Saturday, August 21, 2004

Oy gevalt

Other Jewish bloggers will know what's coming from the title, others will work it out from reading it. I've had a good, old fashioned bad service/quality day today, one just like the worst I've ever had. The combination of my grandma asking me to buy a digital box for her 20 odd year old TV and the fact my flat keyboard that's designed for use by pixies is slowly packing up, I went to the Staples Corner retail park down the road from me in Cricklewood to check out one of each.
The only keyboard in the shop I liked was a cordless one, which I see no use for, but was as cheap as the versions with a tail, so I went for it. There was only one left, in its box, which some pikey had already ripped open to check out as they hadn't bothered to put one on display.
This turned out to have a broken input plug, so that's on its way back tomorrow.

The lovely people in Curry's (name and shame) insisted, not only before I told them my Grandma's TV had no scart socket, but after 3 hours of fiddling and calling customer service to discover that their box wouldn't work without one, that it would, but gave me a refund as they probably thought I'd chuck an eppy, as an old friend of mine used to say. Cretins. I'd never used them before in my life and probably never will again. So now I have to shlep to John Lewis, who do one that will work for double the price.

So Grandma will have to wait for a digital service for a few days, and I'll have to look for a decent new keyboard as the broken one was probably the last one left in the country, from the relief on their faces when I took it off their hands. Well mine's coming back guys, so you'll have to look at it again. I've had days like this before, and for nothing to work at all, combined with bad advice that wasted half my afternoon shows what sort of shops and service we have here. The only good news on that front was a few weeks after I said the digital radio advertised didn't exist it arrived in every shop in the country that sold them, and I drove around an 80 mile round trip to Crawley so I could save £20 on mine. It's humming away next to me now, and I managed to get a ram card of 4 hours for the price of a 2 hour one so I can record overnight programmes etc. I had to balance the bad day with the good, as I have to be fair.

This may have been boring to read, but just think how lucky you are not to have had to gone through it all. And I've still got to queue up tomorrow, a Saturday, with all the chavs, general public from the London NW2 district etc to hopefully get my refund on the fercuckter keyboard, no better off than I was at the start of today. The only good bit was I could take my Grandma shopping and spent the afternoon with her, as she'd have been alone all day if I hadn't come round with the wrong item. But had I been given the correct advice by Curry's, that would have been it. And no more cordless keyboards for me.

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