Best job/worst job: Making one's Marks in customer relations

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day, you'll drink the night away
And forget about everything.

I'm not saying my worst job was so bad that I went though the sort of emotional distress Gerry Rafferty sang about but there were certainly many nights after working in Baker St when I took refuge in a pub over the road from the tube station.

I can't remember the name of the pub - this was 20 years ago - but it was frequented chiefly by Australians. There was a jukebox in the corner which boasted a large selection of songs, although it seemed to me that only one was ever played.

I can still hear Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning belting out while I drank with my Welsh work-mate Eugene - to me Beds Are Burning isn't a song but an anthem.

Baker St, of course, is home to two very famous addresses: 108, which houses Madame Tussauds, and 221B, which is where Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lived and which now houses a museum dedicated to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's celebrated detective.

It was also for many years well known for another address.

For 100 years, until 1994, 55 Baker St housed the headquarters of huge British retailer Marks and Spencer (or Marks and Sparks as we called it).

I was employed as a temp in the furniture customer services department.

Although Marks and Spencer was founded in the 19th century, it had only recently branched out into selling furniture and, believe me, it had teething problems.

I was one of about half a dozen or so whose job it was to try to solve these problems over the phone.

From the management's point of view, there were two golden rules.

First, always give the customer your name so he or she could deal with the same representative if a follow-up call was required.

I for one tried to avoid doing this in case I got landed with a real nightmare.

My problem, though, was that when someone rang back for me and was asked who they'd been dealing with, they'd inevitably reply: "The Aussie".

Second, never use your incoming line for making outgoing calls.

Let me explain: We all had two phones.

One was to answer calls from customers with problems.

The other was to try to sort out these problems by calling manufacturers or deliverers.

That was great in theory but all it really meant was that you built a huge file of problems without even making one call to try to solve them.

Anyway, I'll never forget this woman who called me about a bed we'd promised to deliver to her weeks before.

She'd got rid of her old bed the day we'd promised to drop off her new one, but she was still waiting.

She'd made any number of calls to us but didn't have the names of anyone with whom she'd dealt.

Worst of all, she was six months pregnant and sleeping on the floor.

The poor woman was, not without justification, in a right state - I was having trouble understanding her because she was crying so much.

In the end she screamed at me "What are you going to do about it?".

Now, I'm not proud of what I said next but I too was at the end of my tether.

It wasn't my fault she'd been fobbed off for weeks, but she was taking it all out on me.

So I said: "No promises, but we'll try to get the bed to you before the kid starts school."

Not surprisingly, she gave a shriek of rage and hung up.

You won't be surprised to learn that she wrote a letter of complaint.

I sure as hell didn't own up and I got away with it.

She'd neglected to mention the "Australian" accent.