We read:
"A council has asked staff not to smile when dealing with parking complaints - as it may make drivers angrier.
Staff on induction training for the parking complaints team at Brighton and Hove Council were told a smile could make a row worse.
A spokeswoman at the Tory authority said: "The training is designed to help staff use body language that would not inflame the situation."
But Mark Turner, of the GMB union, scoffed: "I find this astounding. They should focus on useful training that employees really need."
Source
7 comments:
they have a point though. If some snotnosed kid comes up to me when I walk back to my car with the parking ticket I just bought and shoves a fine in my face for not having said ticket displayed when he found the car, smiling broadly as if mocking me, I've this urge to punch him in the face too, and I'm not a violent person.
And that's pretty much the only interaction people have with these private cops that handle "parking infractions".
Come on, people, man-up. If you broke the law, you broke the law. It really doesn't matter if you committed murder or parked in an illegal zone. Be man-enough to admit you screwed up, accept responsibility for your actions, and pay the consequences for you actions.
-sig
Normally, i very rarely agree with any of the bizarre PC nonsense coming out of Britain, but this one does make sense. When you're getting a summons, (which you most likely deserve) the last thing you want to see is the issuing officer smiling at you, which you will (of course) interpret as laughter.
The strangest thing about this story is that finally, something the Brits did actually makes sense.
Anon 11:55 hit it on the nose. Man up. Take what you've got coming, accept the responsibility and be accountable for your actions. If you screwed up, you screwed up. Maybe these people were only smiling to be friendly. You know, customer service. What's wrong with that? WTF is going on these days where we have to coddle people who might be "sensitive" to something? Screw them. Man up or tie a rop around a tree limb. Please.
This sounds like less PC stuff and more along the lines of situational customer service training. If the marketing research backs up the policy then it's a sound practice, assuming they did do some kind of research.
"Come on, people, man-up. If you broke the law, you broke the law. "
Problem with rentacops and parking fines is that more often than not they're more often than not fraudulent.
Example (from Amsterdam, but happens a lot in the UK as well):
there's a ticket machine, but it's deliberately disabled by the "parking guards". People have to walk several blocks to get a ticket, when they come back to their cars the "guards" have already ticketed them with a parking fine.
In fact, they're hiding in doorways and around streetcorners and watching for people to leave their cars to look for a working machine in order to fine them.
There's no recourse either, they're officially "special investigative officers" and their word is worth more in a court of law than is yours (in other words, your statement that you were just gone long enough to get a ticket is worth nothing when used against their statement that they saw your car without a valid ticket so they fined you).
For local governments, this racket has become a major source of income, and the companies running it get a percentage so won't ever tell their employees to stop doing it either.
"A council has asked staff not to smile when dealing with parking complaints - as it may make drivers angrier."
If I worked for that council I wouldn't smile, but I'd have a large yellow "SMILEY FACE" tattooed on the back of each hand!
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