Clubcard
Posted: Wed 29 September, 2010 Filed under: Change, Customer Services, Domestic 3 Comments »Along with the many other things I’m farking about with at the moment, I tried sorting out online shopping with Tesco last night. No particular reason, just thought it’d be a good idea to get more sorted.
Anyway, registration should’ve been easy, ’til it came time to enter in the Clubcard number. Take out the plastic proper card – embossed with my name – put in the number and the postcode. No, postcode not recognised as the one linked to that card. Um. I tried about four postcodes, just in case I hadn’t got round to registering a new address. (I’d have been surprised, but there we go, it can happen) None of them were right. Oh tits.
So I ended up calling them up on the phone, trying to find out what’s going on. And it turns out that somehow, someone else has now registered their name and address for my clubcard. It’s not even anywhere I’ve lived – the postcode they gave me was IG3, which is Ilford in Essex. Never been there, never wanted to be there. So why my card is registered there, God only knows.
I don’t mind so much – I haven’t been using the card much of late, and it’s no big thing – but it does add some levels of concern about why/how Tesco have allowed a live card to be re-registered to someone else in a completely different area.
Ah well.
Xmarks is closing
Posted: Tue 28 September, 2010 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.
So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.
For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.
A very sad day.
Eighty Fucking Quid
Posted: Thu 23 September, 2010 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, National Express East Anglia, Norfolk, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »One of the more surprising things about yesterday’s trip to London was the cost of the train ticket to do the journey.
Now I wrote about it last year when National Express East Anglia decided to almost-double the cost of the trainfare overnight from £40 to £74, and ended up with a letter from NEEA telling me that oh yes, it’d been an error, and the prices would drop back down at the next revision.
Looks like that was a lie, too. Indeed, the price has now gone up, so a return ticket with travelcard cost me £80.80 That really takes the piss. I could’ve driven down, parked all day, and driven back for less than half that amount – the only reason I didn’t was that I wasn’t in the mood for navigating London and the M25.
On the (very minor) plus side, the trains are now a lot less busy than they were when I was using them on a daily basis a couple of years back. Of course, that just means that (in theory at least) NEEA will then try and gouge their remaining customers even more in order to maintain the same levels of income.
Refurbishment
Posted: Sat 21 August, 2010 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Driving, Parking, Stupidity Leave a comment »Currently, our largest local(ish) Sainsbury’s store is undergoing a major refurbishment – a project which looks like it’s going to roughly double the size of the store.
Not that you’d know it from the Sainsbury’s information page about the Longwater store.
You’d think that information like “we’re refitting this store” would be useful – and positively easy to add to a webpage, wouldn’t you? But no, no mention of it.
As it is, the improvements mean that the main carpark has been reduced to (at most) half its previous size, along with being completely replanned. But that’s OK, because there’s a big simple overflow carpark over the other side of the access road.
Except – um – there’s not. Because in a fit of total planning genius, they’ve also ripped that up to re-plan it and generally fuck about with it.
So of that 694 spaces listed on the information page ( 647 normal spaces, 22 disabled and 22 ‘parent-and-child’) there’s about 250 left. Of course, all the disabled and ‘parent-and-child’ ones are kept available, it’s just the other ones that’ve been epically reduced.
So fuck you, Sainsburys.
Renewing Prime
Posted: Tue 3 August, 2010 Filed under: Business, Customer Services 4 Comments »In general, when I buy books or other odds and sods, my first port of call is usually Amazon.
It’s not the cheapest – although I’m not always looking to save pence on these things anyway – but I find that in general if I want something, it’s going to be available through Amazon.
I also pay for the Amazon Prime – £50 a year, and next-day deliveries for the year. Looking back, I made 31 orders in the last twelve months, and didn’t pay postage and packing on any of them. That works out as £1.61 per order for next-day delivery. Amazon charge £4.95 for Express “get it tomorrow” delivery. On 31 orders, that would be near as dammit £155 just on delivery. (Admittedly if it weren’t for Prime I’d be using normal postage for the most part, but you know what I mean)
Needless to say, I’m renewing my Prime subscription. It’s paid for itself a couple of times over.
Missing Options
Posted: Sat 17 July, 2010 Filed under: Business, Catering, Customer Services, Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »On Saturday, the Js and I went out to the Olive Branch in Marsden, which they’d been to before and highly recommended.
The place is/was lovely, and the food was really good. Well worth the visit if you’re in the area.
There was one aspect that was really disappointing, though – and that was the vegetarian options. Both of the Js are veggie, and they’d said that the Olive Branch usually had a good selection. On this occasion though, the option was pasta. Fair enough, it’s “Ribbons of pasta, sauteed with mushrooms, garlic & sundried tomato, goats cheese & pine nuts“, but all the same, it’s pasta.
I think it’s still tremendously disappointing to go out to a restaurant and only see one or two fairly desultory veggie options. It just shows a complete lack of imagination and/or interest in the veggie market – and there’s a lot of vegetarians out there.
Even more importantly, if Herself had come along as well, she’d not have been able to eat anything, as she’s a) veggie and b) wheat-intolerant. Now sure, the Olive Branch says that you can let them know about food allergies/issues when ordering, but by then it’s a bit sodding late in some cases.
Doing good vegetarian options doesn’t take much – even a vegetarian stir-fry with some nice spices and a sauce is easily doable – and there are plenty of options out there. I just don’t know why the options aren’t more imaginative. Sure, not everyone is going to run a business like Greens in Didsbury, Manchester which is entirely vegetarian, but any decent chef could get some inspiration from the ideas there, or in any other veggie cookbook.
Driving (Again)
Posted: Wed 7 July, 2010 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Driving, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »Last night was the day I took Herself and Others down to London. I’d already worked all day (as usual) so it was always going to be a late one.
As it turned out, I got everyone down to central London (Kings Cross / St Pancras) in two hours flat, dropping them off at 9:50.
By that time I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, but wasn’t massively hungry, so just headed back up, thinking that if I got hungry I could stop at the services near Stanstead airport. (Birchanger Green, not that it means much) It was 10:45 by the time I got there, and by that point I was hungry enough that I could’ve eaten a scabby donkey between two pieces of bread. (Which is, of course, why I was even considering something from Motorway Services)
Only it turns out that Birchanger Green pretty much shuts at 10:30.
- Burger King – closed, cleaned up, and one lowly person wiping the surfaces.
- KFC – closed, deserted
- Waitrose – closed, deserted, barriers in front of the doors
- “Eat In” – open, a poxy range of crap (and overpriced) sandwiches, with a queue of people that outnumbered the sandwiches available.
- Shop – closed, barriered off.
And that was it. Nothing else. I assume it stays open for people in dire need of a piss, and that’s about it.
Bear in mind, Birchanger Green is the only services on the entire M11. And it shuts at half-ten.
Call me naïve, but I always thought services were supposed to be open super-long hours – if not 24-hours. That impression appears to have been wrong.
But I wonder how much business Birchanger Green loses by closing at half-ten ? The car-park was at least a third full when I got there. You’d think that being open ’til half eleven or midnight would make sense – particularly when they’re the only one in god knows how many miles.
Very strange.