Israeli customer service, or, why does the post office hate me so much?

I love living in Israel.  I really do.  I’ve made that point several times on this blog and I will doubtless make it again at some point in the future.  I say this as a disclaimer to any Israelis that I may potentially offend with this particular blog because I don’t want its content to be taken personally and I’ve noticed that Israelis being a somewhat patriotic bunch do take criticism of Israel-related stuff as criticism of them personally.  I was telling an Israeli friend of mine about the trouble I have getting through Ben Gurion airport when leaving the country – never less than an hour and a half yet from arriving to actually making it through security, and that’s without the strip search that my friends who work for NGOs routinely have – and he got rather shirty with me.  So, as I say, I love living in Israeli.  But it has to be said that one of the trials and tribulations of living in this country is the utterly appalling approach towards customer service.

A few examples are necessary here to illustrate my point.  Let me start with one from this week.  My friend Tamar and I are going with a group of friends to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers play in Tel Aviv on Monday (woo hoo!) and she spent most of last week going into a ticket place in town, watching the price of tickets drop and waiting for the right moment to snap them up.  On Tuesday morning she went into the shop to check tickets were still available and one of the two girls sitting there assured her that they were.  She then returned later that day with her credit card to find that particular girl had gone and the other girl told her, with some degree of disdain, that there were, in fact, no tickets left.  This in itself was bloody annoying but the girl who told Tamar that had been sitting beside the other girl when she had come in earlier that day, yet denied all knowledge of the conversation in a manner that made Tamar’s blood boil and then refused to check the computer to see.  Tamar would have complained to the manager about the incompetence and the rudeness but having grown up here she’s pretty sure it would have been a waste of breath.

Here’s another example from this week from an institution that has provided me with no end of anecdotes and hilarity since my arrival here a year ago.  I got home on Wednesday evening and stuck my hand into our post-box – a necessary action since we were seemingly never given a key for it – to rummage around for a letter I’ve been expecting from a friend in the UK.  My hand found something that felt like a letter rather than a flyer for the local synagogue and I opened it to discover, in astonishment, a Christmas card from some friends in Ireland.  I know some people like to beat the Christmas rush early but this was a bit ridiculous, so I checked the post-mark and it turned out to be dated 17th December 2011.  Congratulations are in order, therefore, to the Israeli postal services for delivering it nearly nine months late.

At least it made it through; as yet there is no sign of the letter Rach posted nearly three weeks ago and a scarf my mum bought me as a present and posted me back in May has yet to make an appearance.  This is perhaps because she posted it to school rather than home and all the post sent there goes into a box in the central post office, whose workers every now and again decide to declare a fatwa against all post for the Anglican and do everything in their power to make life difficult, for heaven only knows what reason.  It could also be because it contained a nice scarf and some scallywag in the customs office decided to purloin it, which is not an unusual occurrence since the guys in the post office customs department seem to be a little light-fingered.

Back in June I got one of those ‘your parcel is too big for your letter box’ notes and managed to decipher my name (yes, my Hebrew is coming along but it’s helped by the fact that the first letter of my name is the first in the alphabet, aleph – א  – and conveniently the first one I learnt), so I dutifully trotted off to the post office on Agrippas to pick it up.  There’s nothing quite like getting post when you live in a foreign country; much as I love e-mail and facebook and Skype, getting a letter or a parcel can feel like Christmas come early, especially when it’s a surprise.   On that day, to my great joy and delight, a lovely friend from home had sent me a parcel which turned out to contain some magazines and two bars of Green & Black’s Butterscotch chocolate – my favourite.  As I walked home I noticed that the parcel had a rip along the top but didn’t really think about the implications of this until I got home, emptied the contents onto the kitchen table and found that one of the bars of chocolate had been opened and a large corner bitten off.  

Crimes against chocolate.  Seriously, they couldn't just have eaten the whole bar?

This in itself was bad enough (chocolate thieves!) but it opened the door onto a whole host of disturbing questions: why had they opened the package in the first place?  Isn’t my post private?  And after opening the package, did they suspect the chocolate of being something nefarious?  Is that why they felt the need to bite off a corner, to test that it was in fact chocolate and not, say, cocaine?  Do they do that with all ‘substances’ they find in packages and if that’s the case why didn’t they test the free nail polish that came with June’s In Style magazine?  And, crucially, once having eaten my chocolate why, why, why had they put the bar back in the parcel?  That’s damn good chocolate you’ve got there, not the cheap stuff but the real deal.  If I’d been the post office worker who decided to sample the goods I would have had the good sense to eat the whole bar, especially given there was another one in there, rather than do a half-arsed job of re-wrapping it then shoving it back in the package.  I was outraged.  And then I cut a reasonable amount of chocolate off to ensure any lingering post-office worker germs would be removed and put the chocolate in the fridge to be eaten another day.

It is usually the post office that annoys me the most and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that; I was waiting in the central post office on Jaffa Road once last autumn and one man started screaming and shouting at the worker behind the desk.  My grasp of Hebrew then was pretty non-existent so I have no idea what his problem was but I’m pretty sure he was just expressing the frustration everyone feels at being treated like an inconvenience in someone’s day rather than a customer whose business you are trying to court.  There other examples of the rudeness I’ve come to expect in the place of basic customer service.  Like the time I went to buy what’s called a Rav-Kav card, an electronic ticket that you can use on the tram and buses here rather than purchasing a ticket each time you get on something – a bit like the Oyster card on the tube in London.  I got to the stall near City Hall in the late afternoon and told the man there I wanted to buy a card.  He looked at me and turned away, to do what appeared to be some sort of admin relating to my Rav-Kav card.  Five minutes later he turned back to me and said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”  Seriously?  Seriously?  He couldn’t have told me that when I got to the place?  It’s like the people in these places want to piss you off.  As for the woman at City Hall who served me when I went to pay the arnona (Jerusalem council tax), when she found out I was English she actually rolled her eyes at me.  No kidding.  My usual tactics, of smiling brightly and being exceptionally polite, are frustratingly worth nothing here.

It’s a mystery to me why the people in places where good customer service would make everyone’s life just that little bit better insist on being grumpy, unhelpful and occasionally a little incompetent.  But fortunately there are examples of people being pleasant and even friendly and welcoming, to balance out all the negative crap you have to deal with, and it is these I wish to end with so as not to give the impression that everyone here is a miserable git.  I go to the bank every month to cash my pay-cheque since I don’t have a local bank account here, partly because it’s an absolute bugger to open one if you’re not Israeli and partly because I don’t speak Hebrew to the level necessary to open one (ulpan starting in October, at last…).  I’ve gone there so often the woman behind the desk recognizes me and seems almost pleased to see me, which was a huge advantage when I forgot my passport one time and successfully begged her to cash the cheque anyway or I would be penniless over the weekend.  And one day the owner of my favourite Iraqi eatery on Agrippas saw me coming in on the heels of an enormous group of tourists, waved me to the front and served me himself.  There are many, many reasons why I love living in Israel.  But the post office is definitely not one of them.