Alison Hartley

“This plane’s a tech” said the airline representative, as we weary travellers sat at the gate, hopefully looking at the said plane just outside on the tarmac.

We all looked at each other enquiringly, but thankfully the young man gathered his thoughts, and put on his proper customer voice. “We apologise for the delay but this plane has a technical fault, which we’re trying to fix as quickly as possible.” His first phrase reminded me of a couple of things, and as we all switched our phones on again, I thought I should call the mechanic who looks after my cars about a technical fault of my own.

Something fell off the bottom of my car. Now, it doesn’t seem to have affected its performance at all. In fact, something that was clanking rather annoyingly has stopped. However I recognise that it probably had a purpose. Therefore I called my friend Iain, who has been my car guru for 17 years or so. As usual, he quickly identified what was likely to be the problem from my sketchy description, and said I should drop by and he’d have a look.

He is brilliant! He is always calm, always helpful, has fixed absolutely everything I’ve thrown at him, and is always cheaper than I had expected. He has a large and loyal client base and is never short of work. We have a long-term, profitable relationship. What can we all learn, I wonder?

As for second thing: ‘the plane’s a tech’, that’s one of my pet hates- using obscure jargon.. More on that soon.