Today I had the day off as it was time for the second ultra-sound scan for Baby 2.0 down at Frimley Park Hospital. Whilst we usually try to get appointments at either the beginning or the end of the day, this time the only slots available were late morning, and knowing the usual timekeeping, I figured that we wouldn’t be done by lunchtime.
My guess proved to be well founded. Unfortunately like pretty well every hospital they schedule appointment slots for the time they would take if everything goes according to plan, unfortunately this morning they had had some sort of crisis, and by the time we got there were running almost an hour late. Bearing in mind that we also tend to come early because of the twenty minute adventure of finding a space in the car park made doubly annoying this time thanks to the piles of snow in the car park that fairly obviously hadn’t been taken account of when the barriers counted vehicles in and out.
Anyway, when we got in, thankfully this time the ultra-sound operator didn’t have to chase the baby around to get the required measurements, indeed it was exactly the opposite in that the baby was quite comfortably in one position and really didn’t seem to want to move. However the operator got a good look and was actually able to stop and show us the heart beating away, and we saw bits of rib cage, and arm and leg bones. After trying various ways of having Beth positioned, he resorted to poking in order to get the baby to move, and finally got the last measurements. The still baby also gave him a good clear view (if you know what I mean) to identify that our midwife at Finchampstead still has the touch, as she said from listening to the heartbeat weeks ago that it was a boy, and the operator here also said that it looked like a boy – of course they are never totally sure, so we’re going with probably a boy, and keeping a girls name or two in reserve just in case!
As Beth hasn’t developed Gestational Diabetes this time around, this will probably be the last scan – although there is another diabetes test in a few weeks to confirm. Whilst it’s nice to get all the extra scans, as Beth says, she gets mighty bored sitting in the waiting room at the hospital. ETA for the new baby is still some time in early June.
Now does anyone want any girls clothes…
Possibly Related WebsitesI thought I’d just provide a little update to my previous post about the less than pleasurable experience of upgrading to Sky+ HD.
First off, Sky themselves have refunded our £60 installation fee. I e-mailed in a complaint saying much the same as my previous post here (but without the Simpsons reference) and to their credit they replied saying that it was not the level of service they should have given and therefore refunded the installation fee.
The other outstanding issue was the really annoying audio/video synchronisation problem on our Amstrad HD box. After a bit of experimentation and online reading it seems the problem only occurs when the box is auto-switching the ouput resolution between standard definition and high definition channels. The solution is to lock the box to only output a high definition picture, by switching it from Automatic to 1080i.
However the downside with this is it sometimes does a lousy job of scaling standard definition pictures, especially if they we’re originally 4:3 – widescreen standard definition doesn’t seem to be a problem for us – also the upscaled picture is pretty poor quality in comparison to what you’d get from a standard definition Sky+ box or from the Sky+ HD box automatically switching.
The answer comes in the form of the SCART socket on the back of the box. This by design can only output a standard definition picture, but can be tweaked to use an improved RGB connection if the TV supports it, so it does produce a much better picture than the upscaled output over the HDMI cable.
Certainly it’s annoying having to swap, and it will be a lot better when the audio/video synchronisation problem is solved, but it’s a lot less annoying than the audio being three seconds behind the video!
Possibly Related WebsitesWe now have Sky TV in glorious HD, no thanks to Sky themselves – this song from the Simpsons seems appropriate to describe the quality of the install… (words here)
In the past I’ve had one or two issues with Sky installers, generally a drawn out discussion getting them to run cables where I want them, but I was fairly confident this time since all that was required was to replace our existing Sky+ box with a new Sky+ HD box – not much to do for the flat rate £60 installation fee. I’d already measured the slot for the box to go into in the cabinet – it fitted although it was tight, all the cables were there, simple you might think.
When I came home, the first thing was that the Sky+ HD was placed at a jaunty angle because “it didn’t fit” – thirty seconds of shuffling solved that. Then I turned on the box. BBC HD worked fine, but none of the subscription HD channels did – so he hadn’t actually activated the card for HD.
Okay, phone up Sky and go through the process.
This proved to be slightly confusing as the techie originally tried to guide me through the HD settings pages, whilst the box had the old style Sky Guide – despite the yellow sticker on the front asking the installer to do the over the air download, he’d not bothered with that either.
The techie quickly activated the remaining channels, so we sat back and waited for a programme to record, only to be presented with an error again asking us to call Sky – another few minutes on hold whilst a different techie activated the recording facilities.
Once that recording had finished I went through the over the air download procedure myself, and we now have the latest Sky Guide, plus ITV HD set up.
And then the final icing on the cake, when I sat down to try and make this blog posting, I discovered that despite not needing to touch it at all, the installer had pulled the network cable out.
So of all the tasks the Sky installer had to do today, the only one he actually did was deliver the box, all the rest I ended up doing, and I paid a grand total of £60 for this…
Having said that, the HD picture is really good…
Possibly Related WebsitesAfter tweeting that I was going to hear Baby 2.0, thanks to the sheet ice on the road, Beth went on her own to the surgery, and I only got to hear the recording.
However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist appointment at Frimley Park. After the complications with gestational diabetes Beth had to have an appointment to get booked in for two glucose tests, the results of which will determine how many more appointments and ultra-sound scans we will have during the rest of the pregnancy, and ultimately when baby 2.0 is born. The due date is officially 14th June, but if the diabetes returns, as it is expected to, the birth will be induced early.
Having said that, it does look like the trips to the hospital will be a little bit less of a hassle as after leaving early to take account of the usual vast queue to get into the chaos of the hospital car park, we got in really easily, and even got one of the big spaces that make it a lot easier to get Lucy in and out of the car. At first I thought it was just that it was the time of year, but it turns out that it wasn’t only that…
As far as possible we’ve always tried to get morning appointments at the hospital, because you can usually get into the car park – although it’s often busy, you can usually get a space. In the afternoons it has always been absolute chaos, with the queue for the car park stretching out onto the road outside. The problem has always seemed to be around the couple of hours of visiting of an afternoon. Aside from one or two exceptions, all the hospital visiting is in two blocks, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, so in the afternoon you have visitors cars and patients heading to clinics all competing for spaces. According to the sign coming into the hospital today they seem to have finally taken heed of the problems, and afternoon visiting is only available on the weekends, during the week visiting is limited to the evening only. We’ll have to see whether it helps as we go through this pregnancy.
And before anyone mentions the importance of visitors, and how inconvenient it will be to only have evening visiting, I am well aware of that, but short of building a bigger car park, or introducing park and ride – especially with parking charges for hospitals looking like they will be abolished, it is more important that patients are able to park.
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First thing this morning, pretty well fresh off the plane from Canada, Beth had an appointment at the hospital. This is a picture of the reason – Beth is pregnant, with the baby due sometime in late May or early June next year.
Anyway, all three of us took a trip down to Frimley Park Hospital, which is where Beth has opted to go once again, and we sat and waited. Lucy is not surprisingly at her age, not really clued up as to what was going on. She had some fun playing with the toys in the waiting area, however moments before being called in for the scan she decided she was hungry and was signing both “milk” and “more”. Whilst the dimmed lights and images on the screen distracted her for a bit, her thoughts turned pretty quickly back to food.
Her new brother or sister seems to have already developed the same skill at dodging the scan operator as Lucy in that the operator had to chase around a bit to get the measurements, and the pictures she managed to get are not the clearest. In the pictures the baby is positioned with the head to the left, and on the third image you can just about see an arm in front of the face. As with Lucy, the subsequent scans should be clearer, again as with Lucy we’re expecting quite a few scans as having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes last time it is thought quite likely Beth will develop the condition again.
Following on from the scan, Beth also had a blood test, and then from there is was time to make the next scan appointment for twenty weeks (we have a consultant visit for the diabetes test later this month).
Possibly Related WebsitesOne of the things about having a relatively new house, is it costs relatively little to heat, thanks to the modern insulation. The downside of course about being so well insulated is that in this weather, once heat gets trapped in the house, it is very difficult to get rid of, usually requiring windows open and a good breeze to dissipate. As a result, when we get weather like we’ve had for the past few days, where we’ve had almost no breeze, we’ve generally had to be very fastidious about opening and closing windows and curtains at the right time of day, and using electric fans to shift air around the house. Although we’ve been fairly successful, by the afternoon, the upstairs is often unbearably hot.
Whilst it is a rare occurrence here, Beth is well used to soaring summer temperatures from her life growing up on the prairies, where the kind of temperatures we regard as a heatwave over here are pretty normal for the summer. As a result Beth’s parents house is somewhat better set up for coping in summer heat, whilst being even more insulated than our house here to cope with the plunging temperatures in the winter. Although we obviously can’t do much about mimicking the shady location of the house in Canada, we have often talked about duplicating another feature, which is having ceiling fans, which do a much better job at circulating the air around in the house than the small fans we have been using. Needless to say it’s always been one of those things that we’ve thought about after the heatwave has gone. But this time around we managed to get fans sorted in time for the heatwave, even if we couldn’t find an electrician to fit them until today!
After having a look around, whilst you can pick up a cheap fan from a local DIY store, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that you wanted something well made and reliable, as the fans need to be properly balanced to work efficiently, and most especially not wobble. It just happened that the sole UK importer of one of the top US brands was based locally, so we gave the Hunter Fan Company a call.
We actually opted for their own brand fans, rather than any of the American imports, not least because they were cheaper, but as I said they turned up on Monday, and the electrician came out and fitted them today. Even more impressively he didn’t even need to get the balancing kits out of the packaging as both fans were perfectly balanced and wobble free as delivered.
Here is a short clip of the fan in our bedroom:
And this is the one installed in Lucy’s room:
Having had them installed and turned on, it was a definite case of wondering why we hadn’t got them sooner. From a room temperature of almost 30 〬C, and the room unusable, it brought the atmosphere in the room down to a level where Lucy was able to nap in the room, something she hasn’t been able to do because of the heat. Certainly a worthwhile investment, and good enough that we might just have to invest in one for the living room as well!
Possibly Related WebsitesI didn’t set out to get a Marbles Credit Card, I sort of got sold into it.
A few years back we changed around our credit cards, in particular we took the advice of the Money Saving Expert site and swapped to credit cards that provided benefits or perks. It has definitely been a good move as we get a steady although small cash back on one card, but the other, which gets us frequent flyer miles has now taken us twice to Canada and back on free miles. The only downside was that on one of the old cards in particular we had built up a pretty good credit limit. Whilst we never came anywhere near needing to use it, it was reassuring that in a crisis we knew we could use that card.
In order to keep the account ticking over, I had a monthly charge of £4.75 going through on the card every month, which with the repayments cover of 4p a month for that size of balance was a grand total of £4.79.
A couple of months ago we got a letter from the card issuer saying that they were getting out of the credit card business, and that they had sold all their accounts to another company, who were “reassuringly backed� by the Bank of Scotland – although that is perhaps somewhat less reassuring considering what a mess certain other parts of HBOS are like… Alongside this, the new owners seem to have transferred all of their customers like us onto the Marbles brand credit card that they had also brought. The transfer was all automatic, so largely I wasn’t expecting to have to make any changes.
Then yesterday the first bill arrived, for £5.54. A quick check found that I was now being charged 79p for the repayments cover about 16% of the outstanding balance rather than less than 1% – not a problem, I’d just phone up and have it taken off.
I phoned up the call centre who said that unfortunately they couldn’t take the repayments cover off, and to have it stopped I would have to contact the insurance company that provided the product. (The joke here is that the same customer advisors at Marbles can add it onto the account themselves without a problem, they just can’t remove it.) The customer service operator then provided a phone number for me to phone. Unfortunately they were closed for staff training last night, so I had to wait until this morning. However when I phoned this morning before even answering the call there was a recorded message saying that this number could not remove insurance products and that you needed to talk to the card issuer. When I eventually spoke to a real person they said that they were quite frequently getting calls from Marbles customers who had been redirected to them by Marbles.
Phoning back the Marbles call centre, they double checked, and this was the number they were being told to give out.
At this point I was starting to get fed up, so I phoned the company that were making the monthly charge, and within about two minutes swapped it over to another source, and then went back to Marbles, and I think I ended up with a trainee.
He started off okay but once I’d prompted him over the right questions to ask, he then, with my customer record in front of him showing that I’d phoned five minutes before, proceeded to ask me whether my contact details had changed since I’d last called – probably not the best question to ask when I’d spent about twenty minutes bouncing between call centres with the problem. “Not in the last five minutes they haven’t� I retorted. I then asked him again whether he could terminate the charge to which, as with all the others he said no, they couldn’t do it, so I just told him to terminate the account. There was a short pause, at which point he said “But you’ve got an outstanding balance.� – I told him that I wasn’t proposing not to pay that, but that the one regular charge on the card had been moved, and that since they were incapable of terminating a simple charge I was terminating instead, at which point he agreed to close the account without any further argument – in fact it was remarkably quick to terminate the account unlike the multiple phone calls to try and terminate a simple repayments charge.
One interesting little post script is that a colleague at work half jokingly suggested that maybe the front line call centre staff are told to say that they can’t remove the charge, as since the charging structure for the repayments insurance is 79p per outstanding £100 or part thereof, it is a bit of a money spinner. The introduction message on calling the Marbles number goes to great pains to highlight that other cover is available, but certainly it seems that getting rid of the cover once you’ve got it is rather difficult, and I’m not the first person to encounter problems if the agent at the insurance company is to be believed. I’m perhaps not quite as suspicious as my colleague, so maybe it’s just a mistake somewhere in the process of handing over the card accounts, and one that will be ironed out in the future. Suffice to say as an ex-Marbles customer I won’t be around to find out.
Possibly Related WebsitesI guess it had to happen at some point, nobody is perfect, and despite riding high at the top of numerous customer satisfaction surveys, there had to be some part of the organisation at Smile and the Co-operative Bank that wasn’t quite up to scratch, and unfortunately I’ve managed to find it.
The people in question are the Tax Services group, and their job is to handle all the stuff related to tax, in my case with the Mini Cash ISA that I’m trying to set up in order to take the money I had in an ISA with Icesave. This in actual fact is the crux of the problem.
When I claimed my money via the Financial Services Compensation Scheme it was returned via an electronic transfer into my regular current account. As the money has a tax free status I was then issued with a certificate stating how much money I had, and confirming that it was still tax free. In theory what is supposed to happen is you set up a new ISA with another provider, and then send the certificate to them and they reinstate as with any other transfer. Since the money is sitting in an account with the same provider I thought it would be pretty straightforward – I was wrong.
The general problem seems to be that since handling a transfer via a certificate is out of the ordinary, it is not covered by regular procedures. Some banks, Nat West for example, have now issued a memo to each of it’s branches detailing the process for taking in an Icesave ISA, Smile it seems has not – although after this I hope somebody senior sees fit to issue one, as to be frank the people at Smile seem to need some guidance.
When I initially set up the new ISA, I had already told them where the money was coming from. At that point the advisor put me on hold whilst he consulted with the Tax Services department, who told him that I needed to fill in a special form, and that they would send the form. I went ahead and opened the account, and waited for the form to arrive in the post. A week or so later a letter arrived welcoming me to the account, but with a standard transfer form. I waited a bit longer, and still no form, so I phoned again, and again the advisor said they’d talk to Tax Services to get the form sent. A few days later and still no form.
I phoned again, and once again waited whilst the advisor spoke to Tax Services. The advice this time was that there was no form and that all they needed was the certificate and a covering letter, and the advisor provided me with the address of the Tax Services department. I duly wrote a letter explaining where the money was, including the certificate, and dropped it in the post box.
A couple of days later I had a phone call from Smile querying the fact that I had opened the account, but there was nothing in it, having explained the situation, the advisor then didn’t suggest there would be any problem having sent the letter and the certificate.
That was about a week ago. This morning I logged on to see if they’d made the transfer. With all the bad weather it was quite likely the post had been held up. Looking at the accounts, the money was still sitting where it had been, and there was no acknowledgement that my letter had even been received. There was however a message from Tax Services, apologising for the delay and saying that they had dropped the relevant form – the form Tax Services had told the advisor didn’t exist – in the post and to fill it in.
At this point it is fair to say that I exploded. There is a single copy of the certificate, which they hadn’t even acknowledged receipt of, and they couldn’t seem to make up their mind what they needed. I replied to the secure message, and waited several hours – there was no response so I therefore phoned them again, and spoke to another advisor, who then talked to Tax Services to try and find out what was happening.
The first thing she did was confirm that they had indeed received the certificate, but that they were now insisting on me having returned the signed form. The big frustration here is that as the customer I am not allowed to speak to the Tax Services team, like some other corners of lousy customer service in other organisations they hide behind the not speaking to customers, and essentially leave the front line call centre staff to deal with the inevitable results of their actions. The only suggestion I was offered was to send a secure message – the problem being that I’d sent one of those already and hadn’t got a response, and they hadn’t bothered to send a message asking me to fill in the form and acknowledging receipt of the certificate either. She said that the reason they wanted the form was that they needed my signature – despite the fact that they have that on the letter I sent. Indeed with the certificate and the information in the letter they have everything they need to make the transfer, it just seems to be that they are on a major jobsworth streak wanting me to fill in the form.
The big frustration is that through all of this, the money is languishing in my current account, and I’m losing daily interest all the while Tax Services at Smile mess around giving conflicting advice, and not sending the forms they said they would.
I’m certainly going to raise up a complaint over this, as after years of exemplary service, and at times actively going out of their way to help, this current experience has been a total pain, and the behaviour of Tax Services is letting the whole of the rest of the organisation down.
As a general day-to-day bank, I’d still recommend Smile – through all of this the advisers have always been helpful, indeed the woman this morning seemed just as frustrated by the intransigence of the Tax Services team as me. But seriously, if you have anything out of the ordinary, in particular that involves the Tax Services team, I’d say to go somewhere else.
Possibly Related WebsitesIsn’t the best bit of watching someone playing on a Wii watching them, rather than the screen…
The Race from Richard Peat on Vimeo.
So this last week has been pretty monumental. Apparently some bloke was elected president across the pond, but the big news is our baby Lucy was born on Tuesday.
As some of you may know, Beth was diagnosed with gestational diabetes part way through the pregnancy. Basically what this means is that thanks to the hormones produced during the pregnancy her system is less sensitive to insulin, so as with a normal diabetic she needed to supplement her insulin levels by injection. Another side effect is that the birth weight is generally larger, especially if the condition has not been diagnosed, plus there is an increased risk of the baby being still born. As a result, the hospital recommended that labour be induced at around thirty-eight weeks, rather than allowing the baby to go full term.
As a result, we were booked in and dutifully turned up at the delivery suite at the hospital at 8am on Monday morning, and were put in the largest of the delivery rooms with instructions that it would probably be a long wait.
It has to be said, in terms of business, the delivery suite was pretty quiet, by Monday afternoon were were the only people in there (although they made up for that over the next couple of days with every room filled), and with us there wasn’t much happening. Beth was treated with prostaglandin shortly after we arrived and not much happened. We walked numerous circuits around the hospital corridors, but the baby resolutely stayed put. So we read the paper, Beth did the crossword and generally sat around and tried to pass the time. As a result of the failure of the first go they tried again at 3pm, and again not really much happened – Beth had some mild contractions, but by about 6pm they decided to transfer her over to the part of the maternity ward reserved for mothers before birth and sent me home, with instructions to come back for 8am the next morning when they would have another go.
In actual fact I didn’t have to wait that long. Having had something to eat, and phoned around various people with updates I got a call from Beth. Having just got settled in the ward her waters had broken and she’d been rushed back to the delivery suite. As a result I jumped into the car and headed back to the hospital.
I got back just before 10pm to find Beth pretty zonked out from gas and air, and apparently things moving pretty quickly. The midwife thought it would still take a goodly amount of time, so at about midnight we had a visit from the anaesthetist who administered an epidural to allow Beth to get some rest, and they set up a bed in the corner of the room for me to sleep on whilst they monitored during the night.
The overnight monitoring found that Beth dilated pretty well up until the check at 4am. By 8am she was still dilated the same amount and the doctors were called in. The problem appeared to be that because of the positioning of the baby it was being pushed into Beth’s pelvis. They said that we could continue with normal labour if we wanted – but added that we could very well be in exactly the same position in a few hours time. The other option was an emergency c-section. Since Beth was pretty tired at this point we opted for the c-section, and went into theatre about 9:30am, with Lucy being born at 9:41am.
Not surprisingly, us as parents didn’t see much of what was going on. I was sat up by Beth’s head, along with the anaesthetist, and they set up a screen so that Beth and myself can’t see the operation in progress. It takes them all of about a minute to get to the baby (the start time of the operation was officially 9:40am, and you could hear Lucy crying before she was even taken out. After that Lucy got handed over to a paediatrician to check she was okay, whilst the surgeon removes the placenta and closes up the incision. After the paediatrician has done his initial checks Lucy was brought around for Beth to see, and all the rest of the checks, the weighing of the baby and dressing are all done where Beth can see, in part as a distraction from what is going on over on the other side of the screen.
From there we went through and spent a bit of time in the recovery bay along with a mixture of other patients from the other operating theatres, and from there we were taken straight through to the maternity ward. Beth and Lucy spent a couple of nights there, and came home yesterday.
All in all we had a great experience with the hospital and the five midwives we went through during the over twenty-four hours we were going through the system. Perhaps the only complaint we’d have is the sauna like heat throughout the building. People may point at lots of other ways that the NHS is losing money, but if Frimley Park is typical, one major way is straight out of the window. In our room in the delivery suite the main radiator was going full pelt all day, with no way to turn it off, and as a result the staff keep both windows in the room permanently open to keep the temperature at something reasonable. It is the same story in the maternity ward where again they had windows open to keep the place at a reasonably constant temperature. Only the private rooms actually seem to have some ability to control the temperature, and there are some radiators around the place with valves, but not all.
Anyway, mother and baby are now home and doing well, and we’d like to thank everybody for all the good wishes and gifts – indeed the first piece of post addressed to Lucy was sitting on the step when we got home yesterday. We’ve had various people ask if we have things we particularly need, so there are a couple of wish lists going for Lucy. One is at Amazon, and is mainly toys and books, the other is at Mothercare and is generally more practical items, so if you’re stuck for something to get feel free to take a look at those. Once again, we’d like to thank everybody for all the good wishes, offers of help, and gifts, hopefully we’ll find time to get around to thanking everybody personally once things have settled down a bit around here! In the mean time, not surprisingly we have an ever growing collection of pictures of Lucy, which you can see over on our photo pages.
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Just thought I’d share a picture of a couple of little “den warmingâ€? presents to celebrate having a working setup in our new den, and give a quick update as to why it’s been a bit quiet around here recently. With regards to the den, it’s a great little space to work in – cosy without feeling too crammed. We’ve got the basic stuff we need all set up and running, although we haven’t quite finished the job of clearing out the front bedroom, largely because the routine trip to the hospital threw us a bit of a distraction.
On Tuesday we had the glucose test for gestational diabetes. We’d actually been given the test largely because we were on the observation list anyway, and the consultant suggested Beth take the test – the implication was that had we not been on the observation list anyway we wouldn’t have had this test. To cut a long story (and a lot of waiting around at the hospital) short the test didn’t come up totally clear. The result is a glucose level where between 7.7 and 11 puts you onto an extra observation list, and higher than 11 means more significant treatment is needed. Beth’s result came out at 8 – borderline, so a more stringent watch on what Beth is eating, and regular blood sugar checks. As one of the results of gestational diabetes is an increase in birth weight of the baby it also means that we get much more regular scans of the baby – once every four weeks, whereas by this point most other potential parents wouldn’t get another scan.
Anyway, I’ve digressed slightly – back to the “den warmingâ€? presents – the Dalek wall clock is a cheesy but pretty self-explanatory addition, although it does light up when you turn off the lights. The phone however is one of the Firebox.com Retro Telephones, which is precisely what it looks like a refurbished GPO issued original phone complete with bell ringer, and pulse dialling. It was a slight bit of a gamble as since we have a network cable into the den rather than a phone extension we’re using a little Vonage box to get a phone connection. The amazing thing is that the cutting edge VOIP box, in this case a D-Link VTA, is quite happily taking the old style pulse dialling without any problem. From a quick trawl around the internet it seems that it’s not consistent across all the VOIP adapters, and is dependant on the chip set being used, in this case the Texas Instruments TNETV1015. The phones come in hotline red like this one, and also in black, a snazzy/hideous (delete as applicable) target colour scheme, or for the pink lovers around, a tasteful two tone pink. Being pulse dialling you are going to have problems doing anything that involves pressing numbers on the keypad, but as a little bit of history that is still usable it is a great addition to the desk.
Possibly Related WebsitesUsually when I’m ordering something, I try to have it delivered to work – the theory being that at work there is usually someone around to sign for the parcel, and you’re not going to have problems with forged signatures and parcels propped up against the front door. However every so often we have to have something delivered to our home address, as it has been with a parcel that we were supposed to receive on Tuesday. Unfortunately the company from which we were purchasing requires that for credit card purchases, the package has to be shipped to the credit card address, and it was shipped with Parcel Force, the parcel delivery arm of the Royal Mail.
When we first moved here, we had problems because being a new build, the road wasn’t on any of the maps. Eight years on, we’re on all the latest sat-nav data, indeed you can put our address into Google Maps and take a nice look at our back garden. Recently about the only problem we’ve had has been the occasional Tesco delivery driver who ends up in Penrose Park (worth noting at this point that it Ocado equip their drivers with a sat-nav, so we’ve never had a problem with them).
Anyway, both yesterday and today there has been no sign of the parcel, nor any sort of card. Thankfully the company sending the parcel supplied me with the tracking code so I could see what was happening, and it came as somewhat of a surprise. They have twice failed to locate the address – it escapes me quite why having failed to find it on Tuesday they didn’t at least look us up on a map to try and find us on the Wednesday – but twice they have failed to find it. Incidentally, the top item on the tracking is my redirecting the parcel to our local post office, where since we know the post mistress quite well, hopefully there should be no problem picking the parcel up without the card. Annoyingly it takes Parcel Force two days to actually get the parcel to the local post office, so we’ll have to wait until Friday until we can go and collect it, plus they’ll charge us 50p for the redirection. That’s a lot less than the £5.50 they’d charge to redirect it anywhere else. The only other option is to drive to the other side of Reading to collect it in person, but I fear after the farce this week I’ll probably not be at my best with whoever happens to be on the desk if I did.
It just amazes me that a company whose primary business is delivering packages is unable after two attempts to find our house. Granted if we were in an out of the way place, or a brand new house it would be understandable, but the house is eight years old, and the road is on sat-nav, map, whatever, why on earth is it so difficult for them to deliver our parcel?
Update: You’d think this was complicated. I’ve just had an e-mail back from Parcel Farce customer service saying that they had “resolved the address problems” and that the parcel was back out on the van to be delivered to my home address – I’ve just phoned them up, and once through their automated system to a real person (hint, press the ‘#’ key on your phone a few times and you can get out of the menu system) and she had checked, it seems that the parcel is indeed on the normal delivery route, not being sent to our local post office as requested. The customer service agent said that she could send a message to the driver to make sure he delivered it to the local post office instead, although that proved to be complicated as the list of local post offices on her system bizarrely doesn’t list our local post office at all, despite the list on the main website including it. So place your bets please, do you think they’ll actually manage to deliver the parcel to the right place by the weekend?
Update 2: Parcel all delivered. Looking at the paperwork attached to the box the initial instruction to redirect the parcel was actually received, although after having accepted that instruction they then had another failed attempt to deliver to the house. What is interesting is that the customer service agents you speak to seem to have no more information than the tracking system gives you so can’t tell where a parcel is actually going, hence all the confusion in the middle of the week.
Possibly Related WebsitesWe’ve had a load of notices go up on all the doors in the building today warning everybody to carry their electronic key fobs with them. Apparently last night someone was working late and decided to leave the building by going down the stairs rather than taking the lift – going via the lift all the doors have a button to push to open them.
Via the stairs you can’t get into the foyer, as I discovered on my first day when I thought I’d get some exercise by using the stairs instead of the lift. Every door off the stair well requires a key fob, aside from the door at the bottom which is an automatic fire door into the car park which can only be opened by smashing the glass, and doing so sets off the fire alarms when it is open.
To give the guy his dues he did wait around in the stair well for a couple of hours in the hope someone would appear, but ultimately he did end up breaking the glass and opening the fire door at the bottom setting off the alarm and summoning the fire brigade. The really amusing thing of the whole story is that when he got out he discovered that his car was locked in the car park – and managed to persuade the fire brigade to use their bolt cutters to open the gate and let him take his car out!
Possibly Related WebsitesTalking to Mum this morning she said it was Ricky Week, the annual celebration held in Rickmansworth, the town where I was brought up.
The start of the week is always marked by a parade, which as you can see from this video of last years, can be a bit of a washout – having said that even though it’s a decade or so since I’ve been to the parade, still looks much the same as it did years ago.
If you want to see a bit more of Rickmansworth town centre, there is a nice little sequence of clips from around the town on YouTube here the main difference now being that the station car park is now a big Watirose store.
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