hartless portsmouth fc.

Well Paul Hart might as well look a bit glum because the poor bugger was sacked by Portsmouth FC  yesterday to be replaced today by the grim reaper himself; old Avram ‘the undertaker’ Grant. Who’da thunk it? I did a posting recently forecasting who might be the first manager of the season to be sacked in the Premiership. It wasn’t hard to pick Hart as the likeliest given PFC’s position at the bottom of the league. But I suggested that Hull City’s manager, Tango man Phil Brown, might actually beat him to the sack and indeed 3 or 4 weeks ago he seemed on the verge of being handed his P45. But his team have rallied a bit and are edging away from the relegation zone. So the orange one survives whilst Hart is gone.

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happy shopping

After the last bleak posting about the joys of dealing with big companies who don’t even get close to delivering on their customer service ‘promise’, I thought I’d better balance things up with news of a recent happy retail experience. And those are three words that don’t often spring from my lips.

customer service

First serious posting for a while and it’s got to be a rant hasn’t it?  I just thought I’d share a few recent examples of what we amusingly call customer service – the way that companies treat you especially when things go wrong. That said it’s not all bad; just almost all. First things first, we recently moved to a new place in Teddington in SW London. It’s rented again ( I doubt we’ll ever be able or indeed wish to buy a property in  the UK again), and as the landlord didn’t really want to have a satellite dish on the roof we decided to get get a bundled deal for tv, broadband and phone line through Virgin Media’s cable service, as the previous tenants had done. Have you ever sampled the Virgin Media service installation and after sales care experience? It is almost as impressive as Gordon Brown’s handwriting.

busy times

Well this is the first posting in a while. We’ve been so busy over the last few weeks – moving house within London, getting a new car sorted out, heading back to Italy to get the olive crop picked and any number of business issues tidied up and trying to make progress on my projects with existing and new clients. I’ve also tucked in a flying visit up north to see a client and catch up with my folks and we had a lovely week-end down in Cornwall with old friends Cindy and Keith plus spending any spare time with our grandkids and daughters and son-in-laws. I’ve got so much to write about I hardly know where to start but I think I’ll start with a rant (and some praise too conversely) about customer service standards. Not very sexy or stimulating I guess but a subject that’s really got me going recently. More in the next posting but in the meantime it’s good to be back in blogland again.

pp