Thanks British Airways for my broken window blind

Recently I returned back from California on a British Airways 747-400 which is always a challenging distance to fly overnight.  I normally like to get as much sleep flying over the Atlantic to try to lessen the impact of jet lag.

However, my flight wasn't particularly great.  The blind on the Window next to me was broken in ways that were not easily fixable:

Somehow, the blind fillet that should go behind the blind was in front - somebody probably popped the blind out and wedged it back in the wrong way.   The upshot was that I was unable to close it which made watching the entertainment system rather difficult.   As the evening drew to night, the steward told me to close my blind and I pointed out that it was completely broken and they say "Oh, that's OK then", which it in reality it wasn't was it?

Anyhow, I scraped through on a few hours sleep but it wasn't perfect because of light streaming in early in the morning.   I wrote to British Airways and got a sincere apology but zippo zero in compensation, so I plan to fly Virgin Atlantic next time.  Well done British Airways, keep up the good work and alienate your customers.

How not to run a shop

Today I visited Uckfield in East Sussex and popped into a charity shop to see if I could find any second hand bargains. At the back of the shop was an excellent telescope without a price tag so I enquired and was told it had not been priced up yet. I asked if it could be priced up and was told I would have to wait or come back another day as they were pricing up other goods. When I explained I was just in the town for a short visit and I lived quite a distance away so revisiting the shop wasn't easy for me.

The curious thing was that they seemed really reluctant to sell it at all. It was as if they would rather let a customer down rather than sell an item to somebody who was willing to pay some serious money for it. So both of us lost out - they missed an immediate sale and I didn't purchase a rather excellent telescope.

A little later my wife and I popped into a small pet shop to see if they had any pet rabbits and when I enquired the owner told me that selling baby rabbits was morally wrong when so many are abandoned and need re-homing. I kind of got it in the ear for my apparent moral deficiency in wondering if there were any baby rabbits for sale. So much for making the customer feel welcome. The irony was that the shopkeeper seemed opposed to selling rabbits but was very happy to run a business supporting these critters with pet food and hutches. Seemed rather hypocritical to me.

Short changed!

So this weekend I popped over to the local Tesco Express with my son to buy some cheese.   Like most modern Tesco stores it had some automated tills that relies on the customer to do the work of the checkout staff.

I explained to my son that I would queue and wait to be served by a human being rather than take the express route and have to faff around with a machine and the lady in front of me turned around and agreed with me,  so may be I'm not alone in this sentiment.

Now, what really irks me is that Tesco has two automated tills which effectively kills two more jobs and means my tax dollars are probably being used to give unemployment benefit to some poor souls who could be working in Tescos.  More annoying is that Tesco's is making us customers serve ourselves while it creams off the profit.

I was extolling the virtues of being served by a human only to be short changed by the lad behind the checkout.   When I pointed out the error, he told me he was busy and had been known to make this kind of mistake, but it wasn't a problem.  Well, not to Tesco's, it would have made an extra £3 of profit if I hadn't been explaining to my son that one needs to check the change.

So all in all it was a valuable set of lessons for my son:

• Humans make mistakes.

• Tescos seems to like making profit out of it's customers and will reduce staff where possible.

• We like being served by humans only when they don't short change us.

..such is progress.

You have no mail.

The UK postal service is getting worse. The impact of losing some letters in the post has impacted upon my life in trivial and not so trivial ways.

For example, my wife ordered some Tesco vouchers for some cinema tickets so we could watch Toy Story 3. 10 days later they have not turned up. Lost in the post apparently. Now we have to figure out how to sort this out. Lost to us: quite a lot of money in vouchers and the time and effort to try and sort it out. It's not exactly life threatening, but it's annoying.

But my biggest annoyance was when my hospital sent me an appointment by post and this did not turn up. I had been waiting 6 months for this appointment. So I had to write to my doctor for a re-schedule, grovel to get an an appointment because apparently was a bad customer for not attending an expensive consultation, and lo and behold I have to wait to November. Not only is the postal service doing my health a dis-favour, but so is my local heath provider. Surely the NHS never gets any mail lost en-route, since they don't seem to believe me when I tell them when my mail does not arrive.

So I'm stuck with the current postal service that does not seem to care about lost mail and because we have a monopoly running this service on the last mile, my mail will be subject to poor service and there is nothing I can do about it. I feel powerless, annoyed and I seem to have no way to get this resolved.

Health and Safety Madness #2

So in a previous posting I visited B+Q to buy some timber and they would not cut it, so today I visited Homebase instead of B+Q and tried to buy a short length of 2"x4" but it only comes in 2m lengths.   So I went to the wood cutting service desk and they only cut big sheets of wood and not the wood I wanted cut all because of health and safety rules. 

Apparently some fool may saw a finger, a hand or their head off in some freak accident with a wood saw so instead they leave the customer to figure out how to fold it into two and squeeze it into their car.

So much for an convenience store.  These wretched DIY shops are tied up in heath and safety madness.  B+Q now has self service check outs - is that because heath and safety reasons too?  Will the checkout staff hurt their little digits pressing the buttons on the till or maybe suffer from muscular strain injury swiping my credit card?

Urgh! The world has gone bonkers!

Allegations of former ministers selling influence for cash.

So it appears that influence in the government can be bought with cash if we believe what is being reported by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 investigative journalism.

Actually, I'm not shocked at all, this is no surprise, nothing these money grabbing snout-in-the-trough MPs seems to do can shake me now.  It confirms the fact that some of our elected representatives don't really represent us the electorate, instead they just care about lining their deep pockets.

So, when it comes to the general election and you believe your vote can perhaps in some way help steer the way government decides policy think again. Your vote counts for little - what matters is money. Money buys influence, connections and power.  Welcome to corrupted UK politics, goodbye principles, fairness and representation.

Customer Dis-service

Yesterday I visited a B+Q (a UK Do-It-Yourself) to purchase a couple of lengths of timber which were 2400mm long and hence rather tricky to get inside a family car. So I visited the B+Q timber cutting desk only to be told:

1. The timber was not big enough to be cut (why!?)

2. I could not be given a saw to cut the wood in-case I injured myself (once again heath and safety rules non-sense).

The staff member was very apologetic, as if to say "yes, I know it's crazy, but I don't make these insane rules up, I just work here.."

So zero service satisfaction there.

Next at the check-out we were confronted with high-tech scanning self-service tills. The tone of the computer telling us what to do was very condescending and when we got stuck a girl monitoring four self service tills was abrupt with us because we had done something wrong.

Come on B+Q, the customer comes first! If you cannot be bothered to serve the customer then your customers will not return! As it is, next time I want to do some D.I.Y. I put B+Q at the end of my list of places to visit. Humph!