Patience

Technically today has been weekend rather than holiday, so in many ways it was a typical Friday.

The unusual and unpleasant part has been dealing with KLM about my missing suitcase. This includes 2 phone calls to their “service” centre. Their operatives were polite but utterly useless. 

While I was out cutting the grass in the late afternoon I got a call from an unknown UK mobile number, but the caller didn’t leave a message. Usually I wouldn’t dream of calling back in those situations. This time I did, and yes, it was the operative tasked with delivering my suitcase. He’d been given the wrong address. The right street, but the wrong number.

By the time I phoned he’d collected his young son for the weekend and was going nowhere. However, he lives locally and offered to deliver tomorrow. 

Then I had some fun. 

He was - obviously - going to expect me to sit in the house all day waiting for him to stop by. I pre-empted that by asking him to name his time, anytime tomorrow. Can you imagine… an actual precise time. I thought he was going to have a meltdown, but eventually he coughed up 10:30am. 

We’ll see. 

My other bit of “customer service” insight today was about my car - this time from a Birmingham phone number. Again, I would usually ignore and block numbers like that, but this time I took it.

It was from the Audi dealership which supplied my car 3 years ago. It is due for its first MOT (official safety check) next month. Would I like them to do it? 

I pointed out (politely) that I live 300 miles away and a 4 hour (one way) drive to get an MOT done is not an appealing offer. She understood immediately. She also seemed to know already that I live hundreds of miles away (and so she had been wasting her time and mine). What she didn’t seem to know is they they supplied the car to a leasing company, and not to me. 

I really have reached the “grumpy old man” stage today.    

The Blip is my favourite rose in the garden, which usually blooms once in June. This year has been a good year for the roses.