Following my various rants about Carphone Warehouse I am afraid my whinge must continue. I wrote them a very stroppy letter and spelt out the absolute minimum I expected from them in terms of customer service/apology etc. What did I get? A standard letter which said “I’m sorry to hear about the problems you have experienced with your handset. You received a new handset on 14th February”…that’s it. Nothing about the replacement handset also being faulty, nothing about the countless minutes wasted on the phone to “customer services”, nothing about the inconvenience of having to traipse down to stores and deal with their shocking staff, nothing about the fact I have been a loyal customer and currently use them for a variety of services - all of which I will be terminating as soon as I can (except for the rather painful contract agreements which I just have to sit out).
So I sent them another letter today, enclosing my previous letter and drawing their attention to the areas not covered in their shoddy, shocking, standard letter.
I remain VERY annoyed.
Not much blogging this week because:
I would like to say my incapacity has been cause by a genuine illness but actually I’ve only had a cold. Unfortunately because of a rather tiresome ongoing health problem, colds tend to wipe me out completely and I am a candidate for man flu awards. I try not to fuss and even managed to get myself into work most days this week (although turning up grey and covered in cold sweat on Wednesday probably didn’t endear me to my colleagues). It really annoys me that the slightest sniffle floors me.
Oh well at least my prognosis is better than that of my laptop - but more about that rant later when I’m feeling less germy.
My current contract runs out at the end of March so I’ve been doing the dreaded interview thing. So yesterday I rock up the obligatory seven minutes early and then was kept waiting nearly 15 - in my lunch hour! Not happy. First thing they asked was when could I start (it’s a maternity cover) and my timings didn’t fit theirs so it was a sort of ‘oh well but let’s have a little chat’. And a little chat it was - lasting no longer than 15 minutes.
Stomped back to work feeling quite cross and dispirited and then low and behold I got a call offering me the job! You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather (although it would have to be a fairly large feather given my current obsession with eating).
Sometimes you get the weirdest outcomes.
Well not really, but I am missing Suw, Kevin and Tom (or rather their blogs) who - quite annoyingly have all gone on holiday at the same time. Okay so Suw and Kevin are on honeymoon so we might just forgive them.
I am an insomniac and have been on and off since I was seven years old so I am used to weird sleeping patterns. I am permanently knackered most of the time, but you kind of get used to it. However, there are about four nights every month when I get even less than my usual amount. It’s around the full moon (so now-ish). Believe me I do not study lunar cycles and only realised this strange phenomenon after it had been going on for years (you might say I’m not very observant but then - as I mentioned - I am permanently tired), it has now become the most ridiculously predictable pattern: two nights of vivid (and largely terrifying) dreams, followed by two nights when the Antiques Roadshow with signing becomes my nightly companion (tend to give up on the ‘trying to go to sleep’ malarkey around 3am.
I don’t know if this is just a cycle that my body’s got into or if it is genuinely caused by the moon. Either way, I’ll probably be channel surfing at some un-Godly hour tonight.
A couple of weeks ago there was a big old hoo ha about drs’ surgeries not exactly offering the most convenient hours to those of us who work (ie taxpayers who actually contribute to the unwieldy behemoth that is the NHS). I drafted a post about it because my surgery has changed its booking policy and opening hours so many times, it was nigh on possible to predict whether you could ever actually get an appointment. However, I’m glad I didn’t post it because my surgery seems to have undergone a fairly radical transformation which - shock horror - actually makes it easier to book an appointment. Getting an appointment with the nurse is still like finding hen’s teeth but at least there now seems to be a willingness to try and find patients an appointment time at some point in the future.
Long may it continue (although I suspect that given they do seem to change their booking policy every few weeks it may not last…now there I go again with my glass being half empty).
It would appear that I have fixed the technical problem with my handset. In theory this means I am technilogically more adept than people who work at Carphone Warehouse. Whilst I’m not exactly doubting that I do indeed have more brain cells than them, my technological prowess has not thus far indicated any great skill. So I’ll have to see if it stays fixed.
Norton and my PC on the other hand are still giving me grief. Half way through a system scan, my laptop gets bored and just switches itself off for no apparent reason - grrr.
I suspect that part of my current poor mood may be caused by the fact that certain members of my family have been behaving like absolute gits recently. In all honesty this is not a recent phenomenon (see point 13 of 100 things about me and here) and I really can’t believe that people I have loved all my life have sunk to such levels of bad behaviour but there you go.
Current argument is about some photos - in fact the majority of my grandparents’ photos - which aforementioned relatives liberated from my grandparents’ house when they, my mum and I were clearing it. In all honesty we said to them: “Why don’t you take these to have a look at, decide which ones you’d like copies of and then my sister and I can look at them and decide which ones we want to have copies of.” My mum could then have the album because after all it’s her family/childhood.
That was in November 2006.
We now have just received them back (this is only because my parents refused to sign some paperwork - relating to these relatives wanting to squeeze every last penny out of my grandparents’ estate - until they were returned). But the album (painstakingly put together by my mum and grandma) has been destroyed and cut up and they have stolen kept quite a few photos.
My mum - understandably - is distraught. My sister and I are highly annoyed because - apparently - we are not important enough to actually see photos of our family.
“Luckily” my mum has been able to provide the solicitor with details of the photos she remembers but are now missing (no guarantees that that’s all of them though) but is he going to be able to do anything? Who knows. One of the strangest things though is the fact that they want every single penny they are “owed” from my grandparents’ estate but at the rate their stupid behaviour is running up the solictor’s bill there will be about £2.20 left. It makes me sick that the biggest legacy my grandparents left (because they were not at all wealthy) was a loving family. I cannot get my head round what they think my grandparents would think about all this.
I am aware that reading this you might think I am being one-sided and surely they must have a reason for behaving so badly (like they feel left out of the will, like my mum did something awful to them in the past etc etc). This really isn’t the case. Yes, they have been treated differently to my sister and I but only inasmuch as they have been given everything they ever wanted (including my mum and grandad paying their school fees, buying them clothes, supporting them emotionally when their own mother was busy “having a life”) and obviously continue to feel the world owes them something.
