I used to hate it when businesses got too chummy. Then I met Alan the delivery driver

I have always been against the use of names and personal stuff in commercial transactions. And by that I don’t mean someone addressing me by my first name or anything like that; I am on about that business in Starbucks when they demand you identify yourself so they can write your name on a paper cup. For some reason, I have all sorts of problems getting across that my name is Adrian. This might be my accent, which I am told makes my “A” sound like an “I”. You would be amazed how many different spellings there are of my name. I have taken to calling myself Tim, to avoid confusion.

Boden catalogues used to annoy me, too. They would put the models’ names next to the photos, which were of no interest to me, and also their favourite film, song, sandwich or whatever. I am not sure if they still do this because I never bought anything from Boden in protest.

Then, last week, I was waiting, impatiently, for a delivery from Amazon. Clicking on the tracking thing on the delivery company’s app, I was told that Alan would be with me between 14.42 and 15.42. This was later than I had hoped, but before I could huff or puff about that, or over why I was being informed that Alan was madly into football, I saw that it also said he had made 519,000 drops in his delivery career. Surely this was a misprint?

He turned up bang on 14.42 to be quizzed by me about which football team he supported (Swansea City) and which club’s junior section he founded (Penclawdd). And also how many deliveries he’d managed in his quarter of a century with the same delivery firm. And it turned out the 519,000 figure was indeed wrong; it’s a lot more than that now as the number was four years out of date.

I know many drivers have a difficult time of it, on zero-hours contracts and so on. But as I watched him drive away, I felt somewhat uplifted. Here was a bloke who loved his football and, apparently, his job. I’m glad I read his profile.

• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist