I don’t want to rate the restaurant. I want to rate the date

It was an averagely OK evening at one of London’s smarter restaurants: the food was edible, the wine wasn’t vinegar, the company was quite adequate and I managed to return home without actively wanting to shoot myself, which is always a plus. But a mere 12 hours later these feelings of nondescript non-satisfaction turned into a boiling rage, because it had happened yet again: an email pinged into my inbox. ‘Rate last night’s experience at London’s finest,’ it urged. ‘Were you a) Extremely impressed with the restaurant? b) Quite impressed? c) Neither impressed nor distressed…’

And so it went on, pages of it, because you cannot do a blinking thing these days without being asked to fill in a customer satisfaction survey. Who has the time to wade through this stuff? They are everywhere: not just about hotels and restaurants but about everything. I’ve been asked to rate my grocery store driver for heaven’s sake (‘Look, he just delivered the flipping order without breaking the eggs, OK?’). Then there’s every purchase I make online (‘The book had two hard covers, as described, and many really quite interesting pages in between’). A recent personal low was being asked to rate a doctor’s appointment. A doctor’s appointment? By their very nature, doctors are often the purveyors of bad news: what do they expect you to say? ‘Convivial atmosphere, ten out of ten for the bedside manner and a diagnosis of inoperable cancer delivered with warmth and gusto!’ Give me strength.

Recently it began to occur to me that these infernal questionnaires are asking all the wrong questions. For a start, all this business about ‘customer satisfaction’ is nonsense: we’re British and as such we’re never satisfied about anything. If they insist, far better to have one box for us to tick marked ‘Mustn’t grumble’ and have done with it.