Total sympathy for the PayPal saga. PayPal is impenetrable enough at the best of times. I can’t say I ever worked out how to use it in the first place.

The style of customer service does make a mockery of the new god of customer service, but is so typical of the way that customers’ requirements of a service are the last thing that most companies seem to concern themselves with.

Have you ever sat down and said:

“Well, I would find my bank/energy provider/ISP/phone company” (fill in your own product provider) ” much better if it made me spend hours on the phone at my own expense listening to tinny recorded music and hearing how important my call is to them.  I am also p*d off that they pay attention to my letters and emails and provide answers that relate to the matters I raise. If only they would repeatedly send me standard letters that bear no relation to my concerns. And I would rather be addressed by someone with only a passing familiarity with my language, if at all possible” 

It’s good that they are responding to this barrage of consumer demand by providing the exact services we are all begging for.

When does a robbery become a heist? BBC news today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/4749980.stm) refers to “Two more arrests after £50m heist.”

It used to appear that “heists” were only robberiesthat took part in movies, but this odd word is obviously spilling out into news reports. Is there a bottom level value after which an ordinary theft becomes a heist? One hundred pounds stolen clearly does not constitute a heist.  A million?  Pretty likely to be a heist. What about 5,000? 10,000? Can one person pull off a heist, or does it have to involve an illicitly-skilled Ocean’s Eleven-style team?

Maybe there is a special police unit that classifies crimes into robberies or heists.