seemed quite indifferent – another reptile ? Oddly, he seemed to feel it was up to us to sort it out: “Haven’Â’t you got the landlordÂ’s number ?”

This morning when the heating guy finally rang, he wanted to know when somebody could let him in. Since we both work, we tried to enlist Neighbour C who works unusual hours. We knocked on her door before going to work. By definition, she had not had heating or hot water all night. Her reaction: “I heard you outside and I was going to ask whatÂ’’s happening.” We got the impression of a whole building full of adults waiting for the Waffle family to sort out their heating for them.

Mr Waflle suggests they’Â’re all youngest children. This, with apologies to the publishing exec, is because in his family the youngest child is regarded as mildly feckless. She was once described by a family member as “very brilliant you know, but she spends a lot of her time in this world looking for her other shoe”. In my family the youngest child is regarded as immensely responsible, far more so than, say, me. I think that our neighbours may all be eldest children.