Don't upset this man - because if you do he's going to complain
By day he is a lawyer, by night a modern superhero, defending himself and the oppressed with pen, paper and a sense of humour.
I sorted out some pretty difficult problems for people who couldn't possibly have sorted out the problem themselves.
For someone who has spent much of his adult life complaining, Clive Zietman is surprisingly level-headed: "I'm not a whinger. I'm just someone who likes sorting things out."
It is a miserable, blustery night in late summer and I have just been sitting for more than an hour stuck between stations on a crowded, broken-down train. By the time Mr Zietman arrives to pick me up in his silver Jaguar sports car, I am tired, fed up and looking for someone to blame.
But anger, Mr Zietman contends, is pointless and unproductive. Modern life is plagued by lousy service, yet the trick to complaining and getting companies to take you seriously is not losing your temper in the heat of the moment. Rather, you should find a creative way to get even.
"Revenge is a dish best served cold," he continues as we wind through the leafy streets of suburban Middlesex. "Compose yourself, then compose a letter. Don't shout and scream at people on the spot. Then you're just complaining to the monkey rather than the organ-grinder. You need to find someone at the top who can actually do something about it."
He gives an example. Not long ago, he and a group of friends went for lunch at an expensive restaurant run by a famous television chef. "We're at the restaurant, the food's fantastic, there's nothing wrong with the meal. There are absolutely no complaints. "Then we get to the petits fours. There are human hairs going through it! So, what does one do in that situation? I don't want to spoil the meal, so I just put down a marker: I just mention it quietly to the waiter. Then, the following day, I couriered a letter to the chef himself enclosing the offending petit four. And, of course, we get invited back for a free meal." "You kept the petit four?" "You always keep the evidence."
The Jaguar purrs as Mr Zietman pulls up outside his large home in a quiet street near Moor Park, where he has promised to teach me more about the art of complaining effectively. Inside, there's the typical midweek din of a busy family. Mr Zietman grabs a couple of beers from the fridge.
By day, Mr Zietman is a lawyer at Stewarts Law, a growing City litigation boutique, where he runs a thriving practice that specialises in suing banks. He is one of a handful of City lawyers who regularly takes on cases against financial institutions and business is booming because of a large number of disputes emerging in the wake of the financial crisis.
Mr Zietman is fond of joking that litigation is his hobby. His real hobby, though, is complaining. In his spare time, he writes letters to companies and organisations that have ripped him off or provided shabby service, and asks them to put it right. He has turned it into an art. Over the past 20 years, under the pen name Jasper Griegson, Mr Zietman has written to thousands of supermarkets, retailers, restaurants, local authorities, airlines, hotels - no target is too big or too small if the infringement is irritating enough.
His complaints take the form of poems or limericks, even love letters. He couriered mouldy strawberries to the chief executive of British Airways after they were served to him on a flight. He faxed the entire board of Texaco within minutes of his wife slipping at a petrol station and chipping a tooth.
His success rate, he says, is extremely high. He has had benches installed at Tube stations and postboxes moved to more convenient locations.
Mr Zietman, unknown to those who see him only as a serious City lawyer, has published three books as Jasper Griegson. He has written columns for The Sun and the Daily Express, appeared on television, by his count, about 200 times and has lectured companies about improving their customer service - all while holding down the day job. "Whenever someone needs a complainer or a consumer champion, they call me. Channel 4 rang this morning."
The creation of Jasper Griegson was partly, he muses, a natural coping mechanism developed in reaction to a preternatural unlucky streak. "Maybe I did something bad in a former life, but bad things seem to happen to me." Not long ago, for example, he took his family on a holiday to Majorca. They hadn't even been there a day when, walking through the apartment complex, he fell down a manhole that had been left uncovered. "I managed to clamber out," he says and, luckily, he was unhurt. That evening, though, as they were getting ready to go out to dinner, the dishwasher leaked and flooded the apartment's marble floor. Mr Zietman's wife tripped, breaking her leg so badly that she had to spend the rest of the holiday in a wheelchair. He rang a colleague to report the news: "One day, seven hours and fortyfive minutes into the holiday, and we're already suing the hotel . . . These things just happen to me," he adds, matter of fact ly.
He traces his second career as Jasper Griegson to an epiphany he had a year later, in 1986, at Dublin airport. His flight had been delayed for six hours. "There was an American next to us who decided he wasn't going to tolerate this. He went to the management and demanded a free lunch. We heard this and went in sheepishly and asked if we could have the same. "It was during that meal, high up in the airport, looking down on all the other people, that I realised if you do the un-British thing and complain, it has some impact."
The British, he adds, are terrible complainers. Most people vent their fury at a waiter or clerk who has no power to rectify the situation even if they want to. Or they simply grumble and fume and then do nothing about it. "It goes back to the Second World War, when it was sissy to complain, stiff upper lip, the Dunkirk spirit and all that."
The Jasper letters also satisfy a lifelong interest in creative writing that has never been properly fulfilled as a lawyer. "I always liked writing and being a lawyer is slightly frustrating because you're boxed in. The other me would have been a journalist. I think I would have enjoyed journalism, although it probably wouldn't have paid for this house."
In the early days, Mr Zietman wrote the letters merely to amuse himself. But after his cousin, a broadcaster, saw them, he arranged for Mr Zietman to appear on a BBC programme about serial complainers. That led to him being featured in a Daily Mail article and invited to appear on This Morning, Richard and Judy. He went on the show as Jasper, disguised in a hat and moustache because he was supposed to be working that day.
From there, Jasper took on a life of his own, he says. The Sun hired him to pursue readers' complaints and then the Express gave him a permanent Saturday column for three years. Mr Zietman received about 300 complaints a week, which he followed up on the train commuting to work.
"I loved it, and I sorted out some pretty difficult problems for people who couldn't possibly have sorted out the problem themselves."
The Express sacked him as a columnist in 2000 after Richard Desmond took over the paper. Mr Zietman, naturally, sent a letter of complaint protesting against the decision.
In recent years, he has continued writing the letters, mostly for friends and family or to amuse himself. "You don't have to have The Sun or Express on your notepaper to complain and get things done. If you do it in the right way, you can get anything." Don't whinge, don't moan. But don't put up with it, either. Get even.
"We are all bombarded by a multitude of irritants in life," he says, "and you can either deal with it and meet it head-on, which is basically what I do - and laugh about it, frankly - or you can whinge and do nothing."