Sir Bob Jones
Six years ago my normally very healthy partner was suddenly struck down by pancreatic cancer. Before she died she closed her ASB Bank account.
Ever since then numerous letters have arrived from the ASB over her alleged outstanding debt. I’ve done nothing about this, wondering just how long this farce will continue.
As readers can imagine, these letters have been a source of great amusement but I’ve now decided to go public via this Blog, after rejecting the notion of writing on her behalf offering, as the latest letter invites, to pay the debt off in 10 monthly instalments. Should I to do that only then would the ASB stop relying totally on computers to run the shop and finally look at the debt and doubtless red-faced, drop the matter.
This preposterous farce is no reflection on the ASB, rather the same sort of nonsensical non-management can be found with all large corporations in their substitution of computer technology for thinking.
One give-away is the signature, a Michelle Brailsford, inaccurately described as the Credit Solutions Manager over her division’s title, Collections and Credit Solutions.
Two points here.
First, she’s not the bloody manager, she’s the manageress. This nonsense is simply fashionable, epitomised, unsurprisingly in their case, by thespians and their mindless silliness in deciding the word “actress” is offensive, thus today females must call themselves actors.
This can pose problems with the 20th Century vogue of boys being given normally female names and vice-versa; e.g. Evelyn Waugh, he the funniest ever novelist in the English language. Lionel Shriver, the talented female American commentator, and so on.
When I was 17 I picked up the brilliant “Ballad of the Sad Café” by Carson McCullers. It wasn’t until five years later I discovered Carson was a woman, and so it goes.
The second point is the use of the word “solutions”, a give-away of mindlessness fashion following. Plumbing solutions, Building solutions, Accounting solutions; it’s rife everywhere.
My company spends tens of millions annually with tradesmen and diverse other services but never with any using “Solutions” in their name for damn good reasons. That’s because most trades and professions slip into the habit of responding to issues in identical fashion. But frequently problems require innovative thinking which by definition is beyond fashion followers.
As I’ve written, this ludicrous ASB correspondence is not peculiar to them but normal today in all larger companies, and some smaller ones, in their 100% reliance on computer technology.
Should I let it continue, we’re about 3 years away when they’d eventually have passed it over to a debt collector, whereupon the whole process would have recommenced with a series of similar letters, each costing in postage alone 200% of the actual debt, including the envelope.
I suspect this tale will elicit a sizeable reader response recounting similar occurrences.
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