Ooh-err. Post number 500. I feel like I should be writing something all significant and important… A retrospective of the 3 years and 10 months (has it really been that long?) that have passed since my first post on the 20th January 2003. Perhaps the exactness of the time period is somehow fitting. Perhaps it’s all as insignificant as celebrating the changing of the dates at the end of a year, or remarking on one of those occasions when the date is the same forwards as it is backwards. Who knows…
Oh. I know what I’ll do: I’ve spent so many of the previous 499 posts documenting my struggles with customer service in the 21st century (also referred to as “moaning”) that it seems rather appropriate to recount a tale of a new breed of incompetence: the corporation that is so rubbish that it makes mistakes in your favour and doesn’t even realise.
This has happened a few times this year, actually. Back at the start of the year I signed up for an Amazon-linked credit card, mainly so that I could grab their introductory bonus £15 voucher. When this didn’t turn up, I fired off a few emails and eventually got one back with my voucher in it. Then, a couple of weeks later, I got another one. Wahey!
A similar thing happened when I needed to get some about-to-expire hotel loyalty points converted into frequent flyer miles: they didn’t turn up for ages; I emailed; they were credited; time passed; they were credited again. Wahey!
And then just recently I placed a few orders with a photo printing website: www.photobox.co.uk. I’d definitely recommend them if you need some photos printed. The quality of the prints seems to be a bit better than some of the other similar services I’ve used, but that’s not the reason–I’ve now placed three orders with them, and on two of the three occasions they’ve managed to duplicate the order. The first time it all came in the same envelope, and all but about four of the prints I’d ordered were in there twice. Most recently, they actually sent two individually packaged and completely identical versions of the same order.
Even better, they then followed this up with an email apologising for the delay in my order (I hadn’t noticed), and putting this down to problems implementing new systems. Apparently their team “worked round the clock to catch up”. (Perhaps not duplicating everyone’s order would have been a helpful way to reduce the delays. I don’t know…) To tempt me back to their services, however, here was a £5 voucher… Wahey!
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In other photo news, as observant viewers of my Flickr photostream will have spotted, I’ve recently embarked on a blog/photo project. Inspired by reading this a few weeks before my birthday, on the 15th of October I started trying to take a photo every day, and I plan to continue to do this for the rest of my 30th year. Yes, you might say, that’s awfully pretentious and navel gazing, but so what: I’ve been blogging for nearly 4 years; it’s not as if I’m averse to a bit of navel gazing now and then. And I’m not forcing anyone to look at it…
If you’d like to follow my progress, you can do so here: www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/photos/index.php?set=AYearInTheLife or here: www.flickr.com/photos/mattandsally/sets/72157594329732205/
The plan is that each photo gets a comment, as well, so if I’m neglecting the blog a little bit, at least I’m half making up for it by blogging on Flickr (you could always subscribe to the RSS Feed, if you’re that way inclined…)
Coming soon: I’m going to finally get round to finishing writing up our trip to the US. In September…