258. MAKING A COMPLAINT - What Complaining Tells Us About Those We Complain To
Sara Ahmed has written extensively on complaint. How complaint procedures are used to shut down complaints and suck the complainer’s energy until they give up or go away. How complainer is used as a term of denigration, to stain those who make complaints with the stink of social unacceptability to discourage their complaining. And how complaints procedures can be put in place as an empty symbolic gesture: we are dealing with this problem because look at our dedicated complaints procedure for it. Meanwhile few ever look deeper into whether that dedicated complaints procedure actually works to tackle the problem it is ostensibly designed to address.
I thought about Ahmed’s work a lot recently in the most trivial of settings: an issue with my broadband.
I have already mentioned that it was down in the middle of October. An incredibly frustrating experience in itself, but most frustrating was the experience of trying to make a complaint to the provider — EE — and get the issue fixed. Long story short, the fault was reported on October 14th but wasn’t fixed until October 20th. During that time I spent 40 minutes first trying to report the issue and get some information of when it would be sorted — and was lied to about the timeframe of the fix — and then another 44 minutes on the phone with EE on October 17th finding out why the promised repair hadn’t happened and what our compensation would be. Each 40 minute interaction was a frustrating mess of establishing credentials, rehashing the problem, being fobbed off with unsatisfactory answers, fighting the case further, and finally being told things would be sorted a little bit quicker than they would had I not made the complaint.
Except they weren’t. My “expedited” fix promised on the 14th took place three days later than the original lengthy estimate. And as my November broadband bill arrived in my inbox last week, I noticed that for the second time in two billing cycles since the fault, we had yet to receive any of the promised compensation. I’d been lied to again.
Now I don’t know about you, but 40 minutes is a substantial chunk of a life to give up to something futile. Think of watching a 40 minute television programme that offers no entertainment, no joy, and when it ends the final credits just laugh at you for watching. Or a 40 minute lesson in school where the teacher just goes round in circles and nothing is ever learnt. Or the first half of a terrible football game with no goals, no attempts, and no excitement. These are obvious wastes of our time. 40 minutes with EE customer service, knowing as you go into it that it will be 40 minutes of your life you will never get back, is — as Ahmed has written about — a feature, not a bug, of their complaints system. They don’t want you to want to get in touch and complain. They want to put you off. They don’t want to give me my compensation and they hope that by making it so off-putting and difficult to raise the complaint that what is owed has not been paid, I simply won’t bother to complain.
But of course I did. Because of a commitment to justice and what is right, but also because it’s nearly Christmas and I could do with the money (fun fact: since it began in 2019 I’ve spent nearly £1500 of my own money running and maintaining this free website, and have only ever been donated a fiver by any of its many readers in support). So on Saturday morning I took a deep breathe and re-entered the hellscape of the EE customer service chat to ask where our refund was. Again, it took 46 minutes of back and forth chat but eventually I was promised the money would be paid within three working days.
And maybe it will be? Who knows? All I know is that the thought of having to waste another 40+ minutes of precious life talking to an EE customer service ”guide” was enough to make me not pursue the complaint when the first bill came through in October, and when the November bill came and there was still no compensation paid, it took me several days to work up the stamina to bother. And when I finally did, and the near-hour had passed, I still had no idea if my complaint was resolved because I’d been promised similar things by EE before and they had not happened. I felt defeated even though I had, on paper, “won”.
And this is utterly trivial stuff. An unreliable broadband provider, an unpaid refund. Ahmed’s point is that such hostile systems are present in far more important venues. Complaints about workplace bullying or sexual harassment, complaints about severe misconduct from institutions of authority. Complaints politically, about how our country does or doesn’t work.
Complaints are important in any honest endeavour. A willingness to openness to being told that the thing you’re trying to do is not working and needs to be improved. An honest endeavour wants to hear its complaints because it wants to meet its objectives. It wants to fix those things being complained about.
But a dishonest endeavour, entangled in a dishonest system, where complaint means fault and fault means accountability and accountability means job-loss, profit-loss, or even jail-time, does not want to hear your complaints. They want complaints kicked down the road to someone else’s door. Or muffled and silenced. Drawn out until you give up at the futility. Made into a molasses you can’t unstick yourself from which drags you down into a state of despair so pulling that you drop the complaint simply to reclaim what’s left of your everyday life.
Needless to say, once my contract is up with EE I shall be leaving. I’d love to leave sooner, but the procedure there, too, for leaving the contract early is made intentionally difficult and hostile even when the company has failed to provide the things for which it has been contracted. Alternative companies might be just as bad — and probably are — but of all the broadband companies I’ve used, EE has had by far the worst complaints procedure.
And ultimately that is what this post is about. The complaint as a canary in the coal mine. Think about the companies you use, the institutions, the workplaces, and ask yourself how open they are to complaint. How easy it is to do. How complaints are dealt with. And ask what that tells you about the honesty, or dishonesty, of its endeavour.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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