Becca Jane St Clair

[copy of the facebook comment I left for Comet on their Facebook Page this evening. Please spread the word.]

Dear Comet,

Given that you do not permit people to post directly to your facebook page (I wonder why?) I am left with leaving you a comment on your most recent entry.

I wish to register a complaint in regards to your telephone customer service representatives who tell lies to their customers. I have been waiting at home all day for the delivery of my birthday present – a new netbook ordered via the Comet website. I rang your overpriced customer service number earlier today and was assured that my item was out for delivery and while she couldn’t give me an exact time, it would be before 7PM. I rang again at 6PM to enquire as to the wherabouts of my delivery as it still had not arrived. I was informed that I was scheduled for delivery from between 7PM and 8PM (which is news to me, as I was told delivery was by 7PM! and if I had known I had an actual slot I might not have wasted my entire day, but I digress), but if I did not hear from the delivery driver by 7:30PM I should ring back because THE OFFICE WAS OPEN UNTIL 8PM. I just rang 15 minutes ago to receive a recording that your office is now closed as of 7PM. This means that your customer service representative LIED TO ME. I cannot possibly trust a company who hires people to tell lies to their customers just so they do not have to deal with them. I do not have my laptop, and my birthday has now been ruined as I was unable to leave my house to go out to dinner due to being told my package would arrive between 7 and 8 when I was expecting it before 7PM.

And now what? I can reschedule delivery for tomorrow, only I’m not available all day tomorrow and no one is there to take my call to reschedule. I am sure that if I ring in the morning, I will be told that it is too late to reschedule delivery services for that day. In fact, the ONLY day I was available from 7AM – 7PM was TODAY, the day I scheduled and paid for delivery.

I would like a REFUND of my delivery charge, a REFUND for all the money I spent ringing up your “10p per minute” line, and an accurate re-delivery slot. It’s either that, or I cancel my order and I will no longer be stepping foot in your store or any of your affiliates (including your web site) and that’s a shame, as my husband and I need all new Kitchen appliances within the next 5 years.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Lockley

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Yes, I had to leave this as a comment on their most recent post as they have disabled the ability for people to post to their page. I am BEYOND livid. First, that they can’t seem to keep an appointment when the delivery slot IS THIRTEEN HOURS LONG, and second, that they would employ customer service representatives who LIE to the customers. Really? Do they not know what time is knocking off time? Are they sitting in a dark call centre for an additional hour after they shut off the phones? What on earth would possess anyone to tell a customer to ring back A HALF AN HOUR AFTER THEY HAVE GONE HOME FOR THE DAY, if not just because they did not feel like dealing with an irate customer? Oh, don’t they realize that all this does is make me even MORE irate?! If the drivers have mobile phones they are to use to contact customers, why don’t they ring up all their outstanding orders at 8PM just to let the customers know? How do I know my item won’t show up at 11PM tonight after I’ve gone to bed due to a late driver or worse — what if my item has been delivered to the wrong address or left outside the wrong address (which has happened before to me)?

Needless to say, this will be the LAST time Tim and I order ANYTHING from Comet or step foot in their shops. Fortunately, there is a Curry’s in the same shopping centre in Lincoln. It was my own misfortune that I decided to order my new netbook from Comet.

So, yeah. Birthday? Ruined. Netbook? Not delivered. State of the Becca? Extremely cheesed off!!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog. If you are reading this through an e-mail subscription, you might need to go directly to my blog to view videos and images.]

For full Copyright and Disclaimer, please read http://www.blog.beccajanestclair.com/copyright/

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I have been obsessively checking the ticketing website for the Olympics hoping beyond all hope that I would find something….anything and not having much luck. Several times, Tim and I thought we ha tickets only to have the little ticker count down to 0 and “no tickets available”. So we bought Paralympic tickets instead for the two of us (and they were reasonably priced!) and Tim told me to keep trying for a single ticket for myself. Thanks to a twitter feed called 2012 Ticket Alert, I was able to keep an eye on things as they became available. The only downside was that sometimes an alert would be posted for a single ticket in the highest price range (£495!) and in the lower price ranges they went fast and I still missed out.

Finally, on Tuesday evening, Basketball tickets became available for the following day. I held my breath as I loaded the ticketing website, put a single ticket (at the £55 price bracket) in my basket and clicked on “check availability” and watched the countdown tell me I had 15 minutes left….14……13…12….then it kept jumping between 8 and 9 minutes remaining and I thought for sure I had missed out on tickets….so imagine my joy and surprise when it popped me through to the checkout screen and told me I had 3 minutes to book my ticket! Ticket booked, I ran outside to tell Tim I needed a lift to the station in the morning….I didn’t get much sleep that night.

Due to Tim’s schedule, he wound up dropping me off at Lincoln station in time to get the 0526 train. This was good because the information online stated if you had tickets for the same day you were picking them up, you should get to the box office as early in the day as possible. Instead of heading straight to the North Greenwich Arena (which I only learned the day before is actually the O2/Millennium Dome) to pick up tickets, I decided to go to the gates in Stratford because I wanted to get a glimpse of Olympic Park.

Travelling in London was very smooth! From King’s Cross, you just had to follow the pink signs across the street to St Pancras and onto the Javelin trains to Stratford. From Stratford, you followed MORE pink signs to Olympic Park. The queue was short for picking up tickets, so in no time I had my tickets and I headed to the Jubilee line, with the intentions of getting some photos of Tower Bridge with the Olympic rings (the rings will be replaced with the Paralympic logo when Tim and I go down). I got off at Waterloo station and while walking across Waterloo bridge I spotted the floating rings:

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I decided to take the Dockland’s Light Railway (DLR) as far as Royal Docks and then the Emirates Air Line (A gondola ride across the Thames). The Air Line was amazing, and I got a view of Olympic Park from the air:

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And also of the North Greenwich Arena:

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It was lunch time. The ticketing website said to “be at the venue two hours before the event” and the first game started at 2, but I decided to take some time to eat before getting into the arena. I spotted a Subway, so for £3.59 I had a very decent sized salad! Can you get anything at the Olympics for less than that? (Maybe the pound range at McDonald’s!) Getting into the arena was a bit like going to the airport. Put your single bag* on the x-ray belt, take off anything metal (including watches and belts) and go through a metal detector. Okay, not bad. But then, once you got into the Arena and wanted to go to your seat, you had to submit to a bag search. This part I didn’t like, as I had packed my bag very carefully and very full and it was hard getting everything back in without causing a traffic jam. The ticketing website advised that you could bring an empty water bottle into the venue, so I went up to the concession stand and asked them to fill it for me. Fortunately, I had my filter bottle, though I wished the water had been a little colder! I watched many people buying bottled water and then pouring it into their reusable bottles, so it doesn’t sound like they are advertising the “free water” very well!

I was in Section 115, Row Q, seat 74. ROW Q. Does that sound as crazy close to the court to you as it did to me? Well, it turned out I was TWENTY ROWS BACK. I think the only reason the ticket was going was because I was nearly dead center with one of the baskets, so it had a partially obstructed view. I didn’t care.

I sat next to a man from Stratford-upon-Avon (I forget his name) and he and I had a great time talking and commentating on the games. The games I was going to watch were Russia vs. Lithuania and France vs. Spain. The first game was good, but a little slow. And there were loads of Lithuanian fans in the arena who booed anytime Russia had the ball! I decided I would cheer on Russia, and was glad I did because they won the game 83-74. During the break, the Lithuanian and Russian fans left, and the French and Spanish fans arrived. The second game was at a much faster pace than the first. France and Spain seemed to be fairly evenly matched and the score was kept close until the fourth quarter where Spain started to sneak ahead. The last 25 seconds of the game took at least 15 minutes to play out because the French team was obviously sore losers and kept fouling the Spanish players, so we would have a few seconds of play, a foul called, 2 penalty baskets by Spain (which was only increasing their lead!), a few seconds of play, foul, penalty baskets, etc. etc. Spain won 66-59.

I left immediately after the whistle, as I was going to be in a time crunch to get back to King’s Cross for my train….and I was so lucky I got to the ticket barrier just as they were announcing my train!

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Ironically, while I’ve been writing this, the gold medal match is being played out….USA vs. Spain. Who do I root for? The team I have been following since 1992 (when my dad and I were obsessed with the Dream Team) or the team I watched? Oh, who am I kidding? USA! USA! USA! USA! (and USA won!! 107-100!!)

If you’d like to see the rest of the photos I uploaded (I took over 500, uploaded a little over 100), you can check them out in my facebook album.

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* You may bring in ONE backpack of up to 25L or a “medium handbag” because you have to put your bag under your seat. Fortunately, they don’t say anything about having things hanging OFF your bag, so I had my raincoat and lunchbox attached to the outside.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog. If you are reading this through an e-mail subscription, you might need to go directly to my blog to view videos and images.]

For full Copyright and Disclaimer, please read http://www.blog.beccajanestclair.com/copyright/