Failing to grasp the point...

In the week, I ordered two items from different retailers paying a premium for Saturday delivery. Neither have arrived, both are in the care (I used that word loosely) of Hermes.

I checked the status of the parcels by telephone and the automated system cheerily informed me my parcels were still at the depot and should be with me within 2-3 working days.

I go out to work at a quarter to seven in the morning and if I am lucky get back for six at night. Working days for delivery are no use to me, which is why I pay though the nose for a Saturday delivery.

One of the retailers is Debenhams, I should have known better. A couple of years ago, I ordered up Christmas gifts which instead of coming on a Sunday as paid for, arrived in a trickle over the next week, occasionally being taken in by neighbours or returned to the depot.

One item arrived damaged, it took almost a month to get a replacement sorted with them. E mails back and forth.

They picked up my anger today via Twitter and responded with a series of cheery tweets, showing the usual service desk concern, but not actually seeing the point that Saturday delivery means Saturday, not probably Monday or Tuesday.

Refunding the carriage cost is all very well, but as I have written to Debenhams and told them their performance is still as bad as it was 2 years ago, I am no longer interested in the order and want the whole thing refunding.

I've done the same with the other retailer. I am not interested in the Hermes courier trying to get the parcels here when they weren't ordered to arrive, irritating the neighbours in having to take them in on my behalf, that is not what I pay for.

None of the items were of life changing importance, but my precious time at weekend fucking well is. Imagine my mood when I was told it might come tomorrow. So they think I'm going to waste yet another of my weekend days just hoping there will be a knock at the door ? Fucking stroll on.

On another subject, the lift door in the block has been playing up for over two months now. I've raised the problem by e mail with the Senior Housing Officer in our local TMO (Tenant Management Office). We're all shareholders on this estate you see. WATMOS are a fair sized organisation, apparently run for and by the tenants.

Whenever you get in the lift especially on the upper floors like where I am, the door can take up to ten times to actually close and the lift to do what it was designed to do. You get it to complete its door closing task, by shuffling round the lift interior until the optimum spot is found. This changes every time you use it.

FOUR times I have written to the local office on the estate and FOUR times I've been ignored. TWICE I've written to the head office in Walsall of which to date I've also been ignored.

WATMOS used to be run by a pioneer of social housing, a man named Terry Edis, no longer with us. I met him several times, he was committed to his work and I did observe he could be blunt to the point of rudeness. These days as he is no longer here and some of those staff are, I begin to understand why he felt he had to growl the case for looking after the tenants on the various estates WATMOS manages.

It's a sad reflection, that today, it's all administration, targets and box ticking. It looks like the dream of Terry Edis now rests in peace with his memory.

Since Friday, the lift door is now worse. Only a matter of time before it jams completely trapping the lift on whatever floor this occurs on. In an attempt to help, it looks like someone believes a note inside the life informing the door is "playing up" is a positive measure. As if the six to ten times it takes to get the fucking thing to close is not hint enough of the problem?

The fact the block has people who are unable to climb up and down the flights of stairs. I count myself among them, but I'm thinking more of my neighbour who is senior in years to me and in recovery from major surgery. She's not long out of a wheel chair, but is still using a stick to help her get around.

Again, a fuck you attitude of an organisation, in this case who've been alerted to the problem over two months back and have done sweet fuck all about it.

They publish their customer satisfaction surveys and crow about the customer being king, when all the time, this is self-satisfied marketing bollocks.

I spent many hours during my working days recently, trying to get some sense out ot the sat nav people Tom Tom, at one point being instructed to download software to rectify the problem, which just happened to be a total waste of time, as the model Tom Tom in question, is not compatible with the software recommended. I was also told that the two new micro SD cards I'd bought were not up to the standard of the Tom Tom upgrade, which was why they hadn't worked. I'm sure Samsung would be interested in hearing the evidence that's based on.

I noticed on Twitter this week, that the producers of ITV's Love Your Garden now working on a Channel 5 gardening show, had used my previous employer to supply portable toilets and had been let down twice, causing LYG to chime in on the issue too. Again, it's a matter of simple customer service, if you pay for something to arrive on a particular day, then have the infrastructure to deliver on your promise. Wonky bar codes and buttons stuck on the computer (an excuse also once used in an attempt to becalm me), are the problems for internal reflection and rectification. Use your ISO9001 for those.

In short, keep your customers happy and you'll keep your customers.