Ikea Part Two

You asked for it. Well, actually you didn't. But you're going to get it anyway.

So, a quick recap. We'd ordered wardrobe doors. They were the wrong size. We cunningly ordered the correct-sized doors and a double bed to arrive on a Friday that I was working from home. Genius that I was, I asked Ikea to pick the wrong-sized doors up at the same time they delivered the bed and the new doors.

That was obviously a ridiculous request. It was a different company who would be collecting the items. Even though it was all through Ikea. No worries. I carefully told both companies I was in all day from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., but had to leave at 5. They said this wouldn't be a problem.

D-Day (Door Day) arrived. At midday there was a reassuring ding dong as the doorbell announced the arrival of our new wardrobe doors and our bed. The mattress was to be ordered at a later date from a company other than Ikea, as their mattresses were pretty expensive.

In came the doors. In came the bed. Off went the Ikea employees.

5 p.m. came. The old doors still hadn't been collected. I called the collection company, who informed me they'd been in Ipswich and should be with me by 7. I asked if we could reschedule. The guy didn't speak much English but told me we'd be charged £35 for rescheduling delivery. I reasoned with him (shouted at him) a little bit until he understood my point and agreed a free redelivery the next day (Saturday).

Saturday came. Ding dong went my doorbell. In trudged two surly-looking Polish chaps. I showed them where the wardrobe doors for collection were. They said, "Is only three items. I must collect six items." I showed him the bag of hinges that had come with it. "That is still only four items. I must collect six items, or nothing at all." I opened the bag of hinges, in which were four small bags of hinges. "No, that is now seven items. I must collect six." I hid one bag underneath another, presented it to him, and he went away happy.

After leaving muddy footprints up the freshly-carpet shampooed stairs. And the toilet seat up.

We then discovered the wardrobe doors don't come with handles. So the next weekend we went back to Ikea to buy some wardrobe handles.

A week later, TheBloke (TM) put together the new Ikea bed for the spare room. It was at this stage we found out it was just the frame. There were none of the wooden slats that you would need to put a mattress on. I called Ikea. I was told that it was their policy to sell beds like this, and we'd have to go and buy the slats if we wanted them. So, off to Ikea we went, for bed slats. Another £20 - not a fortune, more a frustration.

And, dear reader, this is just the start. Stay tuned for yet more stupidity. Ikea's. Not mine. Well, mostly Ikea's.

And the winner is...

I know, I know. You have all been on tenterhooks for days! Days! Whilst I steadfastly refuse to reveal to you whose customer service is the worst of all. What is a tenterhook anyway? Without Googling, a vague recollection tells me it's butchers' hooks for hanging meat on. But I might have just made that up. If you happen to be writing an exam today and the question "What is a tenterhook?" comes up, I have two pieces of advice:

1. Don't rely on me for an answer

2. Perhaps you should choose a more sensible qualification. What sort of fucking stupid exam has the question "What is a tenterhook?" for fuck's sake?

Anyway, I digress.

Without further ado... (even though half the senior management where I work insist on saying, "without further adieu" every time and it fucks me off to the extent I have to hold onto my chair to stop myself storming onto the stage and correcting their poor English)...

Sorry, digressing again.

The winner of the Worst Customer Service Award is....

IKEA!

What follows is a very long story that may cause you to lose the will to live. I take no responsibility for Ikea-induced death. Therefore, I shall break it up into manageable portions and spoon-feed it to you over the course of a next few days. As management clichés go, this is the best way to "eat the elephant". Don't ask.

OK. Ikea. Part one.

TheBloke (TM) and I had seen some wardrobes we liked in Ikea. However, at 2.5m tall, it was unlikely they would fit in the Mini. Therefore they needed to be ordered online for delivery. Ikea, unlike John Lewis, whose delivery is free, charge £35, but it could not be helped.

Using the special flyer we'd picked up in store, we input the product codes of both the wardrobe and the wardrobe doors into their online ordering system. The wardrobe base was ordered no problem but the codes for the wardrobe doors were void. So we put in the product name and selected the appropriate doors, using the price as a guide (i.e. the flyer we'd picked up said the door was £45, so we picked the door with that product name at that price). Done.

Fast forward ten days, and the wardrobe and the doors arrive. Within ten minutes of delivery we realise the doors are about half a metre smaller than the wardrobe. We check the order. We've ordered the wrong size doors. How did we manage this? Because apparently the flyer handed out at the Ikea store was out of date, and although we did match the product prices, all the prices had increased by £5, and in a spectacularly bad bit of pricing design, they had made the smaller doors the same price as the larger doors used to be, if that makes sense.

Still, technically our own fault for not checking the size of the doors and we took it on the chin. And Ikea did collect them for free, which is something (though this is an anecdote in itself). However, we still needed doors the right size. And of course, would have to pay another £35 to get them delivered. So we decided to order a bed for the spare room too, to lessen the frustration of paying £35 for something we'd already had delivered.

Tune in soon for Ikea, part two.

And the runners up are...

Moving house is always fraught with difficulties. And, being either the sort of person to whom difficulties happen more regularly than other people, or else being the sort of person who whinges about them more, I knew I was in for a doozy of a time with probably several suppliers. I was not wrong.

I promised you a winner for Worst Customer Service Award, and this will be officially presented in a later Plog. But, first, let's take a good look at the runners up.

In third place... SKY

Once we had exchanged contracts on our new house, I called Sky, asking them how much their home move service was, as we'd always been happy with their Sky Plus service (even if their customer service on occasion had been lacking). I was told that it was £60. This seemed a lot, when Virgin Media would install pretty much the same thing for a lot less. So we decided to cancel Sky. I called back to cancel the service, and was told I had already paid this month's bill (£30). Bizarrely, and I'm sure entirely against their corporate policy, the call was taken by someone astonishingly helpful. This man in the retentions team told me that they could normally move home for half price, but as I was an excellent customer, they would waive the fee completely. I clarified this, asking if it was true I'd have to pay nothing at all. He confirmed. I said, "Well, I can't ask for more than that." I asked about transferring the broadband, and he said he'd put me through to the broadband team... At which point I was accidentally cut off.

A bit frustrating, but I called back, and got through to a different person. I explained what had happened, and the offer that had been made to me. She said that, no, I had been offered half-price installation at £30. I explained the conversation again that I had had three minutes ago with her colleague. She accused me of not telling the truth. She put me on hold for ten minutes, then repeated herself. I asked to speak to her supervisor. She put me on hold for another ten minutes, and her supervisor reiterated what she had told me. The original offer did not stand. Angry as a boiled bee, I cancelled the service.

I intended to take out Sky again in TheBloke (TM)'s name and went onto their website to use the "refer a friend" service to get Mr and Mrs Nunn a free HD box. Their site kicked me out fourteen times in a row. It was at this point I registered with Virgin Media.

This, in retrospect, may have been a mistake. This brings us to:


Second place: VIRGIN ON THE RIDICULOUS

First impressions of Virgin Media were very good. I used their whizzy website tool to design the package of phone, TV and internet we wanted. It did a little calculation and told us we could have free HD. The cost was comparable to Sky. Brilliantly, it even told me when an engineer could come and install it - in two days' time! This was perfect. I eagerly clicked "purchase".

A day later, I got an email asking me to call Virgin to confirm my activation. This is where the trouble started. I was on hold for 20 minutes with (for some reason, excessively loud) hold music playing in my ear. I finally spoke to someone, who told me that actually they wouldn't be able to install it for a week because I wanted to keep my old phone number. This wasn't their fault, it was BT's service level agreement. I understood this, and we agreed they would install it on 1 October.

The next day I received another email from Virgin, confirming installation on 7 October - nearly two weeks after the first date they said they could install it. I called again, a bit narked. Especially as I had to spend another 20 minutes on hold, being shouted at chavvily by Girls Aloud, loudly. The operator explained to me (finally) that they didn't have any engineers in my area and it was a busy time with the students going back to university. I told him that that wasn't my fault - and actually I was off work when we'd originally agreed for it to be installed, but couldn't be around for the second date. I said I needed to think about it but was likely to cancel the Virgin package.

This, Ploggers, is the time when I used Twitter to vent my frustration about Virgin Media. Brilliantly (and it really was brilliant), someone from Virgin contacted me via Twitter in minutes, asking if they could help, and gave me an email address. I explained the problem to my new saviour (Billy) who promised to do what he could. And he did. Within a day, he'd set up an appointment for everything to be installed on 2 October. What an innovative use of Twitter. I was a happy bunny.

Until the installer arrived. During the course of the visit he:

- Couldn't test the phone line as he forgot to bring a spare phone with him (and ours was a digital one that wasn't charged)
- Forgot his cement (no, I'm not sure what the cement was for either) and had to go back to the depot
- Managed not to leave me an HD cable, resulting in lengthy further correspondence with Billy and leaving me to the joys of the Royal Mail strike
- Realised that after all the guff about BT needing to transfer the number over, they'd actually forgotten to complete this work and it would be another three days before we could make or receive phone calls.

He then looked at me shyly and said, "Can I ask why you VIP are?" (he was a bit Polish).

I said, "Sorry?"

"It say on job sheet that you are VIP customer. You get express installation."

So it turns out that moaning has actually made me a celebrity. Which would have been brilliant, except his installation wasn't exactly express; he was at the house for five hours (including his return trip back to the depot for cement). And he accidentally installed the wrong level of broadband. And no phone. And didn't leave an HD cable.

Then I was supposed to phone and activate my service. I held for twenty minutes again whilst Lily Allen bawled in my ear before giving up. Twice. I emailed Billy again and sorted it out that way. Without Billy I may well have committed homicide by now.

I ironed out the last of the kinks just yesterday when we got HD working for the first time. It looks exactly like normal-D. What a lot of fuss over nothing.

AND in first place... Stay tuned for your next exciting update. Which organisation has won the coveted first place?

RCIHHTDWWMH

Well, results are in. The shortlist of Rubbish Companies I Have Had To Deal With Whilst Moving house (RCIHHTDWWMH) has been compiled.

The nominees are.... (rustling of opening golden envelope):

1. Abbey

2. Ikea

3. Virgin Media

4. DVLA

5. Sky

Place your bets now, and tune in again soon for the surprising results.

Print preview

There are many irritants about most people's working day. From the guy with BO who sits next to you to the fact that the person who used the toilet cubicle before you seemed to have aimed at the seat, to the snacks machine that obstinately refuses to dispense the salt and vinegar crisps that you have already paid for.

Today's gripe. The printer. No, these aren't the usual gripes - takes ages to print, tears up the paper, always a queue. Actually, the office printer isn't too bad for the above. It's more what it says to me. Not speaks, not literally, but every time I finish printing something, a little message pops up on its LCD screen saying, "Goodbye. Print safely."

Let's just deconstruct that for the moment. "Goodbye". Hmm. Well, that's not terrible, I suppose. It recognises you've finished printing. That's acceptable.

"Print safely". Two things here. Firstly, I've just finished printing. Surely if I were going to suffer a nasty accident, this would have happened prior to walking away from the machine. Secondly, just how dangerous is it to print? Dangerous enough to need a safety warning? Exactly what is likely to happen to me? Will the printer cartridge leap out and attack me whilst I'm walking home? Will the paper feed grab hold of my jacket and suck me into the printer's mechanical bits? Will the reams of A4 paper launch simultaneously at my face to give me 500 synchronised paper cuts? I'm now paranoid.

Also, of course, this warning is futile, as you're walking away from the printer at this stage. So in actual fact, it's malevolent. Essentially it's saying, "I'm gonna getcha. You should have thought about safety and the dangers of reckless printing before you pressed print. But now it's too late to do anything about it."

Kind of puts that whole "goodbye" part of the message in a different light, doesn't it?

Lies, damned lies and food diaries

So, this week I am keeping a food diary, for an annual health assessment. I have never been particularly concerned about what I eat, and though I've put on a bit of weight in the last year, I'm still only around 8 stone, so I wasn't unduly concerned.

First stop, questionnaire from a multiple choice list:

Q: How often do you drink alcohol?

A: On special occasions

Q: When you make scrambled eggs or omlettes, how many eggs do you use?

A: I don't eat scrambled eggs or omlettes

Q: What type of salad dressing do you use?

A: I don't use salad dressing.

Witness, if you will, Friday's food diary:

Breakfast: bacon and scrambled eggs

Lunch: parma ham and avocado salad with dressing

Dinner: Chinese takeaway and vodka and coke. There was no special occasion.

I have to itemise all this on the food diary. BUPA are going to think I'm a pathological liar. With an alcohol problem.

I've also found myself lying about the number of Malteasers I've eaten. I know I'm only cheating myself, but it feels wrong to admit I ate an entire treat sized bag for lunch. As if, if I admit it, I'll immediately succumb to diabetes / heart disease / fatness. Lying about it, however, protects me from these things.

Also, does anyone know if the raisins in a scone balance out clotted cream and jam from a health perspective?

Five portions of fruit and veg a week is OK, isn't it?

Table for Nunn

My friend and I arrived at the restaurant bang on time. I gave my name and the time of booking. The restaurant lady looked down the list.

"6.30?" she verified.

"Yes," said I.

"Hmm. Are you sure it's 6.30?"

"Yes," said I.

Then came the best question of the night. Possibly the best question ever. This honestly, honestly happened.

"Can you remember your name?" she asked.

I was stunned. My friend laughed. I didn't mean to be rude, but all I said was, "Yes. Yes I can." There was an awkward pause until I remembered she probably wanted to know what my name was.

If I couldn't remember my own name, I'm guessing I might have bigger problems than a missed restaurant booking.

Industry idiots

OK, so last week I covered, Wankers I have Worked With. Nice Kate reminded me there were some that I'd missed. So the following list isn't so much wankers as tosspots. The irritating, rather than the evil.

Needy Nora - needed reassurance on everything. Despite being a grade higher than me. "Och, Laura, I'm sorry for texting you so late last night on your personal number. I'm so, so, so sorry. I'd had a bit to drink and I just didn't realise. I really hope you can forgive me." It had been about 10.30 p.m., and I'd replied straight away at the time. "That's fine," I would say. "It was nice to hear from you." "Och," she would say, because she was Scottish, "I'm really, really sorry... it's just..." this would go on for literally ten minutes. She is the only person I've ever been in a meeting with where I've thought to myself calmly and rationally, "I am going to have to throw my shoe at her. I cannot think of another way to stop her talking. I am actually going to have to throw my shoe."

Poverty Line Pauline - would spend half an hour every day telling me how poor she was, how hard it was juggling part-time work and a family, and how she wasn't fairly paid for her job. All things I would have a huge amount of sympathy for were it not for the fact that a) she bought a Starbucks and a muffin every morning b) she smoked like a chimney c) she said she drank half a bottle of wine every night and d) in the two and a half years I worked with her, I never saw her actually do any work whatsoever.

Gerald the Golfer - my manager for a short while. Spent at least 30% of his day browsing golf equipment on the internet. The other 70% was spent telling me how his latest game went. As if I gave a shit.

Incest Irene - not so much irritating as a bit... weird. Her husband died suddenly. We were all very sad for her. Three months later, she'd shacked up with his dad.

Suits you

I am an average human being. I have my failings. I can be too reserved, impatient, intolerant and sometimes a bit lazy. But one thing I am is organised. I am horribly punctual, ridiculously overprepared and revoltingly reliable.

Master Nunn however, my brother, is like a polar photo of me. Where I am reserved, Jack is the life and soul. Where I am organised and punctual, Jack is... not.

Hence the immortal sentences this weekend that literally greeted TheBloke (TM) and me when we all met up in Hammersmith on Friday.

"TheBloke (TM)," said Jack, "I've got a job interview on Tuesday and I've only just realised. All my clothes are in the Midlands. Can I borrow a jacket? What size trousers do you take?"

And, brilliantly, half an hour later, "Fuck. I haven't got any shoes. Can I have yours?"

I am led to believe that he has successfully assembled an entire interview outfit from various contacts. That alone should secure him some marks in the "innovation and enterprise" category.