Getting Away With It
Posted: Tue 4 July, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, General 1 Comment »I can’t believe that Thames Water have managed to get away with not having to even pay a fine on their awesome leakage figures I wrote about a while back.
OK, so they’ve been “forced” (their words, not mine) to spend £150m on stopping leaks, but that’s what the shyster bastards should have been doing anyway. But oh no, tell them they might get fined, then let them off. They must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Shocking
Posted: Sun 2 July, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky 1 Comment »You know, sometimes a company actually exceeds the requirements and expectations you’ve given them. OK, so you don’t really expect much from BT, and so expanding those expectations isn’t too difficult- but all the same.
In this case, they’ve actually connected up the Wireless Broadband ahead of schedule. Its just unreal. The router etc arrived yesterday morning instad of the expected Monday, and when I connected it up, it worked straight away. In fact, I’m using it now, sat in the garden, writing on my XDA. I *SO* need to get out more…
Water Butts
Posted: Mon 26 June, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, General, Green 2 Comments »A while ago, we bought a couple of water butts, in order to save some rainwater for the garden, and all that jazz. (In fact, we now have three water butts, including one that was getting used (and probably will again) for “grey water” – ie washing-up water etc.)
Anyway, out of the three we’ve got, only one has a tap that doesn’t leak. Turns out, two of them were supplied without all the parts for the taps, so they didn’t seal properly – we ended up fixing it with silicone sealant, but all the same, on one it still drips.
Eventually I got round to emailing Sankey, the people who made the butts in the first place, and asked about getting a couple of the missing nuts for the taps.
I got an email today (which had been filtered into “junk mail” because of the subject line – “Butt Taps”) saying they’re going to send out the spare parts. Woo, and indeed Yay.
Drip, Drip, Drip – Extra
Posted: Thu 22 June, 2006 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Green Leave a comment »Ah, I do like annoying people.
I’ve just emailed the following to Thames Water’s customer services.
To whom it may concern,
If, as your current news story puts it, “Approximately a quarter of all leakage is on customers’ pipes.�, that still means that three-quarters of all leakage is on TW’s side of the pipes.
How does a utility company justify selling people a product, and then telling them they can’t use it?
How does a utility company justify leaks that amount to the equivalent of 6.6 million people’s daily usage ( using the DFID’s estimate of 135 litres per person per day ) every day ?
I’m just interested to know.
Sincerely
Lyle
Should be interesting to see what they come up with…
Upgrading
Posted: Sat 17 June, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised Leave a comment »It may seem a little bit odd, in light of what I was saying earlier in the week about our decision to move before the end of this year, but at the moment we’re also moving over our phone line from NT-Hell to BT. Now yes, I know BT have their problems too – but it always worries me that actually, despite all that, BT are still the best of the bunch when it comes to phone lines and so on.
In fact, the phone line installation and activation happened on Monday, and went without a hitch. Actually, there was annoyance, but that was down to lack of communication. Turns out, they don’t actually need to visit the house in order to get everything switched on. Except they didn’t tell us that ’til the Saturday before – you know, when I’d already booked the time off from work, and too late for me to change it. Which pissed me off, but hey, what can you do?
Still, it all got activated fine, so we’ve now got a working BT line, and notice will be given to NTL on Monday, to tell them to piss off. I can’t wait.
And now we’ve ordered the new ADSL connection too. 8Mbs. Lovely. That’s going in on the 3rd July. So we’ll see how that goes too. Yay.
Game Tart
Posted: Wed 14 June, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism Leave a comment »Recently, I wrote a little bit about a company called GameTart.com, and their shonky procedures. I left them because they were turning deeply shit, and never responded to any queries.
Yesterday, when I checked my bank account online, I saw that they’d charged me for another month’s membership. Cue ballistic Lyle.
I sent them an email through their website, asking them what the hell was going on, and asking them to call me.
Nothing.
I sent them another email (they don’t do convenient things like, say, having a phone number) asking them, again, to explain why I’d been charged, and to call me (and yes, I did include a phone number) so that this could be sorted out.
Nothing.
I got a call this morning, where they tried making out they’d replied to emails, and they’d all bounced. Convenient – especially considering that every other email I was expecting yesterday came through fine. Then they tried making out that they’d called me yesterday, but the phone had been busy. Which is, in theory, possible – except that when it’s busy, it goes direct to voicemail. Ooops.
Anyway, the situation’s sorted. It’s still left me with a feeling that they’re actually just a small-time business with very few staff, and less consideration for customers though.