It seems like my new year of good service is trailing last years bad service in with it … You might remember the cellphone saga … It’s still haunting me. The transition from Nashua service provider to Vodashop service provider was not seamless. Around 10 PM on the 31st of December I discovered I could no longer send sms’s. Vodashop had just moved me over, but had not activated that service. It took 2 days to get that sorted out, but after that I thought I was home safe …

Until last night when I received and Upgrade offer from Nashua, and with it came the sneaky suspicion that they had not cancelled m contract as requested. This suspicion was confirmed when I opened up my inbox this morning and found a full account from my friends at Nashua … Their billing period is the 16 to the 15th of the following month, so I should have paid a prorated fee for the end of December, but there it was: my account in full.

I phoned Nashua, and the service consultant told me that the account hadn’t been cancelled because Vodashop had not ported my number. I assured the bloke that they had indeed, as I was making calls and they weren’t appearing on my Nashua itemized billing. So I must have been ported, not to mention the saga that I had gone through to get re-set up on Vodashop. He insisted that I phone Vodashop to confirm they had competed porting. That wasn’t easy as they weren’t answering their phones, but when I did eventually get through to someone, she assured me that I had been ported. Phoned Nashua back and blah blah fishpaste, they’ve escalated it to XYZ.

But this saga is not the point of the post …

The whole ordeal (around 1 hour’s worth of phoning and holding and fighting with people) left me feeling rather sorry for myself, until a friend arrived at work, and told me her car, that has spent 2 weeks at Peugeot with an undiagnosed fault, will now cost her R47 000 to fix. The guys still don’t really know what’s wrong, so now they want to replace the entire fuel-injection system at a cost of 47K! I could get side-tracked here about my experience with French cars, but I won’t … Needless to say my cellphone saga paled in comparison, and I felt a bit stupid for getting so worked up about…

This same friend then mirrored my situation by telling me that just when she was feeling incredibly frustrated and upset about the seemingly insolvable car situation, something happened that made her think “what am I doing getting so upset about this? It’s just a car”. She got a call from friend, telling her about a mutual friend whose unborn baby has been diagnosed with Turners syndrome … If her baby survives she’s got a whole life-time of potential complications ahead of her …

I’m not trying to depress you all here, but it did make me realize how easily I can end up down and feeling sorry for myself when one aspect of easy and comfortable life goes wrong. I am truly blessed and I mustn’t forget that. So what if the service industry is out to get me In the greater scheme of things I’ve got it so good it almost hurts, thanks to God for that.

I joked to my colleagues the other day that I must have some sort of tattoo across my forehead that only the service industry can red that says “Annoy this woman with bad service”.

Between myself and Hunny, most major purchases go awry. Things usually start of okay, we take some pleasant sales person for his word, and then ha takes us for a ride…

Some examples of this:

• The long winded motorbike saga that you can read here.
• The dinning room chairs that the salesperson assured us would be delivered the following week, that turned out to be out-of-stock, and out of country, and finally arrived after much “they’ll be here next week” promising, 6 weeks later.
• The TV unit that arrived 2 weeks late, not so bad except that the sales guy promised us that he’d phoned us on a weekly basis, but didn’t, and only realized in week 4 that he hadn’t submitted the design to the workshop.
• My recent experience attempting to swap cellphone service providers (SP): I went to the guys whom I wanted to move to, told them my plans and who my current SP is, and that I thought I’d have to give a notice period. One sales lady told me that I wouldn’t have to, another sales lady insisted that my old SP wants 3 months notice. I go back to the office and contact my old SP, who says they want 1 calendar month. Doesn’t really give you much assurance about your new SP’s capabilities, does it? 

But this is all in the past. I think 2008 is going to be our households year of good service, and I have a couple of incidents to report that have made me think our tide is turning.

Our couches were delivered a week earlier than promised, well actually the 2-seater and armchairs arrived 1.5 weeks early, but the 3 seater missed that shipment, and error I am choosing to overlook seeing as the total order turned out to be a success, thank you Coricraft.

When recently investigating buying timeshare, we had some really great service from Sue Thompson, from Southern Sun Sales and Rentals – Cabana Beach Resport. Quick and detailed responses, and such a pleasant demeanor.

I will keep you posted about our foray into the world of good service, watch this space.