Cross letter is now written. Am I thinking I will get a response? Hmmm…they have my money so they probably don’t care. What has happened to customer service?
I mentioned some time ago that I was feeling very inspired by 3BT and wanted to try doing it myself - if only to get some discipline into my blogging because I have recently become rather uninspired lazy. However, I don’t think I am currently blessed with the sunny disposition and goodwill towards life to make this feasible. I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a misanthrope but I am increasingly grumpy towards almost everyone and everything of late - perhaps it’s just old age or perhaps I need some karma adjustment.
One person I am feeling very well disposed towards is my sister’s boyfriend who I met at the weekend. Well I say met, I actually first encountered him in Antibes last year when he was pursuing my sister and she was declining on the basis that there is QUITE A BIG age difference. However, she subsequently succumbed to his charms and I can see why - he’s absolutely lovely and demonstrates a suitable level of adoration for my sister (she is very high maintenance though so I hope it can be sustained).
Other things I enjoyed this weekend (as well as meeting aforementioned young man) was reading Blood Sweat and Tea which I’ve been promising to do for ages. I love Random Acts of Realityand reading some of the earlier posts in handy book format meant the ridiculously protracted train journey (engineering works again) from my parents’ home sped by at a more acceptable rate. You see what I did there? Tried to be positive and sunshiney and ended up moaning about trains, I just can’t do jolly at the moment.
Right, I’m going off to try and find where my jolly has gone (although given the prospect of a fun-filled evening tonight complete with smear test and my B12 injection I’m not hugely hopeful)…
So the old handset irritation is continuing but now they’ve really really really annoyed me by messing up my billing, not doing what they said they would do, and putting me at great inconvenience because of their mistakes…grrrr…
As I mentioned before, I extended my contract or changed it or whatever else I thought I was doing which obviously not what Carphone Warehouse were doing. Whilst I was doing this, I made the point SEVERAL TIMES that I wanted to make sure the new contract didn’t start until my old one had finished because I needed my final bill so I could do the final cashback offer for my old contract. Assurances abounded, even in the official bit of blurb at the end he mentioned my new contract would not start until 27th February. So what happened yesterday when I opened my bill? Oh yes, my new contract has started, my final bill will not arrive…I got on the phone to them (0870 don’t you know, yoou have to pay a premium to be messed about by them) and explained.
“Oh there’s definitely been a mistake I need to put you through to another department.”
Put through to another department.
“Oh sorry, we can’t help you, you have to go back to customer services,” (where I’d just come from in the CW’s labrynthine phone system).
“Yes, there has been a mistake, you have to write us a letter explaining and then you can get your cashback offer.”
Could I scream? Could I write a REALLY CROSS letter?
Yes and I’m going off to do that just now.
Yesterday they almost reduced me to tears…
They’d been hounding me to take up a new contract and - as in the long term it saves money - I did. With the contract came a new handset which looked very nice and was generally quite friendly apart from one problem: the function to turn off keypad tones had been disabled. The constant beep beeping was driving me nuts to I went into a store to find out if their technical wizardry could fix the problem; they said take it to a repair centre. I was not keen to take it to a repair centre because there isn’t one close by and my last experience was less than joyful (they kept it for 5 weeks) plus this is a brand new phone. So I phoned ‘customer support’ and they said take it to a nearby branch and they would exchange it for me, allegedly this was written up on my notes. So went into local branch (Bishopsgate - populated by your usual level of unhelpful staff), they checked my notes: nothing. They looked at me as if I was an alien but couldn’t fix the problem so agreed to exchange it. New phone comes back, charge it up, full of excitement…same problem. Turns out all the handsets the Carphone Warehouse had had the function disabled (no doubt off the back of a lorry somewhere).
Phoned up ‘customer support’, they said take it back to the store, went back to the store, they said phone head office. By this point I was losing my sense of humour.
So phoned head office and explained the problem and that’s when I really lost the plot because I was actually not speaking to a human being, I was speaking to a script. Apparently having a basic function disabled on the phone (and that not being flagged up to me during the ’sales’ process) is perfectly reasonable. I cannot swap it for a different phone because the tariff I was offered was only applicable on that phone. I cannot cancel my contract because I inserted my SIM into the phone (you can’t actually try the phone and its functions out unless you put the SIM in but there you go).
What made it worse was that ’script man’ would only speak from his script (he actually kept repeating the same phrases as answers to different questions). I asked to speak to a human being but he told me there was noone else I could speak to (do you mean to tell me that the organisation is run by these drones with no senior management who could actually make a decision?). I also tried to send a complaint through their webiste - it froze and wouldn’t submit - ARGH!!!!
So here I am furious and seething and generally quite pissed off. I’m going to try and live with the phone over the weekend and write a stiff letter to Carphone Warehouse.
I am having enormous problems with portion control at the moment and - as a result - my jeans are having problems coping with my waistline. It’s very annoying and I SHOULD JUST STOP but the problem is food seems quite tasty so I carry on munching.
Need to do some serious jumping up and down instead of sitting on my rapidly expanding derriere.
We don’t call them migraines in my family, they are called Holden Heads and every now and then they hit with ferocious force. I normally get two or three a year for no specific reason, they normally last a couple of days and no matter what fantastic drug combination I come up, they don’t shift. So on Friday it started, on Saturday and Sunday I could hardly lift my poorly head and now it’s Tuesday and it’s still rumbling on. Okay sitting in front of a computer is not helping at all but I don’t really feel I can justify not being at work because I have a headache, it just sounds a bit lame doesn’t it?
I was having a lovely tube journey this morning, seat from Clapham Common which is unheard of. It was lovely and then…
…it took me 15 minutes to get from about 2/3 of the way down the tube to the equivalent of the front of the tube in order to get out of the station. The platform was jam-packed, noone could move in any direction and there were no messages, nothing about the congestion. Bank is one of the few stations that actually has platform staff during the rush hour and they’re really needed because it gets so congested down there on the best of occasions. This morning was far from the best of occasions (no Jubilee line from London Bridge so everyone stayed on for the DLR from Bank, plus alleged escalator not workingness) and the member of staff on the platform was useless. There were no messages, announcements and the trains just kept on pulling in, opening the doors, more people trying to get off, no room, some crowd surfing. Absolute nightmare. It has taken me all this time to feel remotely normal and I really don’t normally get that wound up about being squashed, it’s a general fact of life.
I don’t know what is wrong with me at the moment but I am suffering from dreadful blogger’s block. In fact it’s not just blogging, I seem to be suffering from general malaise in most areas of my existence which is:
a - very annoying
b - not like me at all
I am usually an obsessive list writer, buy birthday presents and cards weeks in advance and keep a running shopping list in the kitchen (yes, I could also be described as anal) but recently I seem to be rather hopeless in matters of organisation as a result I have had to text the Beloved a number of times with a milk crisis, haven’t got round to putting up my pension payments desipte the fact I’ve been in gainful employment for nearly three months and have even ended up paying interest on a ridiculously small amount of money that I seemed to have overlooked when I actually paid the bill.
I have no idea what’s wrong with me but feel I may actually need a holiday quite soon because the wiring just isn’t what it should be…
