A bit like the Shark Vacuum Thread but life in general.

[chipsticksmammy]

I seem to spend my life these days chasing things with companies or wondering what the fuck now. It’s like everything you do/touch/buy falls apart or ends up causing endless problems.

Am I being too sensitive and therefore unreasonable? Is this normal? I’m currently on HRT and I don’t know if things have shifted with me.

Is this a reasonable amount of challenge or have things changed for the worst? Or maybe it’s just bad luck?

My examples:
I’ve been fighting since April with Fenwicks and Whistles for a refund on a dress. Worn once, fell apart on the night out.
Etsy order from UK seller turns out to be coming from China. Month overdue, no sign of a refund. Messages ignored.
Handbag I bought was posted weeks later and will cost me money to return.
I am in an endless spiral with my utility billing. They just keep increasing the DD but my spend remains unchanged.
No local pharmacy has my HRT, I run out on Monday…
Washing machine threw a fit, stopped working two weeks after JL installed it. Getting them to have someone look at it has been a total grind. The big washing machines at the petrol station are cool though.
BUPA claim was billed wrongly by the hospital in July. Nobody at the hospital seems to know how to fix it with BUPA. Nobody replies to emails or answers the phones. So it’s showing as an overdue bill with me. At this rate the poor lad at BUPA will be on our Christmas card list. He phones me more than my husband.

I could write these out all day. I seem to have a permanent list that never really gets shorter.

Is this just life now? Do we all have a list like this? I don’t lead an exciting life, I do have kids who take up most of my time and I would just like something/anything to work and stay working 🤣

FYI my shark hoover is bloody rubbish.

(This is lighthearted, I know there is so much going on in the fairly horrible world at the moment. I just need a whinge about the list of little stuff as I block out the big stuff of care homes and elderly parents)

YABU - Welcome to Middle Age
YANBU - Nope, we’re all going slowly down the drain too.

It's not just you.

This week I wanted to change a hotel room booking to get a bigger room so an extra person could travel with me. I can see a bigger room is available on the hotel company's own app but I've booked a "no refunds" room so I email the hotel to say is there any chance I could change my booking and pay extra to arrange a bigger room. Hotel replies that normally yes I could do that for £x a night but there are sadly no rooms available. I reply oh but I can see this room available on the app can I just have that? They reply no sorry because they cannot access it "on the system" so there is nothing they can do. I said could you... Cancel my existing booking so I can rebook it on the app? No, sorry, no it is impossible.

Every week brings some new customer service insanity.

So you want to give them more money really, but the system doesn’t allow them to do that. 🤣 How dare you try to give them more business.

I assume they have rooms on their system and rooms allocated to Booking.com or similar.

Madness!

But why can I get it from the Radisson app but not the Radisson hotel?? Take my money pleeeeaase!

OP, is your washing machine JL branded or another brand you just bought through JL?

I bought an AEG one from JL after moving house earlier this year, and within a few months a bra underwire escaped from both the bra and the net bag it was in and completely shredded the rubber seal of the machine. I didn't even try going through JL, just went on to the AEG website, filled out all the stuff about the machine (with serial number) and the problem, booked a repair online, the engineer turned up exactly on time and with the correct parts, fixed it, and it all seems to have been covered under guarantee even though it wasn't exactly their fault.

Excellent service by AEG. Very different from my experience with my new broadband supplier (more than three months, multiple phone calls and three engineer visits before it got properly installed), and Thames Water (nearly eight months in, what seems like hours on the phone, two home visits so far, and no resolution yet to an issue with the water supply and metering to my flat and the one upstairs - I am currently being billed for both my water and the water used by my neighbours, a large family).

Oh, and don't start me on Virgin Media and how totally incompetent and unhelpful they are when you are trying to close an account or move house.

But my experience with the bereavement departments of most utilities and financial services companies has mostly been quite good, with the notable exception of Lloyds Bank (I ended up with £400 compensation and I think the woman responsible for their screw-ups was fired).

😂 That's madness.

Take a blow up bed and sneak them in.

I feel this on a spiritual level...😩

You’re not alone. I commute and have a flexible season ticket for eight journeys a month. Sometimes (strikes, faults, illness etc) I get a refund for unused tickets but my God the process is a pain. It won’t work on the app, it won’t work on the tablet - just sends you round in endless circles. Will eventually do it on the website via a laptop once you’ve promised the blood of your firstborn. I know they don’t want to give you money back but does it really have to be this complicated and take half an hour?

The washing machine is Bosch and when I found their customer service it went very smoothly.

It broke down over a hairball smaller than a 5p piece stuck in a sensor. I have no idea how it’s going to cope when the teenagers get really going with their winter hoodies. If it can’t cope with what turned out to be 3/4 strands of hair.

Do you have to change your password every time and get a code sent to your mobile that never comes through?

THATS REAL PAIN RIGHT THERE 😂

YES! And when you do manage to reset it you get a message telling you it’s too similar to your existing password (ie the same as) which it wouldn’t let you use five minutes ago 😤

DH has retired now so I've handed most of this shit these jobs over to him as I spent over 30 years dealing with all the admin.
I did laugh when he tried to sort out a problem with our vacuum cleaner - yes it was a Shark - and they said they wouldn't speak to him as he wasn't the customer who purchased it - that was me! I had to send them an email giving my permission for them to speak to him!
I mean, who the hell buys a vacuum cleaner in joint names? It's a household item of property surely?
In Sharks defence, they did sort the problem out efficiently and under warranty once they had my authorisation for DH to act.

I had to access a very old account that was linked to my landlines. It kept texting my landline to verify me, so id get a call with an automated voice desperately trying to turn a string of letters and numbers into a word (like CH33PRN - CherThreeThreePrunn). I then got blocked as I couldn't de-translate this into the right 6 digit code to access the account.

Call them up. . . "Sorry about our long phone waiting times. Have you tried accessing your account through our website?"

Noooooo, not the website Chatbot who can’t answer the question anyway 😂

This thread is making me giggle. It's not just you, customer service is shockingly shit, making every tiny little problem in life time-consuming and painful to deal with. I also get into work early to do it in the comfort of my office with a brew!

Customer service seems to be crap these days.

I am STILL battling Crampton & Moore over a mid range Samsung microwave purchased 18 months ago, so out of warranty of course.

My consumer rights say this should last me three to five years, not 17 fucking months.

I went to C&M, via Amazon - 'oh its out of warranty, piss off'
Gave them the consumer rights stuff... 'oh you have to have it checked by a Samsung engineer at £squillions and then we might pay for a repair, if its faulty, if you didn't misuse it etc'
I took it to a local electronics repair engineers (and samsung dealer), very much suitably qualified. Inherent fault, they should repair, replace or refund.

Back to Crampton & Fuckdiddle - ' oh, well... lets see what we can do...'

Total silence for several weeks.

Back to Crampton & Arsetwaddle again - 'oh we'll forward this to Samsung then'.

Samsung: 'appliance model and registration no please. Oh, thats out of warranty, not our problem'

TO Samsung - 'we know that, as do Twatton & Mooremoney, we don't understand why they contacted you misrepresenting the issue, this was never a warranty claim, its a consumer rights claim'.

CC that to Bumface & MooreRipOffs..

'Oh, but we said we were trying to find the part price and blah blah etc'..

Me: Screaming into the ether' THEN WHY DID YOU PASS IT TO SAMSUNG YOU LYING FUCKNUGGETS'..

It's now two weeks that they've had since our last contact, with them 'trying to find a quote to fix it'... and nearly three months since we first contacted them!

Next step is to contact them and say 'you've had 14 days to find the part and get a quotation for repair and have come up with jack shit. Replace or refund, now.'

Crampton & Arsetwaddle 😂

17 months, thats dreadful (unless you are running a very successful cafe and not a home kitchen).

For me, there is the waste of creating a microwave, it has a two second life, then the manufacturer is not able or willing to repair it and then it hitting landfill. Lets face it, a microwave is a complicated bit of technology and a bugger to recycle.

Items like than should be mandated to have a minimum 5 or 10 year warranty so that the electrical waste at the end has more than served its purpose. So a washing machine or a hoover lasting less than 2 years, which was the inspiration for this thread, should not be sold.

Life admin is a shit show with all the live chat bots and call centres miles away. It’s so infuriating trying to get anything done now. I think too many companies think AI standard replies are a catch all when in fact all they are is a sure fire way to lose customers.

@chipsticksmammy Nope, 20 minutes defrosting dog food, sometimes an extra 10 for a baked spud. Cake baking occasional. Hardly a tough life and no ones microwaved a spoon or lobbed it out of a window either!

Yes - that should be the next eco mandate! Electrical appliances to last x years, this built in obsolescence is horrendous now. My first combi microwave survived a house fire (slightly melted edge of the door) and three house moves, for a lifespan of at least 15 years!!

On todays episode of What The Fuckery....

The GP surgery claim to have not receive my patient portal request from last week. They suggsted I email them as they can only take requests IN WRITING.

I have hand written a letter and will post through the door after work tonight. I will take a photo as I post it...

Still no reply from Whistles. I have written the £150+ refund off at this point. I would tweet them but I refuse to have Twitter.

I put my meter readings into the app yesterday. I am £450 in credit, we pay £160 a month. The bill today suggests I up my monthly DD. No bloody way.

Letter from the hospital to fill out and return. 'Please note, current response times are 4-6 months'. I actually dont think I am going to bother 😂

😂 I feel you OP!

Actually I'm thinking the NHS is being pretty efficient here, the chances are decent that you'll either have succumbed to or forgotten about what ails you in 4-6mths...

Its a great distraction technique 😂

every fortnight so often I’ll just cry “why is everything so difficult?” and I really mean it 😫 I would tell you about the times Ryanair have downright lied to me and there’s no recourse at all but then I’d get all worked up sympathy OP it’s just so difficult to get through life sometimes 😕

Ryanair. I’ve not flown with them in over 20 years as they are cowboys.

I’m running out of companies to boycott due to either crap goods or terrible customer service.

I love the NHS and all it stands for but it’s a blooming hard task navigating it.

It’s so true, even with companies that have strong brand / customer loyalty focus. I’ve been under-refunded on returns to Xalando and Adidas over the past few months, and in each case have spent weeks in what feels like a total death-loop of form-filling and customer service calls before they eventually concluded that the case was closed, and that was that. In the first instance, I even had a customer service advisor tell me on my first call that she could see the error, and would fix it, but whatever it was that she did, made it worse, and they refused to review the call. It’s incredibly frustrating and just makes me want to cry. In the end, I’ve just given up on both. It was all too hard and not worth the effort.

During Covid, and looking after a vulnerable 96 year old, we tried to avoid mixing with as many people as possible. The local pharmacy, which we had used for years, had a long, snaking queue, of people collecting prescriptions, many of whom would have had all sorts of illnesses. So we moved our pharmacy to an online company, pharmacy2u.com, and they are brilliant for repeat prescriptions. Order via NHS app, and the drugs turn up in the post a few days later. We had a few supply issues in the months after lockdown, but since then worked very smoothly. You order each item each month, so you know if you have missed anything.