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 Because apparently the flyer handed out at the Ikea store was out of date, and although we did match the product prices, all the prices had increased by £5, and in a spectacularly bad bit of pricing design, they had made the smaller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.