Monday, September 21, 2009

Um... it's called democracy...

The Telegraph reports that despite the attempt to railroad the Lisbon Treaty through by holding a second referendum in Ireland it may be delayed until after the British general election because the Czechs have some legal issues to be resolved.

Particularly intriguing is this quote:

Mr Sarkozy then threatened the Czech leader with unspecified "consequences" if Prague allowed the delay to trigger a British referendum that would probably lead to the Lisbon Treaty's rejection.

So, thats the clear admission then. The attempt is to get this Treaty through before the Tories can "wreck" it by actually reflecting the will of the British people on the treaty (anti Lisbon parties easily took over 50% of the votes in this years Euro elections).

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Dell update

Here's the email I sent Dell last night on arrival back from Belgium (a subject on which I shall write more later). I've removed the name of the customer service agent I've been dealing with via email. Apologies for any formatting issue, probably to do with Chrome, Gmail and Blogger not playing nice with each other. I blame Dell, as I'd actually bother to work this out properly if I was using my new shiny laptop!

Dear XXXXXX,

I have now returned from my holiday, and despite this being about the
eighth promise of an update, I notice there is still no news, despite
the fact you mailed this promise on Wednesday.

To be clear, I have been made the following promises:

1. On August 18th, I was promised a response by the end of the day.
2. Having called at 5pm that day, I was then told the response would
be on Thursday August 20th.
3. On August 20th, I called and was told by the supervisor that a
response would be forthcoming by the close of play on Friday August
21st. The supervisor assured me that the matter had been "escalated
with the courier".
4. I called at 5:15pm on that Friday, to be assured an updated would
still be forthcoming that day.
5. As you can see from the email thread below, you emailed me on
Monday 24th to assure me of an update by the end of that day.
6. On Tuesday 25th I was then emailed and told on the phone that a
response would be forthcoming by Friday 28th. At this point, I
informed the customer service agent I was talking to that I would not
be in the UK for the working week ending September 4th.
7. On Friday 28th, I called again to be told that an update was not
then expected until Tuesday September 1st.
8. On Wednesday September 2nd you sent the email below promising an
update by the end of September 3rd. It is now late in the evening on
September 4th.

This means that Dell Customer Service have now missed seven seperate
commitments for an update.

On Tuesday, I was contacted directly by the courier with a return
number in Ireland. Despite being on holiday and therefore having to
pay roaming charges on top of the outrageous amounts typically charged
by mobile companies for international calls, I returned the call to
the courier. I was informed that having now confirmed that I did not
know "J Jones", they would now need to interview the driver. This
was a full fortnight after I initially raised the issue. When I
expressed my dissatisfaction about this, I was told a) that the
courier might take until September 6th to complete their investigation
(I presume she in fact meant the 7th, the 6th being a Sunday) and this
was what the SLA with Dell was. I was further informed that from the
point of view of the courier, the issue was only raised on August 27th
- nine days after I initially raised the issue and a full week after I
had been reassured by one of your supervisors that the issue had been
escalated with the courier. Clearly it wasn't escalated very well!

On returning from my holiday, I have received confirmation from my
bank that the money Dell took off my credit card has now been credited
back to my account. Considering the way Dell have handled this
matter, I am going to take some convincing to allow the bank to
release the money back to Dell.

I would therefore like to ask the following questions to Dell:

1. Why have you consistently failed to meet any of the seven
commitments regarding issue update/resolution that I have been given?
2. Why is the courier company (Walsh Western) saying it took nine
days before they were asked to investigate the misdelivery?

Kind regards,

Thomas Bridge