I've bought my first wetsuit, and there has been cause for complaint.
We were to visit a friend's crib in the Sounds, where I gather all serious bathers slither into wetsuits. It seems only we, the ignorant classes, shiver in our swimmers.
I was taken by the military precision of being fitted out. You tell them your exact height and weight, they calculate, and then select you a skin tailored so precisely no freezing water pours down the neck hole. Astonishing.
You don't try them on at the store because mounting a wetsuit involves heavy rubber wrestling encouraged only in adult shops.
But being cautious, I decided I should field test the miracle garment before heading north. A cold-shower trial would do. I unpacked the wetsuit and pulled, gasped and stretched the rubber for several minutes, before it dawned that these clowns, these fools, these feckless idiots had, despite all their science, sold me a wetsuit a size too small.
I'm no easy-beat. I returned frothing and waving receipts, and they quickly saw how much life improves if the customer is always right. One week later, about to take to the waters of Queen Charlotte Sound, I tugged on the wetsuit, grunting like Maria Sharapova at a tennis match.
"Clods, fools, pea-brains," I yelled, hopping from one bare foot to the other.
"Look it's still too small. The zip won't go all the way."
"You've put it on back the front," she observed helpfully.
We sometimes lose our cool as consumers wronged by the corporates. Then we forget our manners, and behave badly.
A while back, stuck in a Wellington storm when I had to reach Sydney, I hit the phones and found that if I grabbed a rental car and raced past the other stranded passengers to Auckland, I could get on the early morning flight. All I needed was an airport motel, and I managed to book the last available room.
I drove nine hours through crazy weather, and pulled in to the row of airport motels at 1am, goggle eyed and exhausted.
"Lapsley?" the night guy asked, looking at his screen.
"You must have the wrong date. There's no such name, no confirmation number."
I was too tired - deranged even - to cop such treatment from some tin-pot Airport Fawlty Towers, so the fury of the wronged was unrestrained.
The cowed staffer, poorly trained in fobbing off the mad, eventually gave me a room destined for some later traveller and, after pouring myself a Scotch and pills brain zonk, I settled in for a quick five hours.
The night guy's hand was still shaking early next morning as he gave the terrorist guest his bill. I read the account with some surprise. "Airport Travelodge, $150", it said. I signed, and left the man with no further recriminations. This was fair, as he deserved none. I'd slept in the wrong hotel.
Both these wrong-headed complaints had identifiable "villains" to spray. The tougher targets are the anonymous large corporations. I decided the best tactic here was to start at the top - to write to the chairman, especially if he was a nabob who multitasked with other boards too.
These gods are too remote to interfere directly at the coalface even should they know what happens there. So your beef at the chairman will get flicked on by him along with a short, harmless note like "Please investigate", or "Make him go away".
But no matter how kindly he puts it, at the bottom of the chain a chairman's note reads as: "Herr Hitler directs ..." I first invoked the chairman technique when the garage door section of an industrial behemoth kept messing up my new roller door. They were just useless. I wrote helpfully to their chairman detailing how the relationship between his firm's customer service centre and its installers was dyslexic, and they might do better confining themselves to ukuleles.
At 10am on Easter Saturday, the doorbell rang. A stooped elderly man, with a hearing aid and what seemed to be early Parkinson's, hovered on the step with his toolkit.
"This chairman geezer said we gotta send our most experienced bloke, pronto like, to fix your door," the senior citizen wheezed. If he'd had a cap, he'd have been wringing it.
"So I'm here. They brought me back from my Easter break."
I gave him a carton of beer when he finished, but it didn't help much.
I still felt a fool.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
