HSBC Dubai Drooling Incompetence Special

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a while, hasn't it? Things have been pretty quiet on the HSBC bank Dubai front. Nothing screwed up, nothing frustrating. We've actually been managing the hideous complexities of money in/money out without putting out the welcome mat to Mr Cockup. This long period of tranquility has, however, merely been a ruse to lull us into a false sense of security, presumably to ensure that when the diabolical blow came, its impact would be more sorely felt.

So you log into internet banking with a user ID and then enter a memorable piece of information and the six digit code generated by your HSBC secure key gadget. The memorable piece of information consists of a number of pre-set daft questions like who's your favourite dog or name the fifteenth star out from Betelgeuse if you're travelling clockwise around Orion's Belt. Logging on yesterday, Sarah found the system had simply stopped letting her in at this stage of the process. No error message or any other indication that something was up, the screen just refreshed and took her back to its initial state. We checked and double checked, she was typing everything properly but it simply wasn't working.

The fear that gripped me was immediate and overwhelming. I started to gabble at her. Try standing on your head. Drink a glass of water. Anything but force me to call their call centre. But it was clear there was nothing else for it. My hand shaking, I made the call.

The usual appalling IP line, the usual strongly accented CallBot on the other end of it. Perhaps we had been mis-typing the memorable information. Had we forgotten it? It was perhaps a network problem. How the hell can typing an ID into a webpage be a network problem? You might as well blame the state of our custard. Go on, try that. It's a custard problem. Makes as much sense, doesn't it?

A number of calls follow, an hour of frustration and walking through the same script with a number of different people. Reset your memorable information, that'll do it. Okay, off we go to do that. We decide to re-enter the same memorable information as that's what Sarah's been using these last few years and she remembers it.

No. You can't do that. You can't have new memorable information that's the same as the old memorable information. So we're inputting the memorable information correctly then. Do we accept this? Yes, sir, I understand. You clearly have a custard problem and the solution is to reset your memorable information and password. Wearily, we reset the memorable information and password. Still doesn't work.

Someone at HSBC has been watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. You know, the scene where they give Judy Dench a job humanising the call centre people who spam the UK with constant double glazing cold calls. The CallBots are now programmed to say human-like things such as 'How are you today Mr Alexander?'

Given I have just spent twenty minutes being poked with sharp sticks by your witless colleagues and am in a state of fundamental frustration being denied access to my bank account for no apparent reason, how do you think I am today, you artless, bloated drone?

Some things never change, though. There's that same insistence on assuming you are the issue, not HSBC. 'So you appear to have forgotten your memorable information, Mr Alexander.' is part of the affirmation phase of the script. Because of the appalling quality of the line, it becomes 'Snarble afquack I am pooble pickled aardvark goosp fellate.' and has to be repeated a number of times as does, cathartically, my response that I have forgotten nothing the problem is entirely of their making and if the Americans needed any help in making their government even more broken than it currently is all they'd have to do is call into HSBC and ask for assistance with the simplest of issues.

At one state someone suggests using another browser. It's insane. A form is refusing to populate and verify correctly input information and the solution is to use another browser? After protesting, we do. Same issue. And then, three hours of forehead-slapping frustration later, someone else suggests using another PC. Which, against all possible sense works. Why? Because Sarah's downloaded a browser plug-in from some educational company a couple of days ago and HSBC's security has detected it, doesn't like it and so won't let you past its log-in screen.

No error message, no hint why it's not working. Nobody telling the call centre that a failed log-in at this stage could be triggered by another level of unseen security that blocks certain classes of browser add-in. No note anywhere on the system that log-in issues could be caused by untrusted add-ins. So the CallBots just lead you through the reset password script until you explode like a frog with a compressed air line up its backside.

Every time I fly through Heathrow, I see the HSBC ads all over the airport - you know the ones that talk about the future of the world being understood by HSBC? It's got to the point where Sarah has to restrain me, marching me ranting past the offending drivel before security pick me up.

Why not change? Because I am constantly assured the others are just as woeful. If anyone wants to earnestly recommend their UAE based bank to me in the comments, I certainly will. Up until now, nobody has ever been able to make such an unqualified recommendation. Which is, let's face it, pretty tragic...

HSBC Predicts Internet Banking Growth. Shock Horror.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In an interview with Gulf News, an executive from HSBC has predicted a rising trend in the adoption of technology. This is the kind of insight we have come to expect from the bank that knows in Beijing bicycles are a mode of transport, while in Dubai they're used in the gym.

The interview goes on to tell us that mobile technology adoption is on the rise, while m-commerce "is good news for consumers who will experience the benefits of greater convenience and ease of access."

Astounding. It's like Paulo Coelho's entire body of work squeezed into a single, punchy sentence. I could feel my life changing as I read that. I had never before considered the possibility that mobile commerce would allow greater convenience and ease of access. It's one of those moments, you know the ones when the world suddenly seems, well, a little different. Something has shifted. Something has changed.

Apparently HSBC has a mobile banking solution, which was launched on the UAE Apple app store in November 2011. It's also available on Android and BlackBerry. That's news to me, but I'm just one of their customers so see no reason why I would be told. The application, developed by Montise, allows account access, balance, movement of funds between accounts and bill payments. All you need is your Internet banking PIN, password, memorable information and your HSBC Secure Key (which is a small hardware device designed to make Internet banking more frustrating than it need be).

HSBC has apparently conducted research on the factors inhibiting the adoption of Internet banking. While that research is alluded to in Gulf News' piece, the results are not. We are told merely that a third of HSBC's customers are using Internet banking, while half of those are inactive.

I'm one of the inactive ones. I couldn't remember all the usernames and passwords for phone banking and Internet banking both. Username, password, the sequenced genome of a pipistrelle bat, six digit PIN, memorable information, ten digit phone banking identification matrix, internal diameter of a six tonne bow thruster, date of birth, the names of six different violent mammals, secure key entry. I don't even have a secure key. Sarah does. She loathes it with a passion. I wonder if perhaps the sheer richness and complexity of information required to access these services would not count perhaps as one of the inhibitors? My real bank just wants an Internet banking account number and password and hey presto, I'm in.

The study, apparently, revealed that it was important for HSBC to raise awareness about the benefits of online banking.

I can't wait.

HSBC IVR SNAFU

(Photo credit: lipjin)

HSBC has, in a moment of rare brilliance, broken its IVR. Not that it was ever an IVR to write home about in the first place, but now they've really cemented things and ensured it doesn't let you do telephone banking.

The one thing you'd want a telephone banking system to do, really. But then my expectations are probably set too high. Maybe I should expect my phone banking system to be set up to let me craunch a marmoset or perhaps provide me with philosophical inspiration. Because it sure as hell can't perform a transaction.

IVR is, in case you're interested, Interactive Voice Recognition. It's the phone system where.robotic.voices.tell.you.to.press.1.to.be.annoyed OR PRESS two.to.be.really.annoyed. It doesn't really have to be about voice, it can be keypad response. I'll never forget Rick Dees' highly amusing breast self examination hotline IVR gag: "Welcome to the Rick Dees breast self-examination hotline. Press one. Now press the other one."

Anyway, if you want to transfer money between accounts and you have multiple accounts (I do. There isn't enough room in one account to hold all the money I have, see?), you are now presented with a list of accounts to debit. Let us assume I want to transfer from my number two account to my number one account.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.Advance.Account.0...2...0...1...1..TWO...press ONE. For.other.accounts.press.two.

So you press two.

Foryour HSBC.UAE.current.account. ZERO....too...ZERO...WUN...ONE...2 press ONE.

So you press one.

Please.select.the.account.to.credit. Foryour HSBC.UAE.Savings.account.. 0..2...0...0...FIVE...0. Press ONE.

And that's it. You can't actually choose the account to credit and the account to debit. It's broken. Bust. Kaput. Borked. Non-functional. Usefully challenged. Without point. Eff all use.

So, heart heavy, you call the call centre. 

"Hello. Your IVR is broken."

"I'm sorry sir, I didn't understand you. Did you want to have your car washed, top up your credit card or craunch a marmoset?"

"No, I just want to tell someone at the bank that the new IVR is functionally broken. It won't let me transfer between accounts." I nearly say it's pining for the fjords but remember in time that you never, ever try to make a joke with the HSBC call centre or F16 strikes are called down on your house.

"I know the new IVR is complex sir and hard to understand and I appreciate your difficulty. Can I do the transfer for you?"

"But you're just reciting a script you've been given because of the high volume of complaints you're getting and that doesn't alter the fact or escalate the information to someone who could act on it that the IVR is actually functionally non-functional. Ineffective. Not fit for purpose."

"Yes. Umm. No. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

They're taping the call. I hang up because I know what I want to say won't read well in the court transcript of my verbal abuse case.

I hate them. With a passion.

But then you know that...

Cheque this out...

Image via Wikipedia

The new chequebook requirement is not just on the part of HSBC, as my landlord’s man thought happily last night when I passed over my rent in cash to him. He was shocked to hear me tell him that every bank in the UAE is likely to start rejecting ‘old’ cheques and he had no idea at all how to tell the difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ cheques. He is holding several ‘old’ cheques as PDCs preparatory to depositing them when the rents on other properties come due – I wonder how many other landlords are in a similar position.

In my humble opinion, this whole sorry episode is a case study in totally inadequate communications, a demonstration of breathtaking arrogance from banks and a clear sign that the UAE’s banks have a huge leap forward to make in customer service and communication. I might be overdoing it, but I doubt it: this is what I do for a living – communications. I might be useless at it, I might not. But I have never seen it so badly mismanaged in my life – and I have been working in the Middle East for over twenty years now.

All UAE banks have to upgrade their cheques to conform to new guidelines mandated by the UAE Central Bank and so there is a very real danger that the vast majority of cheques held by people out there are now duds. And that the majority of cheque books out there are useless.
The UAE is a society where a cheque was previously regarded as ‘as good as cash’ because of the Central Bank’s ‘two strikes and you’re out’ policy. In the UAE, if you bounce a cheque, the person you have issued the cheque to can call the police and file a case against you and if you bounce a cheque twice, the Central Bank can (and, I hear, will) withdraw your access to banking services.

This has been an amazing deterrent to any form of ‘bad cheque’ and, in fact, there are no cheque guarantee cards here. A cheque is a man’s word and bond and respected as such.

The new guidelines from the Central Bank have been triggered by the introduction of a new automated clearing system, ICCS. This demands banks take extra precautions before scanning cheques and sending them to the Central Bank for clearing, hence the mandated ‘more secure’ cheque books.

HSBC and other banks started to refuse cheques without the new features on the 1st January 2010. I have no record of HSBC contacting me to advise me of this – I did, incidentally, search through the 33 junk and phishing emails that purported to come from HSBC that I have received since November last year, but they are all fakes. HSBC has not responded to my post yesterday asserting that the bank had not effectively communicated the vitally important new changes to me.

There is some confusion regarding PDCs. According to Mashreq’s FAQ:
Retail and corporate customers may have already collected cheques which do not comply with cheque security features prior to this deadline. In view of this, collecting banks will accept such deposits and process them as usual in ICCS till 31/07/2010. Any PDCs dated beyond 31/07/2010 must be lodged with Banks before 31/12/2009 for collection on the due date.

But HSBC’s FAQ is a little more clear (my bold):
Post dated cheques without the security features, which have been collected by customers prior to 31 December 2009, can be accepted until 31 July 2010. After this date no cheque without the security feature will be accepted.

Post dated cheques and discounted cheques deposited in advance without the security feature and already held by banks for any date will not be affected by this rule; however HSBC will not accept any new cheques without the security features post 01 January 2010.

In other words, PDCs will only be honoured if the bank already held them prior to 31/12/2009 – think about it, a cheque dated now and lodged now is just a ‘new cheque without the security features’, no?

I haven’t seen any news stories or advertisements about this massive change to the banking system. If other banks have contacted their customers, well and good – but nobody I have spoken to has been aware of this whole issue at all. I should point out that some people commenting to the last post I put up on this issue do say they were made aware – although some said they received emails as late as 28/12/2009.

By the way – as far as I can see, the ICCS rollout from the Central Bank has been done with remarkable care and some two years of trials, dry runs and suchlike. I remain amazed that two years down the line, banks seem singularly unprepared to meet the challenges of the rollout.

There has been no concerted awareness campaign on the part of the banks to ensure that customers know about this issue. I can gather evidence of, at best, cursory and almost derisory attempts at communicating what’s going on (mounting a FAQ on your website is not communicating with your public). And that strikes me as verging on insane – let alone highly insecure – given that this move potentially invalidates every cheque in the UAE that does not conform to a new standard that most people are unaware of.

So what does this all mean? Try this lot:

• PDCs held by landlords in the UAE that have not yet been lodged or discounted with a bank are likely not to be honoured by banks. They are potentially worthless documents as of 1/1/2010.
  

• Anybody issuing a cheque using the old style cheque book is potentially defrauding the person they are presenting the cheque to. And anyone accepting such a cheque (do you know what the new ones look like? HmmMMM?) is likely to have it bounced by the bank.
  

• Any payments, for instance mortgage payments, car loans or PDCs issued by businesses against scheduled payments, may well (probably will) bounce.
  

• Anyone who doesn’t know the difference between the ‘new’ cheques and the ‘old’ cheques issued by every UAE bank is in danger of accepting a dud cheque.
  

• The criminally minded punter can now have a field day – imagine selling someone some ACs, a fridge or suchlike. By the time the cheque has gone ‘thud’, what are the chances you’ll be able to find yer man? Yeah, zero.
  

• Cheques in the UAE are no longer as good as cash. They’re as good as junk until someone gets their finger out and clearly communicates what the hell is going on here. And that means, collectively, the banks that have so far stayed resolutely silent need to start taking responsibility.
  

Incidentally, the cheque that HSBC bounced on my landlord (a cheque for tens of thousands of Dirhams returned without even making a call to me, of course) came back marked as 'Irregular Signature'.

Cheque Book Fraud

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I suppose I should be angry that HSBC failed to communicate the changes in cheque book requirements with me, but I’m not – merely resigned. I had to find out about it from someone on Twitter in the end.

I should equally, I’m sure, be angry that the bank dishonoured a post dated cheque I had previously given to my landlord, doing so, as usual, without attempting to contact and inform me. But I’m not. I’m just resigned to the lack of communication or basic care for the customer.

The UAE’s central bank has made changes to the way it handles cheques and has therefore made it a requirement that cheques should have an additional level of security, including a tamper-evident watermark. These have been added to new cheque books and banks are no longer accepting cheques made out using old style cheque books.

What amazes me is that a bank could actually contemplate making such a move without any attempt to communicate this effectively to its customers. I consider myself to be unusually contactable – I am quite an online person and you can get in touch with me by telephone, mobile, SMS, fax, email, Twitter or Facebook. You could even leave a comment on the blog. In fact, HSBC has frequently contacted me using SMS, typically to let me know about a discount I can avail at Joy Alukkas Jewellery when I use my HSBC card. Strange they didn’t think of using the same medium, or in fact any medium of communication, to let me know they were about to dishonour my cheque.

But I’m not angry about that. Just resigned.

They could even have bothered to write to me. To enclose a new cheque book, for instance, or at least a letter explaining what was happening and how it would affect me. They could have put a mandatory screen up on the Internet banking system that would have made me click on ‘NO I don’t want the new cheque book’ or ‘YES please send me a new cheque book now in plenty of time before the changes take place.’ That wouldn’t have cost them a penny but would have avoided my landlord getting a bounced cheque. They could even have sent an email using their woeful little Internet banking messaging system, but records show no such communication since November which is as far as records go back.

Given that I am a busy little bee with plenty more important things to do than muck about with this stuff, they could have used several routes to get through to me and let me know I had to act and that there would be consequences attendant on my inaction. They could have written to me, put a screen on Internet Banking AND sent me a letter, SMSed me and emailed me/messaged me via their Internet Banking service. All of them. Just to make sure I knew what was happening. They did none of them. Not one.

It’s not a time thing, either. HSBC has had plenty of time to inform customers of the changes and prepare them for the new system. The first phase of testing ICCS, which appears to have been a thoroughly well managed rollout by the Central Bank, took place in July 2006. HSBC has known for over two years that the new system was to be implemented and therefore has had two years to prepare its customers for the new security requirements. As the global local bank, it would have had experience from other markets of earlier implementations of Image based clearing, surely?

In fact, the whole thing has been a world class shambles, managed with the usual complete disregard for the customer and leveraging the communication skills of a deep frozen wombat.

But what makes me angry, because yes, I am angry, is that my landlord is a decent man but a very sick one and he didn’t need to have to deal with a bounced cheque. That cheque was written and issued in good faith, drawn on the bank account that I am paying the bank to manage on my behalf and returned without any reference whatsoever to the account holder. What’s more, the cheque was written on the cheque book issued to me for that very purpose by the bank – the very same bank that had previously taken to bouncing my cheques because it claimed my signature had changed (it hasn’t). The very same bank that I visited personally in August last year to sort out that whole sorry mess and who did not even think to let me know then and there that I would need a new cheque book. Although they must, at that time, have known that these changes were taking place as they'd been working on them for fully two years since full trials of the new system had taken place.

The bank has at no time communicated to me the requirement for a new cheque book or that it was going to start unilaterally dishonouring my issued cheques for reasons that were completely unknown to me.

Bankers.

IBAN Numbers For The UAE. Be Scared...

Image by ~Aphrodite via FlickrThe news made me shudder. The UAE is introducing IBAN codes for all bank accounts.  By rights, this should cheer me up no end as the IBAN number has long been a mainstay of electronic payments to my real bank in the UK. But it doesn't. It makes me very, very afraid.

My fear is unreasonable, I know. HSBC has a nice, reassuring letter on its website, It even has a 'generate your IBAN' application that lets me key in my twelve digit account number and see what my IBAN number would be.

Let us for a moment skip over the wisdom of an application that asks me to input sensitive personal information without any attempt at security or validation. I am sure any reasonable, competent bank wouldn't encourage its customers to give away account numbers and so on in a way that could lead them to give such information away on, say, a phishing website.

The IBAN number is actually nice and easy. It consists of a two letter country code (AE), a two digit checksum and a three digit bank identification number (HSBC's is 020). Then you have a 16-digit number which consists, in HSBC's case, of four leading zeroes and your 12 digit HSBC account number.

It's nice to see HSBC so keen to use IBAN numbers. This is the bank that didn't have a field on its web-based transfer screen to enter IBAN numbers into - and then charged the currency losses resulting from  the rejected transaction back to the customer.

So why do I think they're going to screw this up? Well, in part because over the 18-odd years I've banked with them there has been no aspect of banking that they haven't at one stage screwed up for me, so I don't see why this should be any different. And in part because I bank with an institution stupid enough to get its customers keying their bank account numbers over open connections with no security or validation. But also because we're all going to need this new system working like clockwork come the end of November.

Why? Because the deadline for implementation of this new numbering system is the 19th November - and any electronic payment made into a UAE bank account without a valid IBAN number after that date will potentially bounce back and incur addtiional charges. And that includes the payment of your salary - the UAE's wages protection system (WPS) will require employers to use IBAN numbers to make salary transfers. If that causes any problems, we'll be rightly banjaxed as most people are paid at the month's end - and the end of November (the first test of the new system) segues neatly into the UAE's National Day holiday. This year the UAE celebrates its 40th year as a nation - it's going to be a biggie.

Maybe it will all go wonderfully. Maybe I'll be proved wrong to be so suspicious and cynical. We'll see...

HSBC. The End Is - Finally - Nigh.

Customer service paradigm

Went to Spinneys the other day to buy stuff for dinner and get some cash from the ATM. The ATM she no work. The credit card she no work. I pay using my Lloyds UK card (expensive, but what to do?) and call The Bank That Likes To Say EOWRUTABABA to find out what's gone wrong.

They've blocked the cards. Without warning, without telling us. No phone call, no email, nothing. They just blocked them and then went home. No, the call centre can't unblock them. No, you can't have access to your own money. No, the branch is closed so you've got no money at all tonight. Mafi faloos, baba. Not a penny. Despite having thousands lodged in your account.

Why? Because they had asked me for a 'salary letter', the latest in a long line of insane documentary requests made in the name of 'compliance' and 'Safeguard'. Apparently, having a scan of the updated utility bill of a guy who's been your customer for 25 years makes us all safer from fraud, scams and Osama Bin Laden.

I queried the requirement for a salary letter by return email, because it strikes me as a tad silly that I - a company owner - would want to write myself a letter confirming I paid myself. In fact, I found out from a letter I got by Aramex on Monday that I could upload my trade license instead and so I did that the very same day. Tuesday they blocked the account.

Wednesday they replied to me with an email explaining I could upload a trade license in lieu of a salary letter. Bit late...

We don't have any loans, or any outstandings. We're in credit. Big time. And we can't use our money. We are, oddly enough, stony broke and cash rich at the same time. It's the last straw, I've finally had enough. This camel's back - after 25 years of abuse and idiocy - is broken.

We're closing the account. I can't trust a financial institution that would do that to its customers. God knows, I couldn't trust them to issue a cheque book, meet a cheque, make a transfer, issue a credit card, operate an ATM, manage a call centre or generally do anything else you'd expect a bank to do.

I mean, it's not like they haven't been trying to get rid of us. Oh, no, they've been trying REAL hard. Even a cursory glance at the Fake Plastic Archive gives us some idea of the treats they've been doling out over the years:

Here, back in 2008, I posted precipitately about my joy - glee, even - at opening a new account with Lloyds UAE and getting rid of HSBC. It was not to be, alas. Lloyds blew opening the account so badly that we gave up. It didn't matter, as it happened, as Lloyds UAE got taken over by HSBC anyway. So it was a case of out of the frying pan into the frying pan and over to the frying pan. It didn't end there, of course.

The howls of pain recorded on this blog alone (bear in mind it started in 2007 and I started banking with HSBC in 1993, so there's years of silent screaming out there)  are testament to a bank that's really, really getting things wrong in a big way. There is NOT ONE aspect of banking service they haven't screwed up over the years. I kid you not, not one aspect.

I have happily accused them of drooling incompetence and gleefully pointed out their legion failings. I have accused them of operating potentially the worst call centre in the world (and defy you to identify a worse one) and charged them with ineptitude of the first order - which is being mild about it.

I have glibly compared their staff to badly trained macaques of below average capability, particularly when they quietly added a requirement for an IBAN number to make transfers and failed to include that field in the onscreen transfer form - then rejected the subsequent transfer AFTER it had gone to the UK and then booked the consequent - and considerable - exchange rate loss back to me.

I have also accused them of lying in their advertising. I have stood by as they have bounced my cheques, screwed up my transfers and generally shook me up like a wasp in a bottle. I have called them useless bastards in the past and I must say I do so very much stand by that accusation.

"Why do you stay with them?" People asked me. Well, it was usually because every time I went to get shot of them, everyone told me the other banks were just as bad. Now I don't care any more. Any bank that will unilaterally cut you off from access to your own money without warning - and that because of their own desire to enforce their unjustified procedural requirements and total incompetence - is not fit to have charge of my funds.

That's it. Game over. I'm sure they'll be glad not to be getting the abuse anymore as much as I - I can faithfully report - have an enormous sense of relief at the prospect of getting rid of them forever.

I only wish I could hurt them more to make the idiots responsible for doing this feel the impotent fury, frustration and considerable inconvenience their thoughtless, pointless and draconian actions have caused us.

I'm not sure what's more remarkable - that we've stuck with them for 25 years or that they just burned a customer of 25 years' standing. As I told the snobby wee girl in the branch today, I can remember when it was the British Bank of the Middle East and there were bedu guards with Martini rifles at the door - and when the paying in form asked for your company stamp or 'chop'.

Goodbye, HSBC, you legendary screwups.

HSBC Dubai - More Trouble On The Cards?

ATM (Photo credit: Modern Relics)

I am very proud to be the owner of a school report, penned by my harried teacher back when I was eight years of age, which contains the immortal words, "Alexander's cynicism can sometimes be extremely annoying."

I can only say the intervening forty years have intensified that youthful trait, although I do try and preserve some form of occasional blind optimism, just so I can prove I would have been better off sticking to expecting the worst from those around me.

This is rarely more so the case than in my dealings with the bank that has managed to in some way fail in the provision of every banking service I have ever required of it. I'm serious. You name something a bank might do for you and I can recount a tale of how they have at least once goofed it up for me in the past two decades they have been enlivening my life.

So you can only imagine the look of dark suspicion I gave the new sparkly red card that landed on my doorstep some months ago. It has a chip thingy embedded in it and the comforting words HSBC Advance Platinum Debit Visa Paywave printed on its front. This card replaces my ATM card and also acts as a debit card - and will support 'touchless' transactions. You just wave the card at a terminal like a modern Gandalf and smiling retailers are recompensed for the good or service they are providing you.

Huzzah!

I refused to use it. Something's bound to be wrong with it. I just didn't want the inevitable headlong descent into The Call Centre after some transaction had debited the Chilean national debt from my account or given all my money to an oran utan sanctuary in Sarawak. I carried on with my battered old 'analogue' ATM card.

And then comes a missive from the bank. The old ATM cards are on the way out, mate, you'll have to use your new HSBC Advance Platinum Debit Visa Paywave card. They've got an 800 number to change or reset your PIN and so I called it (fear and loathing in my black heart) only to find the process easy, seamless and brilliantly managed.

Gulp.

Then I went to an ATM and used the card. And it worked. Perfectly. First time. I was in a state of shock, I kid you not. A lady had to ask me to move aside as I had frozen in situ and was gibbering softly to myself.

And then I realised. The new card only gives me access to one of the three accounts I hold with them. The old card gave me access to all three accounts. So I now have a new sparkly chip and PIN HSBC Advance Platinum Debit Visa Paywave card that is 33% as functional as the old one in the main purpose I hold an ATM card for - accessing my accounts using an ATM.

That discovering this provoked in me a feeling of grim satisfaction is itself something of a worry...

Is This The World's Worst Call Centre?

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The amazing tale of John McAffee that has played out over the past few weeks started with him hiding from Belizeian police by digging a hole in the sand and hiding in it with a cardboard box over his head.

It's an image that played in my mind this morning as I listened to the series of mildly farty whooshes on the line. A drug-addled maniac buried up to his neck in the sand with a box over his head, cowering and gibbering softly to himself in the middle of a South American beach. I would rather have been in McAffee's sweat-darkened sandles than in my own shoes, stuck on the end of an IP line to Dumbabad or wherever it is HSBC's call centre is located.

Is HSBC Dubai's call centre the worst in the world? I find it hard to think of a contender, let alone someone who has misunderstood customer service to the degree they believe this 'service' is fit for purpose.

I spoke at the Middle East Call Centre Conference last year. Uber-geek Gerald Donovan had suggested I take to the stage, place a cassette recorder playing 'Greensleeves' on the podium then leave for twenty minutes, returning to say "Sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was busy helping another conference." I am ashamed to tell you I didn't have the bottle to do it. It would, indeed, have been a career high.

In a fit of finger trouble, Sarah had credited our Visa account instead of transferring between two of our current accounts. So I had to get them to reverse the transfer. It was not possible to do this immediately, before the transaction was posted at the close of business, apparently. I had to wait for the funds to clear and then simply reverse the transfer. Simple!

So I wait until the funds clear then call telephone banking. Wait a moment while they identify a random species of mandrake parasite. Now key in the last six digits of your bank account. This number is never recognised by the system, so you just key in any random number. Now your ten digit phone banking number, your twelve digit bank account number or your best estimate of the number of craters on the moon. And now your date of birth in DD/MM/YYYY format followed by the hash key. And now your six digit phone banking number.

By now you're exhausted. But at least you can dial one for card services then star for a human being. And - look into my eyes - you're through to Dumbabad. How can HSBC help you today? Well, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Ah. Please hold.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

And we're back. I have to transfer you to internet banking for that, sir. Fine, let's do it. Is there anything else I can do to help you today? No thank you. Can I just confirm your mobile number? Yes. Your PO Box? Look, could you just transfer me, please?

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

I'm on hold for a subjective eternity. Card services. Hi, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Ah. Hold on.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Right. Umm, you can't do that. Yes I can, I've done it before. Hold on a second, I'll transfer you to the relevant team. But...

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Sorry to keep you holding for so long. The agent you need to talk to isn't picking up, I'll just transfer you to the relevant team. HANG ON before you transfer me, who is 'the relevant team'? Card services. But they transferred me to you. They're the ones you need. Fine.

The music on hold is inaudible in the whoosh and swish of the IP line. Occasionally IP artefacts cause strange auditory phenomena like eddies in the astral plane. In the sea of wow and flutter you can occasionally hear snatches of music, a slightly manic-sounding, repetitive jangle not unlike a Goan Jamaican steel band overlaid with a recording of Paul Young's bassist. It fades in and out maddeningly.

Card services, hello.  I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. I have been on the phone for thrirty minutes now for this one simple thing. You want to lick an axe murderer from Crawley? No, I want to reverse a transfer from my Visa account. Sure, no problem. There, done.

Done?

Yes, done. Anything else I can help you with today?

That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

It's been a hectic week, hence the lack of posts. The ArabNet Dubai Digital Summit sucked down more time than I'd ever have thought it was going to - but what a time it's been. The week's flown by in a whirlwind of panels, chatting, eager startups and blethering about all things online.

Not even HSBC's decision to mount an insane war against their SME customers, reported upon excellently by the Al Arabiya English website, tempted me to post. Truth be told, there just wasn't the time and anyway, what could be possibly said that would make any sort of sense of a bank unilaterally shutting down business accounts in the United Arab Emirates with just 60 days' notice - just before the summer and Ramadan coincide to ensure 60 days' notice is insufficient?

Even HSBC's assertion that it 'remains committed to the SME market' wasn't enough to break the ArabNet spell. Although now looking back on the story that comment still provokes wide-eyed astonishment. We've wiped out the Marsh Arabs but remain committed to all indigenous peoples. Right.

I got to have a little gentle fun with banks myself at the ArabNet banking solutions panel, when Graham from Radical outlined some of the cool stuff his company had been doing with banks internationally and the very brave Pedtro from Emirates NBD took to the stage to speak for the Middle East's own banks. Perhaps starting the panel with the assertion that all Middle East banks are rubbish wasn't terribly PC of me (I realised my introduction to the topic had turned into a spittle-flecked rant only when the audience started to turn into a mob hefting burning brands and demanding to march on the monster), but I thought if we could all agree that basic principle, we could then move on and not spend an hour throwing custard tarts at Pedro.

And that's the way it worked out, generally - but I came away from the session with the feeling that people like Pedro are fighting against legacy systems and legacy-minded management, while banks in other parts of the world - leaner, meaner and generally more competitive - are providing some really smart digital services. You wonder what's holding us back and then something like HSBC vs SME happens and you realise that yes, it is pretty nigh hopeless.

I enjoyed many of the talks and panels I attended at ArabNet, there were few 'duffers' in the mix which was a blessing - and with three tracks on the go, rare was the moment when something interesting wasn't happening somewhere. Skills marketplace Nabbesh was raising money on startup crowd investing platform Eureeca, Wally got Dhs 1.5 million funding for its blisteringly smart expenses tracking app (it scans receipts and lets you track locations, venues, expenditures and the like), Restronaut took everyone out for dinner (the latest brain-child of Make Business Hub founder Leith Matthews) and private car booking service Careem offered everyone a free ride. There was a lot of stuff going on, I can tell you.

I had the dubious honour of being the last speaker at ArabNet Dubai and so was surprised to find a packed room in front of me - that's a testament to the engagement and commitment of the audience at the event. There were a few grumbles of 'three days is too long' but I'm not so sure, myself. It wasn't a stretched out agenda by any means. Anyway, I spent fifteen minutes gibbering and railing at the audience in tongues, the usual shamanistic display of erratic behaviour. And then I got to lead a panel on women's content and branded content. 

With one client and three publishers on the panel, it was always going to be hard to get a good challenging debate moving - and the publishers were determined not to have the fight I was so keen to goad them into, so the panel was a tad tamer than I'm used to. Tragically, we didn't have the Twitterfall displayed on the stage monitors, so couldn't see the howls of outrage taking place on the projected screen behind us. As the panelists talked about why marketing managers didn't understand women in the region and why women's content was Chanel and handbags, a furious cry rose from the significant female element in the audience who felt women were, well, worth more than that. I couldn't see it and so the opportunity to square the circle between audience and panel was lost.

And then, in a trice, it was over. The developers' awards saw Lebanon taking the trophy and a couple of hours later, the Atlantis conference centre was back to being a vast expanse of strange nautical primary colours and Dubai was filled with little pockets of partying geeks and, no doubt, a very relieved and exhausted ArabNet team.

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner

Liars

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am never at my best in job interviews. I’m a disastrous candidate (I was once stopped in the middle of an interview to be told my ‘interview persona sucks’) and even worse as an interrogator. Never a great lover of formality, I find the stilted nervousness appalling.

The other day a candidate asked me what was the difference between PR and advertising. It struck me as an odd question to ask in an interview for a PR job, but I did my best to answer it. And my answer boiled down to this.

Public Relations - as I see it - is the communications discipline. It is about driving structured, benefit-led change. In my professional career, fifteen years now, in public relations I have never told a single lie. Never.

But advertising is all about lying. It's what they do, constantly. What amazes me is how we put up with it, consigning it to the dump bin of background noise when actually we should be protesting it. Look at HSBC's most recent radio ad in the UAE. "At HSBC, we believe that..."

No you don't. That's simply a lie. You do not collectively believe in personal loans with 'keen' (6.5% is competitive, apparently.) interest rates. It's not a corporate value. In fact, your offer is not driven in any way by a "belief", other than a commercial imperative. So why do you find it appropriate to so glibly misrepresent yourselves in this way?

Axe does not make men attractive. Oh, sure, it's an amusing way to highlight the 'brand essence' of the product. It's also a lie. It smells like toilet freshener. I have yet to meet a woman attracted by the smell of toilet freshener. Pantypads don't make you a more successful mum and microwave dinners don't mean more time to enjoy the family. Famously, I would contend a Mars a day doesn't really help you work, rest and play. It just tastes nice and is bad for you. There's no medical evidence to support the unsupportable claim.

It has long been a catechism for me that assertion without proof is a lie. And yet this is what advertising does constantly. Feel the radiance warm your skin, taste the joy of the open road. Dare to dream the dream. Oh, and while I'm at it, why does the 'Hundred reasons to buy a BMW' radio ad only ever feature reason 82? Do you think they even have a list of 100 reasons to buy their blasted cars?

And on and on we go through a litany that touches pretty much every commercial we see. A constant barrage of the untrue, indefensible and mis-characterised. And we let it wash over us rather than pushing back and asking brands to kindly just stick to the facts, the truth.

Which is what you have to do in public relations. Because if you don't, you'll get called out. In public. It used to be by journalists, now it's by every mobile phone in the country.

I can't say the interview was a great success. It contained some very long silences...

On Your Bike

Image via WikipediaIt’s always a delight when a new radio advertisement appears that stands out in the awful sea of half-baked drivel that punctuates the stuff you actually want to listen to. My delight is only enhanced that the latest piece of drooling, witless buffoonery originates from those admirable fellows at HSBC, the bank that likes to say 'Is there anything else I can do to help you?' at the end of calls where they have been signally useless. This is just one of many endearing habits, but I shall not allow myself to be sidetracked. Back to the radio spot.

The script goes something like this:

"In Beijing a bicycle means transport, in London it means recreation while here in Dubai it means working out in the gym. We understand the world so give us your money."

For a start, as both a consumer and business customer, it’s always reassuring that one’s bank can demonstrate a clear understanding of world bicycle usage trends. There are few aspects of the global financial services market that occupy me more.

However, the fact that the insight on offer from HSBC is clearly based on mildly egregious generalisations and actually represents absolutely no insight whatsoever may be a worry to some. For instance, some Chinese people may (I know this is hard to appreciate, but bear with me here) actually use a bicycle recreationally or may even visit a gym. Londoners certainly use bicycles in the gym and many use it to get to work. This even in the city of London where you would expect people to be somewhat more advanced than those amusingly manual slanty-eyed coolies pedal pumping across the rutted tracks over in Chinkyland.

And here in Dubai, while I’m sure we’d all like to take comfort in the image of a city packed with successful young executives working out before a day of glorious triumph over world markets in their globally aware organisations, I’m afraid it doesn’t quite do justice to reality. In fact a bicycle to me rather evokes the gentleman in a grubby shalwar khamees who comes by our dumpster every day and picks out the cardboard to add to the tottering pile strapped to the back of his bike with a threadbare bungy.

But I’m cavilling, I know. It’s just an advertisement and not meant to represent the reality of the situation at all. It’s meant to increase my awareness of my bank’s global insight and the bicycle thing is just a sort of metaphor. Or to old fashioned moralists, simply a lie. What's tragic is that it's a badly told one...

HSBC: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Out Again

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of you have got bored with the HSBC Whingey Posts. Why not a fun, frothy 'Shiny' post? You ask. A touch of irony, a scintilla of witty flair. Not that anger thing you do. No way, guy, that's just, like, you know, negative.

Well I can't help it. Every time I'm prepared to sue for peace, they go and do something else that makes absolutely no sense unless you are prepared to admit that the bank is being run by a row of Listerine-gargling Orangutans perched on a sapient pearwood branch lighting farts tuned by arraying their relative bottom sizes to squeeze out 'Roll Out The Barrell' every time a decision of any sort is required that will do anything other than ensure the absolute and consummate misery of their beaten-down and exhausted customers.

There is no category of banking service they have not managed to fail to perform in the time we have banked with them. Not one. Issue a cheque book, a credit card, send a draft, make a transfer. Every single aspect of banking has, at one stage or another, been royally muffed up by these vapid goons.

Imagine, then, my amazement that we managed to get new Visa cards issued with only a personal visit to the branch when our old ones were a day away from expiry, having not been replaced automatically (and I having been assured they would be). Imagine we had told the girl we were going on leave and could only accept delivery after the 24th August - and I got a long, rambling call from a drone on a heavily IP-saturated line when I was in the UK (incurring roaming charges that would melt the iciest heart) telling me my cards were ready for delivery.

'HaHa!' I laughed, and 'Fie and Fiddlesticks to boot! I'm on leave! I told you! No can do! Put that in your corporate pipe and see if you can't get a tune out of it by shoving it up the nearest Orangutan's...'

The cards arrived the other day to the office once we had returned. I was, to be honest, sore amazed. They have a sticker across the front of them giving a number to call to get a PIN number as they're 'chip and pin' cards. Called it. Did the rigmarole. It all worked perfectly.

By now I had relaxed. Oh, you know with hindsight and think me a fool. But I had indeed sighed relief and smiled at my wife. "Perhaps, my love, we have broken the spell at last" - imagine Shrek speaking ecstatically to Princess Fiona (I have spent the summer mingling with young nieces and nephew).

And then I went to peel the sticker off to find it wasn't a plastic 'easy peel' sticker that leaves no glue behind. It's a paper sticker that leaves a gluey, papery residue across the front of the whole thing. It's going to pick up fluff and dirt, go grey and grubby.

A glittering new credit card that immediately looks skanky, filthy and worn. Yes, people, this is indeed fitting...

Groundhog Day

It's like groundhog day around here. The film, not the event.

The Central Bank has extended the deadline indefinitely for the implementation of the new Image Cheque Clearing System (ICCS), following problems implementing the system on January 1st 2011.

Meanwhile in unrelated news, the collective fat-headed nincompoopery that is my bank, HSBC, has once again seen fit to dishonour my rent cheque to my landlord. Which is precisely what they did in January last year.

On January 6th last year, I posted about both of these events. It's linked here. I pointed out the many problems people would face trying to present old cheques that lacked the security features mandated by the UAE Central Bank's implementation of the new automated cheque clearing system. I also pointed out what a communications disaster the whole thing had been. Of course there was little attempt to communicate the whole thing clearly and effectively and so, precisely a year later, the system has been once again delayed, withdrawn temporarily as everyone tries to work out how to go about honouring old cheques past the deadline set for them to be honoured.

The ICCS was first started as  project in 2005. Now, five years later, it still hasn't been implemented. Last year's confusion led to more delays and a new deadline (the original 'new cheques only' deadline was 1/1/2010) which has now been extended once again purely because nobody invested in effective communications.

Meanwhile, HSBC is saying, as it did last year, that my cheque has been dishonoured because of my signature. Last year I went to see the morons and we sat together and agreed that their scanner had squashed my signature, which is naturally some 5cm high. We rescanned my signature (I had, first, to try and copy the squashed signature, my 'old' signature before they'd scan my 'new' signature. Honest.) and then their scanner squashed my signature to look like the 'old' signature. In order to do this, of course, they required my passport copy - and wouldn't accept my National ID Card as proof of ID.

My signature is,  believe me, highly distinctive. I have been paying rent to my landlord for some ten years now. I write only two cheques every year - one to him, one to the post office. You'd have thought my bank could check the history or even telephone me before deciding to dishonour my cheque for tens of thousands of dirhams (obviously it would be an important transaction to me), but you'd think wrong. You'd assume some level of applied intelligence, care or (gasp!) initiative. And they are all sorely lacking. My bank has managed to make a mess of absolutely every aspect of banking, from issuing cards to making transfers, from providing a reliable, sensible and usable telephone and Internet banking service to honouring cheques. I am left dumbfounded as to how the hell they make money, but can only assume that totally ignoring the needs of your customers is the key to success.

You may want to suggest I find another bank. I am open to suggestions.

Twits

This Thursday will see the global Twestival event taking place in Dubai. Over 175 countries all over the world are having simultaneous events to celebrate the fine art of Twittering. All you have to do is be a user of the micro-blogging social networking phenomenon and this year’s biggest new thing since Marmite rice crackers.

Why bother?

Well, I can see there’s a downside to getting stuck at the upper deck of Dubai’s Barasti Bar on a Thursday evening with upwards of a 140 early adopters, geeks, nerds, social networking gurus (they’ll be the ones in towels) and neologists. But there’s an upside, too.

Twitter’s damn useful. It started as a social application which aimed to give you a 140 character space to answer the question ‘What are you doing right now?’ But Twitter has evolved at a remarkable pace. The underlying technology hasn’t changed so much as they way people have used it. Rather like SMS, Twitter has taken on a life of its own.

The Dubai Twestival venue was itself sourced and booked using Twitter, which can move information at remarkable speeds. In fact, Le Meridien Mina Seyahi (@minaseyahi) became a sponsor of the event - again, through Twitter. And so did Virgin Megastores (@virginmegame)!

Crowd-sourcing (Anyone know where I can get tickets to the Dubai Twestival?), customer service (I hate HSBC! "Hi. This is HSBC. What’s the problem?" - OK, so that example's a pipe dream, but you get what I mean. Companies like Comcast are using it effectively), marketing ("Try this out, it’s cool") and sharing ideas, information, updates, tips and links you’ve come across are all just a sample of the many ways that people are finding Twitter is a useful and cool tool.

For what it’s worth, people, my Twitter feeds into my Facebook page and to the blog (the feed’s there, to the right hand side) and generates a very different set of responses from each of the platforms it goes to. By using TweetBurner, a natty little application that shortens URLs, I can Twurl any site I come across on the web, sharing that information with the people ‘following’ me on Twitter, my Facebook friends and even you, the rather wonderful readers of this daft wee blog.

You can respond to a ‘Tweet’ on Twitter, send and receive direct messages and ‘re-tweet’ stuff you like and want to pass on to your fellow Twitterers. By tweeting and re-tweeting, information can flow at remarkable speed and to remarkable numbers of people. Just take the recent Mumbai bombings or the Israeli incursion into Gaza, where debate and information were flowing at a blistering pace.

And then start adding in other applications for Twitter. Take a look at Blip.fm (again, there’s a ‘Blip widget’ to the right side of the blog if you scroll down), which lets you select music you like and create a playlist. Each track you pick gives you a chance to comment and that comment’s shared with anyone getting your tweets as well as people following you on Blip. It’s a great way of playing with music, sharing and discovering new stuff. There are a whole range of interesting/useful/crazy Twitter tools out there, too.

If you want to find out more, a great place to start is by registering for Twitter, which takes little more than going to www.twitter.com and clicking on ‘Join the conversation’. You could follow up by registering for Twestival here - if you want to do that, I suggest you extractez le digit, because it's nigh on full as I post this.

If you get to the Twestival and want to meet up, I'll be easy to find. I’ll be the one not wearing bottle-bottom glasses and a funny ‘arm hammering my head’ hat...

PS: And now, for your listening pleasure, that Catboy and Geordiebird interview. Don't blame me if you go ahead and click here!!!

How To Upset Your Customers

Image via Wikipedia

I'm not sure I am aware of any organisation that is quite so skilled at ineptitude of the highest order as my bank, HSBC Middle East. As I have had reason to remark before, I cannot think of one aspect of personal banking that has not at some stage caused me problems, been mishandled or generally failed to deliver as promised. This is not generally considered to be a good thing.

You can search the blog for 'bank' if you want to steep yourself in the most recent five years of blthering idiocy, but it's been something like 18 years in total now since I first walked into the British Bank of the Middle East and admired the two gun-wielding bedouin guards at the door.

These days, I try and avoid going to the branch at all costs. It makes me physically angry even to walk in. (So please do take my remarks with a pinch of salt, I am not my usual calm and Zen-like self when it comes to issues related to banking.)

It's one reason why telephone and Internet banking has been such a Godsend. The vast majority of transactions can take place in a nice, automated phone call or browsing session. I actually only use phone banking because I can't remember all the passwords, PINs, forgettable questions etc. And even then, HSBC asks that you remember (and key in) your 10 digit personal banking number or your 12 digit bank account number, your date of birth, your six digit personal identity number and the average velocity of an African swallow.*

Now they've found a new way to get to me. They have started playing an advertisement for some financial service or another to their customers when they call up to use phone banking. The advert not only drones on in English, but is then repeated in Arabic. While.we.wait.

You can only imagine what kind of drooling nincompoop would have thought that interrupting customers using a service that's part of a service package they are paying for (and we pay plenty) and rendering them helpless to do anything other than wait out the interruption would be a good idea. It's frustrating, irritating and annoying. It clearly demonstrates the bank has nothing but disrespect for its customers, their time and their convenience. And it's clearly symptomatic of a failure to understand the nature and role of corporate communications at the most fundamental level.

Irritating and inconveniencing your customers is not smart marketing. It just shows your contempt for them.
 * Okay, so I made the last one up.

Language

Image by jovike via Flickr

Language is a funny thing: when you're writing, sometimes you have to stop in mid-flow and cast about for the right tword, the mot juste. Sometimes your choice of word can be telling - and make the difference between how things appear. Sometimes a word can give away what you're really thinking and not what you'd like to project - what you'd like people to think you're thinking.

There are two words that are part of my everyday life that I believe are telling in this way. They're used by my bank, HSBC. No doubt selected thoughtlessly and dashed down in seconds as a tiny part of the greater job of building a sprawling empire of flawless customer service, they do rather give the game away.

When I use telephone banking, a service that I truly appreciate as it has meant I have had to make only infrequent visits to the branch and therefore have been largely able to avoid interacting with the drooling, slack-jawed incompetents that infest the place, I frequently make transfers between accounts. When this process is successful (which is quite frequently, as no member of the bank's staff has the chance to insert themselves between me and the computer), I get the message 'Your request has been processed.'

This is a screech to a stop moment for me every time. It's my money and you're providing a service to me in return for which I pay you. So it's not a request really, is it? It's an instruction. I am instructing you to do something, not begging a favour. I'm wearing the big boots, I'm the customer and it's a bloody instruction to you regarding the arrangement of my assets.

When I use an ATM to take money from my account (again a process that is frequently successful for precisely the same reason that telephone banking works - its totally automated and as long as you don't want to do anything in any way slightly unusual or intuitive, you're onto a winner) and the ATM confirms that I'm about to get my money, it tells me 'Your withdrawal has been accepted'.

Again, I apply the old locked brakes here. Accepted? Like an officious dame ticking a box to confirm that I don't have any threateningly anti-social tendencies and can, indeed, use the swimming pool, my bank is accepting my request to take some of money out of my account. And here was me thinking that my instruction was being processed.

I'm the punter, not a beggar in front of a mosque. Those two little weasel words are a constant reminder to me that HSBC's view of our relationship is somewhat different. To paraphrase the bank's intensely annoying UK advertising campaign:

Customer Beggar Beggar Customer

Ve Middul Eeste Pee Aar Awordes

Beavis and Butt-Head via last.fm

There's something slightly worrying about a room filled with over 500 PRs. It's a happy zone, tides of positivity washing against the walls.

The 'practitioners' are all chatting away happily, a tumultuous babble, but I'm sitting at a table of journalists, the usual criminals of the Middle East's marketing media waiting for someone to fall so they can eviscerate them, their jaws slavering at the very thought and evil grins stretched across their drink-sodden faces.

The MC is shouty, trying to get people to stop talking. You'd have thought that 500 people talking together and sharing experience, best practice and all that was what MEPRA was all about, but apparently not. She's screaming STOP TALKING YA YA YA at us and slowly people get the message.

We're good at crafting and communicating messages, but getting them is not quite our forté, apparently. Ya ya ya.

American people shouting at me reminded me, for some reason, of watching the news on CNN...

The MC and various types gathered on the stage to pass over awards to a bunch of PRs. Some bloke from HSBC made some lacklustre (well, he'd hardly sparkle, would he?) jokes about the collective noun for PR people - a flock of flaks, apparently.

Any contributions in the comments about the collective noun for HSBC employees would be appreciated. I though perhaps a dribble of d... well, never mind. Yayaya.

By now, the press are restive. The jerks of drumroll tape that occasionally peppered events was starting to get its reward, bursts of malign laughter from the hock of hacks around me. I've heard that type of laughter before, at a performance of Othello at The National - Felicity ("Felicity, Felicity, you fill me with electricity", according to Ade Edmonson at his loquacious finest) Kendal as Desdemona bursting satisfactorily out of a Nell Gwynne dress while Paul Scofield hammed it up so badly that Othello's soliloqy to his dead lover drew gales of the stuff from the audience.

This was nasty laughter, the laughter of the cut-purse about to make his move as he stalks the dark, wet streets of Elizabethan London.

The worst of them is Allison, his faux-genteel Edinburgh accent masking his guttersnipe urges, egged on by AdNation's vile Elliot ('the Bear') Beer, the two of them cackling like Beavis and Butthead as they scan the audience of hapless wannabe winners for victims. And then Allison's off, leaving his voice recorder on the table behind him so that it can pick up any snippets of gossip about him while he's absent. He's ducking and diving in the crowd, picking up quotes and snippets of snark, digging for dirt like a pig rooting out Perigord truffles, while the MC says 'ya ya ya' for the umpteenth time. I think she believes it makes her sound Arab, but it comes across as somehow more Maureen Lipman.

It's all too much. I clap maniacally for Peyman Parham as he picks up the final gong, 'Communicator of the Year', with a genuine feeling of enormous relief - Sarah would have spent the next 365 days referring to me as 'Gob of the Year' and thanks to Peyman I have bilked that dire fate. Now we could go drinking, but instead we spend hours wandering around the labrynthine Habtoor Grand Hotel in search of a bar that would accept men dressed in kandouras. What a joke - teetotal hosts that aren't allowed to join their friends in a bar. Eventually, exhausted by wandering aimlessley down the charmless marble corridors, we find a smoky joint that's a ten second walk from the place we were thrown out of. It turns out that the toilets are actually over in the forbidden bar.

Which is, I'm sure a metaphor for something.

As we celebrate Peyman's win, I'm filled with a strange sense of unease. And then I realise it's because the press aren't with us. That's a bad thing - it means they're holed up in some dark, foreboding garret 'writing up' the evening.

I fear the worst...

A Bunch of Bankers

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

My bank has a new toy. It’s an automated calling system that puts a call in to me if one of our three joint accounts we hold becomes overdrawn. I get a call that then places me on hold until someone at the call centre becomes free and picks up the line.

So I, the ‘customer’, am made to hang around like a jerk on the end of a line until they can find the time to talk to me?

Is this what they call customer service?

And then I get dopey the call centre clot telling me that my account is Dhs50 overdrawn and asking when can I ‘normalise the situation’. Needless to say, I point out to the clot on the line, the other two accounts are significantly in funds, which you’d have seen if you cared enough about your ‘Status’ customers to give even a cursory glance at the account status before putting calls in to them on a Friday morning about insignificant overdrafts.

Taking that quick look at the account status before placing the call would have taken a great deal less of the bank’s time and effort than the FIVE calls I got from them on Friday regarding the same issue. It would also have avoided a lot of unpleasantness for their call centre staff. One of them, deliciously, called after I had authorised a transfer from another account to restore the balance of the account that was causing so much apparent heartache. ‘Oh, you see the system doesn’t update properly’ she told me just before I let her have it.

I did tell her it wasn’t personal and I didn’t see why she had to apologise to me – it was the bank’s issue and I wanted her to escalate my complaint. She hasn’t, of course, but I have.

The world’s local bank? HSBC? The biggest bunch of numpties I have ever dealt with, they continue to blight my life with every single contact I have with them. The only thing you can rely on is their constant failure to provide even the most basic level of service and banking facilities without embroiling their customer in needless heartache, anger and frustration.

Why don’t I move? Because last year I finally snapped and went to Lloyds only to find they couldn’t even open an account without screwing it up. As so many people have told me – they’re each one worse than the other.

No wonder the useless bastards all needed bailed out...

Mobile

So now you can pay for your Salik using your mobile. Whoopee.

I don't need that service, thanks to the Dubai e-government payment portal, which crashed last time I tried to pay my Salik, a couple of months ago. It blew out the transaction with an error message. I tried again, same result. I thought I'd give it a go at 'third time lucky' but it just came back again with a failure and error message.

Next day I had Dhs750 of Salik credit. The RTA blamed the e-government payment portal, the e-government people blamed Salik. Neither would contemplate (against the TOS, I believe, of Visa) a refund of the erroneously credited Dhs500. I sent email after email to the e-Pay people. Nada.

I also raised a complaint to HSBC Visa, who have been brilliantly silent on the matter since.

I remain a Salik millionaire. But I shudder to think what financial carnage could be achieved by the combination of RTA, Etisalat, e-Pay and HSBC, particularly bearing in mind that Etisalat will only discuss a billing problem once the bill has been settled and that the other three won't discuss a problem at all.

A confederacy of dunces indeed...