It wasnae my fault!

Bit of a disasterous trip out for Fathers day today. My sister & I had decided to take Dad to a falconry in Fife as a Fathers Day treat. However when we arrived the conversation went as follows:

Us - "We're here for our 1pm booking"
Them - "Did we not just speak to you on the phone?"
"No, we've been driving for the last hour"
"We don't have any bookings for 1pm today"
"Yes you do, we're booked for 1pm" (I hand over voucher)
"This voucher has expired - look it says May"
"It says valid FROM May and clearly says booking for 21st June at 1pm"
"But I've started the half day course I'm busy now"
"That's not our fault, we booked and confirmed and reconfirmed"
"But I've started without you, you're not booked"
"Yes we are" (Show voucher AGAIN)
"No you're not"
ad finitum

Eventually the "ever so charming young lady" allowed us to walk along with the others, but she made no allowances to wait for my Dad who's a bit unsteady nowadays (which is why we'd booked a session that would drive him to the location to do the bird handling)
When she started to go over completely uneven land & my Dad started to stumble all over the place, I finally lost it and told her in as polite a tone as I could muster in the face of the worst customer care I'd ever seen, that we would be leaving the tour and going back for a refund. Her "professional" response of a shrug and a blank look summed it up.
Back at the office we had another frustrating exchange with one of the men who tried to convince us that we should stay and get 10 mins on the lawn handling an owl, as this was just the same value as an hour handling a Harris Hawk out on the grasslands and if we did that then we'd not need to get a refund.
Needless to say we didn't take him up on the offer.

So we left (minus our not inconsiderable refund - that fight's for another day)
and headed to Kirkcaldy for a nice ice cream in the park before driving back via Burnstisland for a yummy fish and chip tea at the Peacock. A salvaged nice ending to a crappy trip out.

Just in case you ever want to treat your dad (or anyone) to a falconry day, the place to avoid at all costs is (ironically enough) called Elite Falconry in Cluny

Never a more inapropriate name for a place!