Men complain as much as women, Brits complain as much as Americans, and the young complain as much as the old, but some are better at it, writes Lucy Kellaway

NOT LONG ago, a friend opened a can of Heinz baked beans to feed her children for supper. As she poured the orange slop into a bowl, she spotted two brown beans among the hundreds of orange ones.

Right away she called the Heinz customer service line. The woman on the other end apologised and said: "I can see how distressing that must have been for you." She then explained that the beans get checked twice, once by machine and then by human eye, but that very occasionally the odd (harmless) brown one slips undetected into a can. Within 48 hours, vouchers for five cans of beans arrived in the post and my friend pinned them on the fridge to admire them for a bit before cashing them in.

Compare this to my latest experience in customer complaint. A couple of weeks ago I bought a £100 Mondaine watch from a swanky gift shop in Islington. Within a day it had steamed up upside. I took it back to the shop and asked for a replacement.

The assistant said they didn't give replacements, but she would send it back to the manufacturer. However, she warned me that they might charge for the repair if they deemed that I had been doing anything with it to cause it to steam up like that.

"I'm not happy at all! This is ridiculous! I didn't do anything to it!" I said. This impotent bleating had no effect at all - apart from causing my daughter to hide behind a rack of overpriced mugs.

One moral is that companies that sell cans of beans for 30p show their customers more respect than companies that sell watches for £100.

Another moral - and this is the one that interests me - is that there are different styles of complainer. My friend is a champion. She complains when the blister pack containing vitamins loses its airtight seal. She wouldn't dream of putting two brown beans in the bin when she can call a customer care line instead. She finds it a pleasurable activity - it is about justice, about standing up for the consumer and about getting something for nothing. The brown beans made her day: the woman had been nice, my friend got free beans, and her belief in Heinz was reinforced. She felt all was well in Consumerland.

Whereas I hardly ever complain. I find it stressful and boring. So I only do it when quite a bit of money is at stake, and even then with a heavy heart, as I am never confident of getting a good result. The watch story proved to me what I already feared was true: that all is not well in Consumerland.

Deep down, I always suspected my approach was morally superior. My friend is big at complaining because she is quite petty, whereas I'm not, and in any case I don't like complaining because I was brought up to think that it's rude.

This view has been challenged on reading Julian Baggini's fascinating new book, Complaint. For a start, it shatters my assumption that I don't complain much. It reminds me that actually I start complaining before I've even got out of bed in the morning about how badly I've slept and then moan throughout the day.

Baggini's research suggests we all complain roughly the same amount - there seems to be a basic human capacity for it. Men complain as much as women, Brits complain as much as Americans, and the young complain as much as the old.

What is radically different, though, is what we complain about and how we do it. Americans tend to complain to the right person and expect a result. This, he thinks, is because they are optimists who feel that they can fix the world. My friend, though a Brit, has worked for an American company these last two decades and so the style has rubbed off.

Brits, by comparison, seldom complain to the person responsible - we moan instead to whoever is to hand. We are pessimists and do not expect the world to change and so when we complain we do it just for the hell of it.

One might think that the American purposeful complaint is better, and that bellyaching of the pointless sort is its poor relation. But I'm not sure about that. I think both can be highly enjoyable leisure activities. Both are skilled and we should admire the people who do either well.

As my colleague Susie Boyt pointed out recently, a purposeful complaint requires the right mixture of high-handedness and lightness of tone and this is hard to pull off.

But I think a good purposeless complaint is even harder to do well. To complain to the wrong person you must be able to sound diverting and amusing. This sort of complaint is one of the most important activities in the office. In fact, it has a lot more to be said for it than the purposeful variety - which is almost always a waste of time. If you complain as a consumer, you are dealt with by a trained professional who is trying to make you feel better. If you complain at work, you are dealt with by a tired manager who wants you to go away.

Not long ago, I had a minor beef about the displaying of my work on the Financial Times website. I complained to the right person, who batted the complaint back, saying why he couldn't fix it.

Even though his point was reasonable, the exchange made me feel worse than if I hadn't complained in the first place. So I tried complaining to the man I sit next to instead. He nodded in sympathy and told a similar story. And then it occurred to me: this isn't unconstructive at all.

To complain to the wrong person makes you feel better, and as feeling bad was really the problem, pointless complaint is the solution.