Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, D4D™, Weirdness |
Over the weekend, I got the usual letter from Royal Mail about continuing my mail redirection from Attleborough to the new house. Now, I know that the process is a simple one – albeit one that seems to cause a lot of people problems. D4D™ comes up second (at the moment) if you type the renewal address (www.royalmail.com/renewal) into your google search window, rather than into the address bar in a web browser.
And lo, once I’d typed in the address in the correct place, all went smoothly. Most of my mail is already coming to the correct place, so it’s not a big hassle anyway, but I’ve renewed for another three months just to make sure. It took about five minutes all told, which isn’t bad at all – and is certainly better than taking a week to process…
Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel |
Oh, well done, One Railways. On the first sub-zero day, with frost all over the place, let’s use a train at 7am where not only is the heating off, but the air-conditioning throughout the train is jammed on.
I swear, it was colder inside the train than it was on the platform at Cambridge.
I’ll write more when my fingers have thawed…
Posted: Sun 11 November, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic |
As many have observed before, when it comes to technical/practical stuff, I’m a complete numpty.
This weekend’s case in point came with the car, and replacing the windscreen wipers on it. Or not.
I’ve known for a while that the wipers needed changing – they weren’t clearing the screen properly, and the one on the rear screen was flapping at the end. I bought the wipers last weekend, and didn’t get round to putting them on. In some ways that turned out to be a good thing.
Anyway, once I’d got down to Oxfordshire yesterday I decided to change the wipers before going down to London, and made (to be blunt) a right bollocks of it. Still don’t know how, but I just couldn’t get the new blades to go on correctly, despite having made note of how they went on.
In fact, in the end I went to the local Ford garage, and asked them to do it. They took about 30 seconds to fit them, and probably sniggered behind their hands at my incompetence. But I don’t care – I’ve never had an issue with the fact I’m a numpty, nor with admitting that to people who do know what they’re doing in their own area of knowledge/expertise.
So yes, I’m still a complete technical/practical twonk, but at least I’ve now got fresh windscreen wipers, regardless of how they got put on. Oh, and I’ve still no idea how they actually did it!
Posted: Fri 2 November, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism |
I’ve just had a call from an electricity board, wanting to know if I had an account with them. Turns out that I do, in Norfolk – they’re the ones we currently use.
However, this call was based on my address in – um – Manchester. Not even the last address in Manchester, but the previous one. Which makes the data, to my reckoning, at least four years out of date. Nice to know that these records are kept current (pardon the pun) isn’t it?
Or maybe it’s just time for me to change my mobile number. I’ve obviously had that at least as long.
Posted: Thu 1 November, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related |
Many moons ago, I opened a business account for the limited company I had at the time, and it all turned into an utter nightmare. The problems primarily spouted from the fact that my personal current account suddenly came under the control and “management” of the business banking people, which led to huge screwups all round. I finally closed that account back in ’05 after roughly two years of absolute hell.
Anyway, with that experience in mind, I’ve so far avoided getting a bank account for my wee business. But it’s coming to the point where I need to, so I’ve been doing some checking around, looking at fees, costs, and all that malarkey. It’s duller than shit, of course, but still stuff that needs doing.
Of course, based on my previous experience, I’m avoiding RBS like the plague because I still do my personal banking with them. So one of my primary requirements – if not essentials – for any business banking account is to make sure that the relevant bank doesn’t then insist that I have to have my personal banking with the same bank. Even if I had wanted to stay with RBS, that requirement would kill their chances.
I’m still looking around the various tosspots members of the banking community, but so far HSBC are looking like a good candidate. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d find myself saying.
Posted: Tue 23 October, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related, Writing |
With the redesigned business site, one of the things I seriously need to update is the entire “About Me/About The Business” page. It’s never been great, but now needs to contain a lot more information than previously.
The thing is, believe it or not, I’m utterly crap at writing that kind of thing. I don’t like writing self-promoting and self-publicising stuff, although I know it’s a necessary evil in the context of having a business. Freelance Switch had a piece about this kind of problem with a couple of ideas I might try out as well.
Then again, maybe I should just write it as though it were a blog post, and that might come up with something workable.
Posted: Mon 22 October, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related |
I haven’t written a great deal about this yet (and there’s still a big ranty post in the offing about it) but it’s finally beginning to look like I might get paid for some of the work I did back near when we moved into the new house.
It’s been an absolute nightmare, but basically the client got the work I’d done, declared it OK, then when the invoice was sent out by the umbrella company that I use, refused to pay it. All of a sudden, despite a number of emails saying “that’s fine, send the invoice, we’ll pay it” (which, thankfully, I’d kept) the work became unacceptable, and they were disputing paying anything at all.
The umbrella company haven’t been great in this either – despite me being the person paying for their so-called “service”, I’ve been the one having to chase this every inch of the way. Yes, there’ll be a solid letter going to them once we’re all done, believe me. It’s taken a lot of calls to get things done, but I’ve now been told that they’re actually (finally) taking the guy to court to get him to pay up. Hey, it’s only taken five months so far.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens now. I still have a vague suspicion that this isn’t all done yet, and that things are still going to be a pain, but at least I’ve now got the support of the umbrella company, and they’re doing something about it.
I’m not going to go into details at the moment for obvious reasons, but at least things finally seem to be progressing. When I got the contract, this client wasn’t overly happy at going through the umbrella company for the work, but I’m glad in this instance that I stuck to my guns – otherwise it would’ve been even more of a nightmare, I suspect.