Julie Goucher ~ Anglers Rest

Last Friday there was a burst water main near us, and we were without water for about 3 hours. As we have been poorly we have had heating on a bit and the pressure on our heating boiler dropped and then ceased working. The boiler refused to work until the pressure in the system was increased and that could not be increased because of the burst water main and then the subsequent reroute of the water supply. I phoned the water company – South West Water and was told I could apply for compensation and I would receive a call within 2 days.

On Monday a chap phoned me. He was deeply sorry but we were not inconvienced enough to qualify for the compensation of, drum roll please, are your ready? £20. Yes that is right the most expensive water company in the UK can not give us compensation of £20. When I asked why the chap was simply not prepared to do the right thing, he simply said “What is the right thing” my response was if he had to ask a customer then perhaps he should reflect on his manager role…..well I assume that he was a manager he did not introduce himself at the start of the conversation nor did he state his role at the water company. For all I know he was the guy digging the hole at the burst main last Friday. Anyway, it is not about the money, I’ve been known to spend more than £20 on books, for me it was about the principle of the whole event.

As I was already in a grumpy mood, I then made a telephone call to the warrenty company with whom we have a package with for our car. At the end of October we took the car for an MOT and service and a few bits needed to be done, of course! – so we had a bit of a debate with the warrenty company on the deliberate vagueness of the coverage of the package we have. We agreed on a price and I sent off the paperwork as requested on 27th Oct with a note requesting “prompt re-embursement would be appreciated”, so there I was realising that 3 weeks on I still had not had the cheque. I telephoned them and was advised that it takes 4 weeks to raise a cheque, when I challenged and said that we had received the warrenty book back after 10 days and that I didn’t understand why a cheque could simply have not been included, I was given the complex answer of “it couldn’t” I give up, in sad comprehension that for these appauling bouts of poor service I have actually paid for them.

On Monday afternoon I came across at the back of the filing cabinet in my study a pile of floppy discs, when I say pile there was about 300 of them that represent the period of 1999 – 2002 online. Copies of letters, research notes, emails and various work and professional work documents, plus all the material from my degree course. My laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive and neither does hubbys. Our desktop does and might be replaced over the next few months, so I sat on Tuesday afternoon with 300 floppy disc, a cup of tea and a pile of tissues and dropped and dragged all the data from all the discs into a folder on our external hard drive. A very boring job and I probably won’t even look at the data that was on those discs, but I can if I want to. I did come across a few bits of real interest, that I thought I had lost so perhaps it wasn’t time wasted afterall?