CHAOTIC CUSTOMERS

I've done some cosseting in my time so I'm firmly of the school that the workplace would be so-oo much easier without "customers":

Publishers would have an easier time without drat authors

Pubs and restaurants would certainly operate more efficiently if it wasn't for bloody troughers and sluicers shambling in at all hours disrupting carefully organised stock-taking

I've no doubt doctors and nurses would be about their duties in more efficient and orderly fashion if it wasn't for pathetic malingerers rolling up with all manner of sordid ailments - I mean, eeuww.

And what about chisel-jawed, gleaming-fanged dentists called Roy with fragrant hygienists called Phoebe? Much more time to get to know each other without nightmare British molars intruding for their quarter-century checkup and query about that "sort of ache at the back, where the loose tooth is."

So I'm delighted to read that Britain's discredited ex-Home Secretary is keeping up the tradition, blaming the shambles he left his successor not on Ministers or officials - oh no - it's the effing 'dysfunctional customers', innit?

I kid you not: JS has diagnosed the "fundamental problem of the Home Office as not quality of staff but the nature of individuals it has to deal with (my itals).

And who are these customers? In Straw's own words, "mostly asylum seekers and criminals ... people who do not wish to be subject to social control".

Wow. Who'd be an Escalation Rep on *that* shift?