30/07/2014

Bingo! Thank you, Herr Neumann. You are warmly invited to collect your congratulatory luxury food hamper from the Alsterhaus Feinschmeckender Boulevard! Actually, you’re not. We don’t sell food hampers, and if we did, I wouldn’t have the authority to offer you one. But here’s a pen with “Alsterhaus” written on it! Thanks again.

Yours sincerely,

Walter Myer

Junior Customer Services Assistant

No one will notice if one goes missing...

This is the letter (and some of the pens) I considered posting today, after an eventual, glorious triumph in my personal game of bingo. Here’s how the game works: every day, I enter the contents of about a hundred handwritten applications for Alsterhaus loyalty cards into the store’s electronic database. One of the fields I am required to enter is the customer’s date of birth, and as I do this, the history of previously entered birthdates with matching digits appears in a pre-emptive pop-up box beneath the field. So having typed “05”, the box might suggest “05.09.1973” and “05.05.1956”, if those dates have already appeared in previous forms. The aim of my game is to use this pop-up to determine whether a certain day (eg. the 5^th, the 12^th, etc) has appeared in combination with every month of the year. When I find a day that has, I have reached bingo.

I always knew it was a bit weird, but written down it looks pathological. Which makes me think, if it’s hard to explain here, how on earth will I fare in German when Herr Neumann comes to pick up his Alsterhaus branded notepad?

Well, I suspect I’ll have a shot, because the Germans seem to like their numbers. This I’ve learnt recently, with the story of five lottery balls selected in sequential order hitting national headlines. The statistical anomaly was then discussed avidly around the water cooler at work the next day*. Finally, like-minded people! Is what I would've cried if I didn’t find it all a bit boring. So I apply double standards in my passion for different statistical events, shoot me.

That's not Numberwang.

In any case, Herr Neumann may never understand exactly why he made my day. But it’s thanks to his inspired combination of being born on the 20^th March and wanting a loyalty card that my game has finally come to an end.

Only, it hasn’t. In bingo, the game ends when someone wins. The participants jealously applaud, the toupéed presenter packs up his equipment and half-baked rhymes, and everyone takes the bus home. Not so in the world of forms. Here, the game runs on long after the initial suspense has been punctured, pressing daftly into the eternal. Or more likely, until the installation of a direct customer interface registry system.

Which is kind of an important point. As much fun as I’ve been able to generate from converting handwriting to Helvetica, I have performed the role of the quintessential superfluous middleman, and even I know that I need to be cut out. It is senseless for customers to provide their details in writing, sitting three feet away from the computer at which an employee will process the information after two weeks of backlog. Give the customer the computer! Help them with it if they’re unfamiliar with the technology, and the paper forms can always be kept as a last resort. But otherwise, it’d be foolish to pass up an option which saves customer time, employee time, and paper. Heed my call, Alsterhaus, and protect the forests. I will now translate this into German and nail it to the entrance of the local church.

*Sadly, this is a proverbial water cooler – customer service annoyingly doesn’t have one. I fill my water bottle from the taps in the toilets.