I don’t want to rate the restaurant. I want to rate the date

It was an averagely OK evening at one of London’s smarter restaurants: the food was edible, the wine wasn’t vinegar, the company was quite adequate and I managed to return home without actively wanting to shoot myself, which is always a plus. But a mere 12 hours later these feelings of nondescript non-satisfaction turned into a boiling rage, because it had happened yet again: an email pinged into my inbox. ‘Rate last night’s experience at London’s finest,’ it urged. ‘Were you a) Extremely impressed with the restaurant? b) Quite impressed? c) Neither impressed nor distressed…’

And so it went on, pages of it, because you cannot do a blinking thing these days without being asked to fill in a customer satisfaction survey. Who has the time to wade through this stuff? They are everywhere: not just about hotels and restaurants but about everything. I’ve been asked to rate my grocery store driver for heaven’s sake (‘Look, he just delivered the flipping order without breaking the eggs, OK?’).