Here's an email I have just sent to the complaints department at Vodafone.............
On Tuesday 23rd January, I placed an order with yourselves for an equipment upgrade on my account. I spoke with Michael in your upgrade/ termination department. He was courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. I had been unsure whether to upgrade with yourselves as many of the deals offered to me by other companies had very attractive incentives. In the past. I had also received unsatisfactory levels of customer service when I had taken an upgrade.
Michael was able to offer me a newly launched phone for free on a twelve month contract. I was happy with the deal and I was told that the equipment would be dispatched and would be delivered the next day. I requested that it not be delivered before 12 noon and this was duly noted. Yesterday, I waited in from twelve in anticipation of the delivery. At around 9am this morning, I called to check on the order. I was told that delivery would be made today. At the time, I requested a note of the consignment number so that I may track the delivery myself. I rushed home to be here from twelve and at around 3:30pm used the consignment note number to track the package on the Parceline website. It was only showing as having reached a “security check” in Aberdeen and did not show as being “out on delivery” as I would have expected. I also noted that the phone did not even leave Vodafone’s premises until late on the 24th so there is no way it could have been delivered “next day” I have pasted the tracking information from the Parceline website for your information.
Consignment Details
ConsignmentNumber
Date Sent
SendersReference
Service
No ofParcels
Post Code
Status
2217 399 063
24 Jan 2007
CN32676865
Before 12
1
AB11
Security check
Tracking History
Date
Time
Location
No of Parcels
Status
25 Jan 2007
10:01
Aberdeen
1
Security check
25 Jan 2007
00:08
Birmingham Hub
1
Confirmed On Trailer
24 Jan 2007
23:45
Birmingham Hub
1
Forwarded to Aberdeen
24 Jan 2007
Leicester
1
Collected from sender
I called the most appropriate looking number listed on the Parceline website in order that Imay find out the whereabouts of the package and when it would be delivered. The number was an 0871 national call number (While named NationalCall rate numbers, they’re more akin to premium rates, costing up to 8p/min, massively more than a normal call.) where I was initially told that I was in a queue and was likely to be connected to an advisor in “4 minutes 36 seconds, around a minute and a half later I received the same estimated time, after roughly four minutes, was told I would now have to wait 5 minutes 20 seconds! I referred back to the Parceline website and found an 0845 number which related to another query altogether. This was instantly answered by a very helpful operator who was able to access the records and confirm that delivery would take place to my home address of ** ******** **** Aberdeen. I was shocked. I advised Vodafone when I moved house in October of 2005 and my last upgrade was delivered to my current home address last year.
The Parceline operator told me that I would need to contact Vodafone in order that the address be changed.
Initially, I spoke with David, who was very keen to help. Unfortunately, something happened where he was unable to hear me but I could hear him. I must extend my appreciation of the time he spent trying to speak to me before I realised that the easiest option was to terminate the call and try again.
I was told on my subsequent call to yourselves that my old address still appears on your system although the new address has been used for billing since the date of my moving house. The assistant told me that an error must have been made when the order was placed. She confirmed that an email had now been sent to Parceline advising them of the correct address that it is to be sent to.
It is more than a mere inconvenience, that I must now plan a third day, around the expected delivery of my new equipment. Whilst I would understand if the time taken from the despatch on Tuesday, to it’s arrival in Aberdeen, meant that delivery was not possible yesterday. The catalogue of errors I have described are completely unacceptable for an organisation of your size. I expect a full, written apology and some form of recompense in light of the time I have wasted, waiting in vain for a package that wouldn’t have even come to the right address had it been on time. In addition, there has been the extra time and effort I have had to expend trying to resolve this issue. None of my actions can be described as contributing to the delays or wrong information.
I have been a loyal customer of Vodafone for over thirteen years - eleven unbroken years with my current contract.
Incidentally, my partner recently upgraded her phone with her servive provider, Orange. The phone arrived the following day.
I look forward to hearing from you soon. Let's play a game, will my phone arrive, or will you reply first?
Regards
John W. Emslie
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Everything but the kitchen sink
It has been a while since I last posted an entry so my apologies. As usual, far too much going wrong to get a chance to Blog. I am considering doing a video blog to save me the time taken to type. Let me know what you think.
A Happy New Year to one and all. A new year and a new wave of The Emslie Effect hits. Back in November, the boiler blew up with a final flourish. Lewis, our plumber, had saved it from the brink at least four times. However, when I had bought a new part which lasted a mere two evenings for an outlay of £45.00 (and that was after persuading the chap at the trade counter, that trade price would give him a better chance of repeat business from me than the retail of nearly seventy!) we decided that it was time to go for a brand new boiler. Katy wanted the stone shed, once the outside latrine, to become the boiler house, thereby freeing up more space in the kitchen, improving the aesthetics and raising the temperature in said shed to allow tomatoes to be grown and perhaps the installation of a chest freezer. Curious, that an appliance, designed to keep things cold will not work properly if it, itself, is not kept sufficiently warm.
Our friend Lewis, we prefer to call him a friend, as it tends to reflect better on the rates he charges. He is a nice guy too but I, once again, digress. Lewis said he would come down between Christmas and New Year to get stuck into fitting the boiler and re configuring the pipework, left dangling in mid air after the wall got knocked down. We had to source a boiler and dig a trench for the pipes from the back door, over to the shed. Finally, on Boxing Day, I found the time to start my excavations. During December, I had been working pretty much twelve hour shifts, combined with a few Christmas parties to DJ along the way for good measure so, time wasn’t something I had a lot of until the “festivities” kicked in. I was utterly miserable up until I finished on the 23rd. I was tired, I was cold (only when in the house of course, the car has a good heater, as do the majority of the work vans and trucks) I did not feel Christmassy at all. I had invested in a few outdoor lights to brighten up the place. Christmas eve was spent putting a string of bulbs up the front overhang of the cabin, finding the transformer for the small lights in the big ash tree at the top of the garden and decorating the “other tree“ . When Katy and I bought our tree this year, it was from one of her work associates who had insisted that we take another, smaller, tree as a “Buy One, Get One Free“ or maybe he meant something else when he said BOGOF. He intended it for use inside the cabin but I thought it would have a better effect all lit up, just outside the front door. I managed to miss the Muppets Chrismas Carol which would have instantly put me in the mood. I had to settle for the straight laced one with Patrick Stewart and Richard E. Grant. Frankly, Withnail and I would have put me in better spirits. Christmas day was just the three of us. We exchanged gifts and Evie enjoyed chasing the wrapping paper and sweet wrappers. We retired quite early after getting stuffed and in the knowledge that I had a hole to dig the next day.
As most people slept off their Christmas day excesses, I had all my power tools assembled, an array of hammers chisels, crow bars, spade, shovel and wheel barrow. A couple of weeks before. I had requested a visit from my father and my brother George. They came down to check out my proposed locations for boiler, flues and such like. Lewis had suggested running the pipes underground up to the side of the shed then through it’s wall. George and my dad persuaded me that the hole should go up to the door of the shed then under it’s floor. I started digging up the Tarmac which was so thin, it needed very little effort to get through. Under that was compacted hardcore, again not too much trouble. I then found my nemesis, clay! Lots of clay, this stuff had obviously never been disturbed and it took me all my effort to dig it out. In the process, I managed to bend the spade into an unserviceable shape. It was a cheap spade and I resolved to buy a new one before finishing off the job. The next day, Katy wanted to get out of the house so I decided to treat her to a day trip to Portlethen. It was actually her suggestion so don’t judge me too harshly. We found ourselves in Homebase, pondering over the spades on sale. A value spade at £7.99. A better one for a tenner or all the way up to a sparkling Stainless steel one by Wilkinson Sword for about £27 with a lifetime guarantee. I opted for the ten pound one and we wondered over to another section of the store. To my amazement, there were even more spades there. Actually it was a display of “Roughneck” tools. For the uninitiated, it’s a bit like choosing at a Kenwood blender then discovering there is one just over there made by Kitchen Aid. There is just no competition. The range of different spades was overwhelming. May I say they had them in spades? Sorry! There was a builders spade that caught my eye and a ditching spade too. If you have ever seen a film where someone is ordered by the baddie to dig their own grave then the spades used there are ditching spades, a long straight handle and a narrow curved blade. So confused and excited was I that I bought them both. I dug out the rest of the trench with my newly acquired toys and everything seemed ok until I found a slight problem, the floor of the shed had a rather thick floor. One would expect to find maybe two inches of concrete to be sufficient for the floor of a shed, or outside toilet, but using ten inches of the stuff to me seems rather like overkill.
Lewis arrived on Friday, he had lots of call outs over the festive period so this was his first chance to get down. He took out the old boiler, disconnected some pipes and gave his considered opinion on the trench. “Aye, it needs to be a bitty wider than that” …. “you need it deeper than you have it” …. “it’s in the wrong place” Friday afternoon was spent digging a new trench not so far away from the first one. I found the old oil line, as much as possible of which I pulled out before it’s straight line from tank to house took a strange detour under an, as yet, un excavated part of ground. Perhaps my father and brother were consulted on it’s path too. I also discovered a side branch to the main drain. Luckily, I found it with a spade rather than a more aggressive tool. It may yet need to be accidentally on purpose broken as the incessant rain at the moment may need somewhere to drain to prevent the house being the only one in Fordoun with it’s own moat.
Today, I had the task of breaking out the kitchen floor where the pipes are due to exit the house. Armed with a diamond cutting disc and a drill/breaker tool, I set to work on the concrete floor. The scene had a forensic scientist feel with a tarpaulin taped over my work area to keep down the inevitable dust. Another five minute job that pretty much wiped out a whole day. Two chisel bits got stuck, the other end of the oil line kept getting in my way. I forgot to wear a dust mask so still have black bogies and the reason the job took so long? The particular piece of floor and wall I was trying to get through, was of mostly concrete construction but concrete done in 1907, as when the house was built, didn’t rely on steel reinforcing, which is just as well or it probably would have fallen down a long time ago, but, instead upon lumps of stone. No, not gravel or ballast one would use in concrete today but boulders, moraine, moguls, giant lumps of granite. The place I was boring (and if you thought I was, you would have stopped reading during the bit about spades) just happened to have this lump of granite which I defeated, but only after a lot of effort and expletives.
About an hour after I had finished demolishing even more of our house. We had the return of the kitchen designer from DM Design. This appointment had been pre arranged and we were eager to know what kind of plan he had come up with for the new kitchen.
Katy and I have laboured to get the right layout for the new kitchen. It is a big space, the trouble is, all the pre existing objects are rather large. An American style fridge freezer, a big dining table with church pew, a range cooker, one wall knocked out to reinstate the chimney for a wood burning stove and a piano thrown in for good measure. Not to mention our desire to open up the windows at the side of the back door to form large French doors. All this makes fitting in the rest of a kitchen a tricky juggling act. We decided to enlist the help of the professionals. First of all, we visited MFI to see what they had to offer. After liking the look of one of their kitchen styles in a high gloss, lemony creamy colour. The designer (or should I say salesman) set about trying to work with our space. He came up with a rather mediocre layout using about ten base and wall units at most. He then set about telling us the price. I didn’t hear the tannoy announcement saying “ladies and gentlemen, there is a bomb in the building, you have twenty seconds to get out before it will detonate” Katy obviously did, it was a bit like the speed you go when you know you’re going to be sick and the bathroom is further away than you feel you will safely achieve before the gaps between your fingers give way. Maybe I was wrong, maybe it was just the shock of how much they wanted to charge. I actually mistook the first digit for a three initially, no, three was the second digit. It had an eight in front of it. Now bear in mind this quote was only for the units. No appliances. It did include a designer sink at around £300 but that meant that the chipboard units came to an amazing eight grand! I thanked the gentleman for his time and tried to catch up with the fleeing Katy, who, by now, was halfway across the car park. We made the mistake of looking at one another and immediately burst into fits of laughter.
When the man from DM Design pointed out that the MFI design had a fundamental flaw which would have meant we couldn’t open the fridge doors properly, it instilled a bit of confidence in his abilities. He toddled off, agreeing to come up with something for us and that he would see us in the new year. Tonight he came in and showed us his design. It was certainly different. It could work, given a few tweaks here and there. A brochure came out and Katy flicked through the pages proclaiming at almost every turn “don’t like that one” … “or that” … “don’t like the handles” One of the styles looked ok so we asked him to price us on that. He explained that their kitchens are made to measure and not like MFI, he went on to say, he had priced us on a mid price range but that it was only for units and worktops. The sink would not be included. Luckily for us, the sale is on at the moment so there is apparently 50% off all unit and drawer fronts. Then came the price. Remember, as with MFI there are no appliances in the costing as we have those. Unlike MFI, it did not include the sink so, hey, at worst, it could be £300 less than they quoted. The total for DM Design’s efforts was an amazing nine thousand nine hundred pounds. Now, do I not know something? Has the commodities market now included chipboard and MDF along with copper, tin and frozen concentrated orange juice? Yes, they trade in that too. It was in the film Trading Places so it must be true, another great Christmas film. Seriously, do we not know the value of a good kitchen? Neither of us is out of touch with the real world. I know how much spades cost. I know how much new boilers, plumbing sundries, log cabins, the current house market for goodness sake! How can a kitchen cost so much? I am willing to pay a bit more for quality but it looks a lot like we will be doing what we do best, sourcing the individual components ourselves, then bringing them together with a friendly local tradesman. My New Year’s resolution, as ever: Not to get ripped off more than I already have been.
A Happy New Year to one and all. A new year and a new wave of The Emslie Effect hits. Back in November, the boiler blew up with a final flourish. Lewis, our plumber, had saved it from the brink at least four times. However, when I had bought a new part which lasted a mere two evenings for an outlay of £45.00 (and that was after persuading the chap at the trade counter, that trade price would give him a better chance of repeat business from me than the retail of nearly seventy!) we decided that it was time to go for a brand new boiler. Katy wanted the stone shed, once the outside latrine, to become the boiler house, thereby freeing up more space in the kitchen, improving the aesthetics and raising the temperature in said shed to allow tomatoes to be grown and perhaps the installation of a chest freezer. Curious, that an appliance, designed to keep things cold will not work properly if it, itself, is not kept sufficiently warm.
Our friend Lewis, we prefer to call him a friend, as it tends to reflect better on the rates he charges. He is a nice guy too but I, once again, digress. Lewis said he would come down between Christmas and New Year to get stuck into fitting the boiler and re configuring the pipework, left dangling in mid air after the wall got knocked down. We had to source a boiler and dig a trench for the pipes from the back door, over to the shed. Finally, on Boxing Day, I found the time to start my excavations. During December, I had been working pretty much twelve hour shifts, combined with a few Christmas parties to DJ along the way for good measure so, time wasn’t something I had a lot of until the “festivities” kicked in. I was utterly miserable up until I finished on the 23rd. I was tired, I was cold (only when in the house of course, the car has a good heater, as do the majority of the work vans and trucks) I did not feel Christmassy at all. I had invested in a few outdoor lights to brighten up the place. Christmas eve was spent putting a string of bulbs up the front overhang of the cabin, finding the transformer for the small lights in the big ash tree at the top of the garden and decorating the “other tree“ . When Katy and I bought our tree this year, it was from one of her work associates who had insisted that we take another, smaller, tree as a “Buy One, Get One Free“ or maybe he meant something else when he said BOGOF. He intended it for use inside the cabin but I thought it would have a better effect all lit up, just outside the front door. I managed to miss the Muppets Chrismas Carol which would have instantly put me in the mood. I had to settle for the straight laced one with Patrick Stewart and Richard E. Grant. Frankly, Withnail and I would have put me in better spirits. Christmas day was just the three of us. We exchanged gifts and Evie enjoyed chasing the wrapping paper and sweet wrappers. We retired quite early after getting stuffed and in the knowledge that I had a hole to dig the next day.
As most people slept off their Christmas day excesses, I had all my power tools assembled, an array of hammers chisels, crow bars, spade, shovel and wheel barrow. A couple of weeks before. I had requested a visit from my father and my brother George. They came down to check out my proposed locations for boiler, flues and such like. Lewis had suggested running the pipes underground up to the side of the shed then through it’s wall. George and my dad persuaded me that the hole should go up to the door of the shed then under it’s floor. I started digging up the Tarmac which was so thin, it needed very little effort to get through. Under that was compacted hardcore, again not too much trouble. I then found my nemesis, clay! Lots of clay, this stuff had obviously never been disturbed and it took me all my effort to dig it out. In the process, I managed to bend the spade into an unserviceable shape. It was a cheap spade and I resolved to buy a new one before finishing off the job. The next day, Katy wanted to get out of the house so I decided to treat her to a day trip to Portlethen. It was actually her suggestion so don’t judge me too harshly. We found ourselves in Homebase, pondering over the spades on sale. A value spade at £7.99. A better one for a tenner or all the way up to a sparkling Stainless steel one by Wilkinson Sword for about £27 with a lifetime guarantee. I opted for the ten pound one and we wondered over to another section of the store. To my amazement, there were even more spades there. Actually it was a display of “Roughneck” tools. For the uninitiated, it’s a bit like choosing at a Kenwood blender then discovering there is one just over there made by Kitchen Aid. There is just no competition. The range of different spades was overwhelming. May I say they had them in spades? Sorry! There was a builders spade that caught my eye and a ditching spade too. If you have ever seen a film where someone is ordered by the baddie to dig their own grave then the spades used there are ditching spades, a long straight handle and a narrow curved blade. So confused and excited was I that I bought them both. I dug out the rest of the trench with my newly acquired toys and everything seemed ok until I found a slight problem, the floor of the shed had a rather thick floor. One would expect to find maybe two inches of concrete to be sufficient for the floor of a shed, or outside toilet, but using ten inches of the stuff to me seems rather like overkill.
Lewis arrived on Friday, he had lots of call outs over the festive period so this was his first chance to get down. He took out the old boiler, disconnected some pipes and gave his considered opinion on the trench. “Aye, it needs to be a bitty wider than that” …. “you need it deeper than you have it” …. “it’s in the wrong place” Friday afternoon was spent digging a new trench not so far away from the first one. I found the old oil line, as much as possible of which I pulled out before it’s straight line from tank to house took a strange detour under an, as yet, un excavated part of ground. Perhaps my father and brother were consulted on it’s path too. I also discovered a side branch to the main drain. Luckily, I found it with a spade rather than a more aggressive tool. It may yet need to be accidentally on purpose broken as the incessant rain at the moment may need somewhere to drain to prevent the house being the only one in Fordoun with it’s own moat.
Today, I had the task of breaking out the kitchen floor where the pipes are due to exit the house. Armed with a diamond cutting disc and a drill/breaker tool, I set to work on the concrete floor. The scene had a forensic scientist feel with a tarpaulin taped over my work area to keep down the inevitable dust. Another five minute job that pretty much wiped out a whole day. Two chisel bits got stuck, the other end of the oil line kept getting in my way. I forgot to wear a dust mask so still have black bogies and the reason the job took so long? The particular piece of floor and wall I was trying to get through, was of mostly concrete construction but concrete done in 1907, as when the house was built, didn’t rely on steel reinforcing, which is just as well or it probably would have fallen down a long time ago, but, instead upon lumps of stone. No, not gravel or ballast one would use in concrete today but boulders, moraine, moguls, giant lumps of granite. The place I was boring (and if you thought I was, you would have stopped reading during the bit about spades) just happened to have this lump of granite which I defeated, but only after a lot of effort and expletives.
About an hour after I had finished demolishing even more of our house. We had the return of the kitchen designer from DM Design. This appointment had been pre arranged and we were eager to know what kind of plan he had come up with for the new kitchen.
Katy and I have laboured to get the right layout for the new kitchen. It is a big space, the trouble is, all the pre existing objects are rather large. An American style fridge freezer, a big dining table with church pew, a range cooker, one wall knocked out to reinstate the chimney for a wood burning stove and a piano thrown in for good measure. Not to mention our desire to open up the windows at the side of the back door to form large French doors. All this makes fitting in the rest of a kitchen a tricky juggling act. We decided to enlist the help of the professionals. First of all, we visited MFI to see what they had to offer. After liking the look of one of their kitchen styles in a high gloss, lemony creamy colour. The designer (or should I say salesman) set about trying to work with our space. He came up with a rather mediocre layout using about ten base and wall units at most. He then set about telling us the price. I didn’t hear the tannoy announcement saying “ladies and gentlemen, there is a bomb in the building, you have twenty seconds to get out before it will detonate” Katy obviously did, it was a bit like the speed you go when you know you’re going to be sick and the bathroom is further away than you feel you will safely achieve before the gaps between your fingers give way. Maybe I was wrong, maybe it was just the shock of how much they wanted to charge. I actually mistook the first digit for a three initially, no, three was the second digit. It had an eight in front of it. Now bear in mind this quote was only for the units. No appliances. It did include a designer sink at around £300 but that meant that the chipboard units came to an amazing eight grand! I thanked the gentleman for his time and tried to catch up with the fleeing Katy, who, by now, was halfway across the car park. We made the mistake of looking at one another and immediately burst into fits of laughter.
When the man from DM Design pointed out that the MFI design had a fundamental flaw which would have meant we couldn’t open the fridge doors properly, it instilled a bit of confidence in his abilities. He toddled off, agreeing to come up with something for us and that he would see us in the new year. Tonight he came in and showed us his design. It was certainly different. It could work, given a few tweaks here and there. A brochure came out and Katy flicked through the pages proclaiming at almost every turn “don’t like that one” … “or that” … “don’t like the handles” One of the styles looked ok so we asked him to price us on that. He explained that their kitchens are made to measure and not like MFI, he went on to say, he had priced us on a mid price range but that it was only for units and worktops. The sink would not be included. Luckily for us, the sale is on at the moment so there is apparently 50% off all unit and drawer fronts. Then came the price. Remember, as with MFI there are no appliances in the costing as we have those. Unlike MFI, it did not include the sink so, hey, at worst, it could be £300 less than they quoted. The total for DM Design’s efforts was an amazing nine thousand nine hundred pounds. Now, do I not know something? Has the commodities market now included chipboard and MDF along with copper, tin and frozen concentrated orange juice? Yes, they trade in that too. It was in the film Trading Places so it must be true, another great Christmas film. Seriously, do we not know the value of a good kitchen? Neither of us is out of touch with the real world. I know how much spades cost. I know how much new boilers, plumbing sundries, log cabins, the current house market for goodness sake! How can a kitchen cost so much? I am willing to pay a bit more for quality but it looks a lot like we will be doing what we do best, sourcing the individual components ourselves, then bringing them together with a friendly local tradesman. My New Year’s resolution, as ever: Not to get ripped off more than I already have been.
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