Having dealt with complaints for a living, people who go straight to the MD immediately get filed under the "nuisance" category, and their complaint immediately gets batted down and handled under the normal process anyway. It usually makes things slower.
Indeed. And if the same person does it more than twice, they get filed under ‘troublemaker’. In my experience such people fall into one of two categories:
1) Grumpy old men who enjoy shouting at people and need to watch their blood pressure
2) men of any age who think they know how to run a railway.
The dangerous ones are those that sit in the overlapping part of the Venn diagram.
Then there’s the really persistent ones. Sometimes, in a weak moment, an MD may offer to meet them individually. For any MDs reading - this is always a mistake. Even when you present them with incontrovertible fact, it won’t change their view.
(I once helped an MD in correspondence with a particular individual who kept claiming his train was persistently and consistently late. I got so annoyed with the individual’s claims that I did some detective work with the train concerned and cctv. It turned out he sat at the very back of a 12car arriving into a busy London terminus, was last off the train each morning - having finished reading the paper - and gently ambled up the platform. He then reached the barrier line, checked his watch, and wrote something in his notebook. This was what he used as his arrival time.)
