They make it look easy: that bloke who engraves the winner’s name on the FA Cup just seconds after the final whistle has blown, while the watching millions look on.

In my experience, things that look that easy seldom are.

My own personal engraving mission was to find someone to engrave onto a small metal plate the name of my office’s current Fantasy Football League champion.  Sadly, not me, this year.

Possibilities abounded, but I chose what I thought would be the simplest option: a well-known High Street chain, whose name shall remain a secret.

Should have known better?  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Except…

On my first visit, I was already starting to have doubts.  The young bloke behind the counter did not automatically inspire confidence.  He took down the wrong measurements for the plate; was a bit vague about delivery; seemed to regard me with suspicion, as if he had never seen a customer before; never seen a human before.

Now, at this point, I was not unduly worried.  My Fantasy Football Award Ceremony was still a fortnight hence; even allowing for the shop assistant’s worst-case-scenario predictions regarding delivery, there was still a good few days to spare.

And then the days came; and then the days went.  I had been told I would be telephoned when my engraving was ready.  No such telephone call was received.  A couple of days before the Award Ceremony itself, I returned to the shop.  The same assistant was behind the counter to fend off my enquiry:

“Ready?  No, not yet.  We are waiting on parts.”

Every qualm that I first experienced came flashing back in that nonchalantly delivered excuse.

How easy it would have been to go somewhere else.  Why hadn’t I trusted my first instincts?

“Oh,” was all I replied.  “When will it be ready?”

Possibly there was a hint of a shrug: “Can’t really say.  We’ll ring you.”

Embittered, but bested, I retreated.  What else could I do?  There is little retaliation to absolute indifference.

Lesson learned?  Hardly.

End of this saga?  Nowhere near. 

Scarcely the beginning, little did I know it then.  My office FPL Ceremony passed, and I had to extend my apologies to the winner that her trophy remained without engraving.  I returned to the shop: once; twice?  Still no engraving.  Then a breakthrough.  No phone call, but on a third off-chance visit, I was told my engraving was ready.  It wasn’t.  When I was handed it, it was the wrong size and the word ‘Championship’ had been misspelled ‘Chapionship’.  I pointed out the error.  There was that now-familiar suspicious look again, as though I had been in some way responsible for the misspelling.  By now, I was beginning to become almost amused by the exhibition of ineptness.  I speculated that I was part of an elaborate Candid Camera TV show to see how much crap service one person will endure before cracking.  There was no apology, but there was an offer to redo the engraving.  Like a masochist, I agreed.  How many subsequent weeks passed by?  How many different shop assistants did I encounter, each equally inept, doppelgangers in indifference; how many different excuses did I receive?  Stocktaking; “Can’t find your order”; “Not sure we do engraving”; the shutter on the shop is not working––that was a particularly imaginative one, I thought.  Never once did I receive a phone call to say that my engraving was completed until… finally, one day, out of the blue: “Your order is ready.”  Dutifully, I trotted along to the shop, still optimistic, even then, still optimistic, to discover that I had been called out to collect the same misspelled piece of engraving that I had rejected, how many weeks before?  It was then, and only then, that I let rip.  Justified?  Surely, more than justified.  I ranted about the paucity of the entire service economy; about the lack of basic politeness in modern society; about the impossibility that we ever got to the Moon given our species’ fundamental incompetence; about Brexit.  I drew a less-than-flattering comparison between the highly skilled individual who does the engraving on the FA Cup and their High Street equivalent.  I ranted until I was ranted out.  And it is at this point in my anecdote that I would normally like to include an ironic addendum to the effect that it was only after ranting until I dropped that I suddenly discovered that I had been wrong all along and that ‘Chapionship’ had actually been spelled correctly as ‘Championship’ and that the whole sorry saga was actually all my fault but the simple fact is that it wasn’t and the blame lies squarely at the door of the utterly hopeless High Street engraver and their utterly indifferent staff.

Still maintaining his integrity, Donnie Blake refuses to name his nemesis.

© Donnie Blake

Donnie Blake is all ranted out.