A particularly aggravating week

So the week started well – the DRM project is going phenomonally well (but not that well – don’t want to annoy Toby) and it looks like we are (Toby aside) going to meet our deadline with maybe a few days to spare. Which, I admit, will mean I am more likely to get moved on to the CSS project earlier than expected, but even that has a bright side (getting to do stuff I haven’t done before – maybe starting a whole new batch of applications we can provide for our customers). 

But maybe I should have known that it wouldn’t end as well as it started when my copy of The Avengers didn’t turn up on time. I ordered it for my girlfriend’s birthday (which I admit is not until October) but – with her permission – plan on watching each movie early, so that if any of them are broken or not working, there would be time to replace them before her birthday comes (rather than watching them first on her birthday, and then finding out none of them work and not being able to watch them on her birthday – we have a plan to watch all 6 movies on the one day. Whether that will be possible or not is a whole different matter, but nothing ventured, nothing lost in a black hole) and I thought that nearly four weeks would be long enough to ensure they’d come. 

However despite the fact that Amazon e-mailed me to tell me that it would be arriving on the date of delivery (an e-mail they sent me after their initial confirmation of the order, which lead me to believe that they would at least make an effort to get it to me on the date of release), it has yet to arrived. I contacted Amazon earlier today, and they told me to wait another three days, because it had been delayed in transit. And then they sent me an e-mail saying they didn’t actually know where it was, but I should still wait three days anyway.

As to what happens after that, I am not quite sure. Will they send another one out at once? Or will I have to wait the 21 days I usually have to wait (which will take me far too close to my girlfriend’s birthday for them to send another one out in time)? 

That was the first indicator that this week might not be as good as seemed.

I left work as usual on Thursday night, and drove down the motorway as usual. I have done it (on average) five times a week ever since I started at The Hive. 

However this Thursday – as I got about halfway down – a stone flew up from the tire of the car in front and hit my windscreen.

This has happened before, but it usually hits the middle and bounces right off.

But this time it hit the very edge, and cracked it. At first I didn’t realise what had happened, but then I saw a line extending about 200mm across the windscreen.

(My urge to measure things in mm comes from my employment at my previous company – we had to measure things to  a given standard and they used millimeters, since it meant it was always a whole number and it would produce remarkably precision).

My first urge was to stop on the motorway, but I figured that would probably not help the situation. So instead I drove to the dealer that sold me the car, hoping I could either get someone to see to it there and then, or at the very least get it booked in for the next day.

However – as a side effect of one of the single most annoying decisions in the history of customer service – the Peugeot dealership decided that their service department should close at 5:30pm and all the staff should go home.  (That wasn’t the SMAD that pissed me off – that was their decision to stop doing services on a Saturday. But that will come in to this entry a bit later on, so I will refer back to it then).

I drove home, and phoned up my insurance company. I was a bit wary about doing this, because – if it was just going to be around £100 to fix the crack, I didn’t want to make a claim to do it. However the nice man on the end of the phone assured me it wouldn’t affect the policy at all (because it was two days away from the renewal date) and he made an appointment for the next day for someone to and either repair or replace it (it was starting to look like a 200m crack was not repairable). 
 

But it did mean I had to e-mail Jane to let her know I needed to book a day off – The Hive is very good place to work, but randomly taking days off with only five minutes’ notice – not a good thing to do, even when it is clearly an emergency.

And that was Thursday.

The guy came and repaired the windscreen on Friday, and I actually got quite a lot done in my project to sort out my house (I am planning on selling it in the near future). So – I suppose – Friday was not that bad. But, like the eye at the centre of the tornado or the calm before the storm or the pause on a computer just before it throws up an error that indicates it has wiped all your data, it turns out that Friday was just lulling me in to a false sense of security.

But before I move on to Saturday, I will get back to Peugeot and their gorram decision to make my life a misery. 

Up until around three years ago, they did services on a Saturday. Which, since I work around an hour away from my home, was a good thing because it meant I didn’t have to arrange any services during the week.

But then for some reason – one I can only assume they made because they were annoyed so many of their customers were happy and figured out the best way to piss them off – they stopped doing services on Saturday. 

I generally work five days a week, sometimes six and occasionally seven.

But the five days I work are generally the same five days everyone else works. (If you are at all curious, we have a group that covers the weekend, because we only provide technical support to our various customers, and about half the shops don’t open on the Sunday so there is even less of a need for any type of support). 

And now that Peugeot have stopped doing services at the weekend, I now have to arrange them during the week. Which means two things – 

First – they don’t open until 8am, and it takes around five, ten minutes to sort out booking my car in, and then another ten minutes to drive to the nearest garage to fill up the car (because – by the way – they have stopped putting fuel in the cars and you have to fill them up yourself. And if you don’t use all the fuel you put in, you don’t get compensated for it, so not only are they charging you for the service, they are also getting fuel that you have paid for. Which is anothing thing that really pisses me off). This means I am generally around 15 to 20 minutes late for work. And even though my bosses understand it, it’s still not good.

Secondly – they close at 5:30, so I can never get back in time to pick up my car. And so I have go back the following day to pick it up. Which leads to me being late to work for a second day in a row. And again – I have very understanding bosses, but still – it makes me crazy.

Now – you might think I am just being slightly pissy about all this. After all – it costs to bring staff in on a weekend, so why shouldn’t they save money?

The thing is, these are MANDATORY services that are required as part of the contract for the l

ease-to-buy scheme I get the car on. I don’t have a choice about attending them – if I don’t, it potentially invalidates the agreement and reduces the final value of the car. meaning that if I don’t take the car in for these services, I lose money. I also have to pay for these services, meaning I lose money anyway. 

And I have no issue with this – but if they are going to FORCE me to do something they could at least make it easy for me to do it. They are supposed to make customers happy, not screw them around. They are supposed to make customers feel welcome, not like it is a chore and an obligation and like they just want to poke every single person who works at the dealership with a huge, pointy stick.

And in that – they are failing pretty damn badly.

But this is more of a long term annoyance, and isn’t just connected to this week. (But since the woman phoned up while I was waiting for my windscreen to be repaired, I thought I’d mention it. Plus she entirely seemed to sympathise that her employers were screwing me over. Which was nice).

Around a year ago, Comet came to my girlfriends house to fit a new washing machine. They didn’t fit it properly, and the main water pipe became disconnected and started spewing water all over the kitchen floor. In addition, whoever turned the stop-cock off to fit the washing machine turned it back on so hard it jammed.

Now, being the conscientious and good people they are, my girlfriend and her mother phoned up Comet as soon as they realised what was happening, but were told that no one could come out until the following Tuesday (they noticed the leak on the Saturday), even after Comet were told that the water would not shut off.

So my girlfriend phoned up the insurance company, and they said they couldn’t get there right away, but could come between 1pm and 6pm the following day. Until then, they had to put a bowl under the leak and use towels’n’stuff to mop stuff up.

Anyway – the insurance people turned up, the leak was stopped, but the floorboards were wrecked and the carpet beyond repair.

To make a long story less long, the kitchen got sorted out – the floorboards dried, the cupboards replaced, the carpet replaced and life was more or less back to normal.

But today, my girlfriend was informed by the insurance company that Comet are refusing to pay up, and the insurance company is now threatening to recover the money from my girlfriend and her family. 

Comet – it seems – are saying that their engineer never makes mistakes, fitted the thing correctly, could not have done it wrong and is a mixture of Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ with a bit of Santa Claus mixed in. They are also HEAVILY hinting that it was, in fact, my girlfriend who "loosened" the connection. 
 

Now – I realise I do have a somewhat biased view of my girlfriend, but I have seen her hand back £10 extra in change (because the teller thought she gave him a twenty when she gave him a ten), have seen her pay the shipping costs on a DVD when she accidentally ordered two instead of one, and admit something somewhat embarrassing to me because she didn’t want me blaming someone else (someone I really dislike and would have been happy to blame). 

AND if you keep in mind that the money they received for fixing this problem was only enough to cover fixing this problem. There was no profit involved in this – they didn’t make £10,000, £1,000, £100 or even £10 out of it. And, if you add the time they had to live with a kitchen bereft of carpet and with soaking wet floorboards (and running the central heating more than usual to dry out the floorboards), I think it is more than likely that they came out of this financial losers. 

So why would they want to go through all that just to rip Comet off? It’s not like either my girlfriend or her mother have a fractious history with Comet, so why would they go through that amount of hassle and crap and spending hours on the phone and pain and annoyance just to "get back at them"?

Needless to say, neither of them are happy with the decision Comet has made to call them liars and accuse them of attempted fraud. I am equally unhappy, but there is little or nothing I can do about it.

(Except write a fairly long entry explaining how Comet are basically refusing to own up to their mistake, and are now accusing one of their customers of doing something that is actually their fault in the hope that other people will realise just what a bunch of bastards they are, and make up their own mind as to whether – the next time they need to buy a PC, or an iPod – they should go to Comet or to somewhere else. But while doing that might make me feel a little better, it won’t actually help my girlfriend or her family, and won’t stop Comet from pursuing their current course of action).

So – that’s the end of my story about this week. I would say that I don’t think it could get any worse, but again – that would be tempting fate.