Moans:
British Gas Homecare, whose helpline people are trained to attempt to upsell you more of the homecare service whenever you ring. At least they don't do it until after arranging the engineer visit. If they do it a third time I will point out they already asked me twice in the last week and I haven't changed my mind.

HSBC Credit Card, who continue to staff their phone lines with American-accented non-native English speakers and train them to tell lies about the British banking system. They have no capacity for passing you up to a more senior person, though I did get an email address to compose a complaint to. The lie: they claim they need a new direct debit mandate to switch me from making minimum payments by DD to full payments by DD, and that this is because they need to change the setup with my bank. Explaining that this wasn't how direct debit worked actually got me blank incomprehension and repetition of the lie. I could well believe HSBC's own systems are so rubbish they want different paperwork for full payment by direct debits, but other companies manage such switches just fine without making the customer jump through hoops unnecessarily.

I was going to keep them as the joint spending account, but now that's not happening. 6 more months maximum (I need to do other credit-card juggling in the mean time) and then they get no more little cuts of our spending.

TwoLeftFeet, who took my money for a shipment of nappy soak and then failed to communicate with me for 2 weeks after saying it would be delivered in 3-5 working days. Their "after-sales service" consists of email-only contact to which they say they will respond within 3 working days, with dire warnings on the website not to email again as it will "reset the timestamp". Their responses were generally at least 4 working days, ended up in the spam folder without fail, and consisted of telling me that they were just waiting for an order and it would be a few more days, and generally ignoring everything I'd written.

I cancelled the order 6 weeks after first making it (having found the stuff I needed in John Lewis) and got a reply saying they'd refund me within 30 days. That was 21 days ago, why no the money isn't back on the credit card yet. Never ever ever shopping there again.


Cheers:
The local pet shop, DJ Pet Supplies, who take phone orders for giant bags of catfood, and deliver it as they shut before I can collect it on a weekday. When I discovered the next day they had delivered me a small bag of kitten food rather than a large bag of middle-aged-cat food, they were very apologetic, and sent round two young people (the Saturday help?) to sort it out within the hour.

Little Possums who delivered two slings I very much wanted within 48 hours of the order, at no extra charge. So I was able to take one of them with me last weekend where it proved very useful.

Today I booked Eurostar tickets to go see Tony's dad in November. It's now possible to book through-tickets from most UK stations to Paris (and other Eurostar destinations, and beyond!), so I decided to do so, having already got the French travel booked through SCNF.

These are a win because a) they are a saving over buying the Eurostar and Cambridge-London tickets separately and b) they bring the journey under international travel protection, so that if FCC cock up the Cambridge trains that day, Eurostar are still committed to getting us to Paris on the next available train.

However, I was annoyed when trying to book online when I got to "Seating Preference" and was offered a drop-down of "No Preference" or "Side by Side". I was expecting to see a choice including "Eurostar Family" so at that point I gave up and booked by phone instead.

At the end of the booking, I asked if I could make a suggestion about the online booking and was put through to the "internet helpdesk". There a very helpful person listened to me, replicated the issue, and then kindly explained that if I just continued the booking beyond that screen, I would get assigned initial seats but could then choose any I wanted.

I suggested that this was made clearer at the "Seating Preferences" stage, was promised that a ticket would be raised about the unclear wording, and rang off. I then ran a dummy booking far enough to confirm that he was right. It's very cool indeed being able to pick exact seats. I will be booking all future Eurostar journeys like this :)


Note: I used to recommend RailEurope for international rail bookings but they recently redesigned their website, making it much harder to book trains and without the Eurostar Family option. I just tried to make a booking to see if they also let you select seats directly and couldn't even get as far as choosing an outward journey successfully.

The cleaner broke the Dyson last week - managed to get the cable sucked into the brushbar, which stripped the insulation until things went bang (she was ok).

Earlier this week I finally got as far as checking the Dyson website for spares and found they didn't offer cables but noted the "expert advice" helpline was open 7am-10pm. Couldn't ring them at the time due to demanding toddler. On Friday morning I had a spare 10 minutes and Charles was engrossed in something so I rang the line.

"Oh yes, we can send you a replacement cable for £15 or have an engineer come and fit it for £40"

I opt for engineer, £25 well worth not having to stress about having the right screwdriver or doing repairs unhindered by toddler.

"How about tomorrow between 8 and 1?" (Yes, that's right, an engineer visit OUT OF OFFICE HOURS. Before fainting in shock, I accepted the offer.)

The engineer turned up around 11:30am today, he took about 5 minutes total, including putting everything back, he took payment by credit card, and he said we'll shortly receive (at no extra cost) a replacement brushbar and soleplate that should minimise the chances of the same thing happening again. We had a brief chat about how things have changed since my time at Dyson, and off he went.

I remember that James Dyson had a thing about good customer service when I worked there and I'm glad that's one thing that hasn't changed.

During the last tax year Tony joined me in receiving income from lodgers in his home over the Rent A Room allowance, and therefore needs to start filling in tax returns. I'm going to do most of the work as a) I like paperwork b) I am an old hand at tax returns now.

To register to do tax returns online (by far the easiest way), you need among other things a Unique Tax Reference (UTR). I got mine years ago by ringing up the local tax office, so rang up to ask for one for Tony. It turns out they "never give out UTRs by phone any more, you have to write". So he posted a letter some weeks ago saying "I need to start doing Tax Returns, can I have a UTR". This week he got a generic letter back saying "We have looked at our current tax records for you and now believe we should be asking you to complete Tax Returns this year. [much waffle]"

Aside from the generic form letter and the false information (er, you didn't "check your records", we WROTE AND TOLD YOU), is there a helpfully labelled UTR anywhere on the letter? Of course there isn't. There's an "Our reference" which is the right length, and we'll try using shortly, but honestly, is it too much to expect them to READ THE LETTER and RESPOND TO WHAT HE ASKED FOR?

Die. Die. Die.