Thankfully yesterday’s mysterious email from the gym was nothing to do with Covid. The abrupt closure was due to an electrical fire in the ladies changing room.
The good news is it’s open today though predictably it’s the men who will be inconvenienced. We’ve got to come kitted up and shower at home while the women take over our changing room.
I am though impressed at how quickly they’ve reopened, shows a bit of can-do that seems to be lacking in large parts of society these days including my business bank HSBC.
On and off for the last few days I’ve been trying to get in touch with them to reverse an unauthorised withdrawal. It was for a payment I’d set up last year that I never intended would be collected annually.
It’s not a huge amount, thankfully, and I’ve tried contacting the supplier but no response so my only recourse was HSBC.
I must have rang their customer service number half-a-dozen times and each time I’ve waited an hour or more until my wireless landline has run out of charge.
I did get through once after a long wait and then the person I was dealing with was unable to answer the query and tried to put me through to the right department and again after a long wait no one answered.
I tried to send a Secure Message via my online bank account but for some reason it says I am not considered the primary user, even though I am the boss.
I would go to my local branch who have been operating the shortest opening hours of any bank in the town at just 10am to 2pm. When they are open they seem unwilling to let anyone in and only deal with basic transactions like paying in cheques so I’m doubtful they’d be any help.
Now today I’ve decided the only option left to me is to write them a complaint letter. Thankfully the issue I’m contacting them about is not that important but what if it had been?
It’s quite scandalous really, it seems to me the bigger the organisation – with the honourable exceptions of Amazon and Apple – the worse the service.
After my blissful Wetherspoons breakfast yesterday – where the service was exemplary by the way – I had a bit of a browse at the nearby Waterstones bookshop.
I found myself drawn to ‘The Good Retirement Guide 2019’ by Allan Esler Smith. It’s a weighty tome claiming to include ‘Everything you need to know about health, property, investment, leisure, work, pensions and tax.
Leafing through the contents I couldn’t help but notice a whole section devoted to ‘Getting better at complaining’. I couldn’t help but wonder why this would be part of a retirement guide, I now know why!