Big ship, small minds

Today the large P&O cruise ship Arcadia called at Port Adelaide.

I went there to meet some English friends, one of whom is 87 years old, who were visiting Adelaide for the first time.

Arrangements, or lack thereof, for disembarking passengers left much to be desired. A wire fence security cordon extending well beyond the passenger terminal (and my comprehension) added to the third world ambience. I took the photo from the security barrier. The passenger terminal is the white building on the right, about 200m from the barrier.

The port security staff, while courteous, lacked the authority and perhaps the desire to assist those passengers who had not booked tours or taxis. It took me several phone calls and about 45 minutes to obtain permission to drive to the terminal and collect my friends, who'd been left waiting outside the building.

One problem was that nobody with a skerrick of authority seemed to have easy access to a passenger list, let alone a list of those who'd actually disembarked. This is a major deficiency in security arrangements.

Another was that the security cordon was crack-brainedly large. Why does Port Adelaide need a large fenced off compound surrounding its terminal building when other terminals eg ports such as San Francisco and Singapore and every international airport I've seen, don't?

On reflection it seems as if the port operators are trying to dissuade cruise ships from visiting Adelaide. If they were serious about supporting tourism in SA they could do a few simple things such as putting information on the web and allowing people meeting passengers to register in advance so that they can meet their friends without having to wait in limbo for an indefinite time.

Service SA delivers...

I'm pleased to report that after my post last week and some further phone calls, when I wasn't automatically cut off and managed, after I'd read out the post, to speak to someone with access to people in authority, I've now received my bike number plate.

I've not yet had the promised reply from the Registrar-General, yet it's good to learn that there are knowledgeable people in his department, though unfortunately most of them don't seem to be deployed to front line customer service duties.

During my quest for a resolution I was told various things, including

• by the dapper, mild-mannered, mustachioed gentleman who took my order and who was at counter 6 today when I collected the plate, that there was no way I could collect it until after Christmas (I was expecting him to say it was more than his job to vary the rules, but he didn't go that far)
• by someone over the telephone that if I didn't have the correct numberplate(s) I should contact the police, either here or interstate, to see if they would accept (or turn a blind eye to) an interim home made number plate
• by an automatic message reply when I emailed (as I was advised to do) the Registrar-General

Thank you

Your enquiries will be forwarded as quickly as possible to the relevent section within Transport SA, and we will endevour to respond as quickly as possible (during normal office hours).

Anyone for Spellcheck ?

• by a female supervisor, who was extremely helpful, that (1) as the plate was a small one, it could be produced more quickly than I'd been told by the West African Australian manufacturer and (2) the Australian Road Rules allowed for a number plate to be relocated to a bike rack so that it was visible. This I didn't know, and I wonder why explanatory notes about this and the myriad other rules couldn't be made more widely available on the internet and, if funds permit, in what would need to be a very bulky volume.

I must make it clear that all the people with whom I dealt were courteous. They also seemed to have a sound grasp of the most common issues with which they deal. They don't, as my experiences attest, have that extra layer of knowledge to help resolve more challenging issues. The supervisors and managers seem to able to tap into this but it's not easy to contact them, either in person or, as my previous post indicated, over the internet.

With the State government proposing to introduce a shared services regime throughout the public sector it's a worry that the current system has so many shortcomings, and so little awareness, let alone acknowledgement, of these. Shoehorning the customer contact functions of several departments into one office sounds a good idea, but when doing so often results in delays and incorrect answers to queries this can only add to the costs of administration, not to mention the negative perceptions of many clients.

A suggestion: the Medicare claims centre in Currie Street uses a similar ticketing system to the North Terrace Service SA office, yet in my experience everything flows much more smoothly there. Perhaps the relevant State government ministers and senior officials could look into this take a leaf or two out of Medicare's book.

Australia Post (mis)delivers

This letter was delivered to my letter box yesterday. I've covered up the addressee's name and street address and left the suburb, state and postcode, all of which are a long, long way from here.

What a major sorting and delivery blunder. I wonder what, if any, procedures Australia Post has in place to reduce the risk of this happening. Even if a sorter makes a mistake isn't the postie trained or even encouraged to pick up gross errors like this?

Business class traveller gripes

Today in The Australian Bernard Salt, who generally writes well on demographic matters, weighs into airlines (mostly Qantas) about delays in airport security check-ins and various other things. Initially, instead of (as I've tried to do) coming up with some constructive suggestions, his piece loses its way and lapses into a self-serving rant:

Waiting in line for 20 minutes simply to X-ray carry-on baggage is bad enough but this procedure is made all the more galling by the convention of allowing Qantas (and I assume other airline) staff to walk straight to the top of the queue. Their logic is, no doubt, that they travel almost every day and so they shouldn't have to wait in line with the plebs.

But what about people like me, business travellers paying business class margins, who travel 160 times a year. How does this frequency compare with a pilot's? And yet I am treated the same in the security queue as a once-a-year tourist!

To a thrice (or so) - a-year tourist like me this is red rag stuff. At the arrival end Mr Salt and his business class mates get out of the blocks first, so whatever they may lose on the swings of the departure queues they gain on the roundabouts of arrivals (provided that their baggage is delivered to the roundabouts in time - but that's another of his gripes) .

To be fair, he does get back on the rails later:

It strikes me that Generation Y staff, in particular, believe that if they apologise for a problem then that problem ceases to exist.

"You've been waiting in line for 15 minutes while we get our act together and summon extra staff to help with business class check-in?

"No worries, when you get to the counter I'll apologise for the delay and then we can both pretend that it never existed. And when you come back tomorrow and the same thing happens, I'll apologise again. And again."

Now I don't know whether this is me being picky, but if there's a problem, I don't want a rote apology - I want the problem owned and fixed.

Could someone in airline customer-service training please remove the instruction to offer "platitudinous but meaningless apologies" from the program, and replace it with "ownership of the problem".

My comments might be viewed by some as the end-of-year grumbles of a jaded traveller, and to some extent this might be true.

However, what the airlines need to know is that these complaints are discussed frequently among business travellers. Indeed, the jaunty ice-breaker to any business meeting these days is talking about how horrendous the flying and baggage-retrieval experience was. Everyone has an anecdote worthy of telling and retelling.

And the worst thing is that there seems to be no accountability for the incessant delays in the travelling process. Any complaint is invariably shrugged off with a "you wouldn't want us to skimp on security, would you?" To me, this seems to be the eternal excuse for slack service.

Good service

Today I'd arranged for a plumber to come around and clear a blocked drain. He arrived on time, quickly discovered that the cause of the problem was outside my property (therefore no cost to me), arranged to contact the water authority, who, within an hour, attended and did what was necessary to fix the problem . Well done United Water.