I had to renew my and my son’s passports recently and it was a right pain in the arse. I know I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I’ve got more to say about it. Come back! It’s not all boring.
Do yourself a favour and just check quickly that all passports that you are responsible for have a goodly splat of time still left on them - I think they need to still have six months remaining on them on the day you get back from holiday. Just go now, go and check. I’ll wait.
If you need to renew your or a dependent’s passport in advance of the summer, do it now, do not delay. I did mine online and although the application process was a piece of cake - mine didn’t even need a countersignature, whoop! - what followed was a hassle, as the passport office lost our old passports.
I was incredibly relieved that I had been a super swot and sent the passports by Special Delivery and then wrote down the passport application numbers on the receipt and stuck them onto my Important Stuff pinboard. DO THIS. Normally I am very sluttish about this sort of admin. Thank god I got it together because it meant when HMPO claimed that they have never received the passport I was able to prove that “Greg” had signed for them the day after I sent them and they were there somewhere. They were duly found after 24 hours.
Then the new passports were slowly delivered back by TNT, which is part of FedEx. The TNT driver repeatedly messaged me, about four days in a row, saying that they were unable to deliver the passport because a road two streets away was shut. I kept getting picture messages from the driver of the Road Closure sign up the road, which was incredibly weird as my street is open at both ends. Why bother doing this? Why not just deliver my passport?? Eventually they posted them through my letterbox, but not before I had sent TNT about four furious messages saying them they were violating my human rights by preventing me access to my passport. (Is this even a thing? I don’t care.)
The whole process took a month from start to finish, but with a load of unnecessary anxiety scattered through it. Don’t mess about.
The other week Royal Mail delivered my Me + Em jacket to the wrong house. I rang Royal Mail, and the lady on the phone was very nice but she said she wasn’t allowed to tell me to which house it had been wrongly delivered. But, she said coquettishly, if I asked her if it was, (for example), number 23, she could tell me whether I was right or wrong. So I went through ten house numbers until she said, “Yes, it has been delivered to that house.” It was surreal. It reminded me of the outing of poor Dr David Kelly – the MoD press office, (I think it was the MoD), were not allowed to reveal his name but they were allowed, just like the Royal Mail, to say yes or not to a question. So all these hacks rang up and read out a list of scientists and eventually one of them got to the “K” section and asked “Is it Dr David Kelly?” Doom, doom.
Last of all: Glossybox. I have not enjoyed my Glossybox experience. I self-gifted it on impulse before Christmas, as it looked like fun – I understand now that I ought to have opted for Birchbox instead, as Glossybox is for teens – and what turned up was what my children would describe as a load of “off-brand” junk. Random glitter-stuffed highlighting cheek palettes that didn’t suit me, colour-changing lipstick, hair masks… god. I felt like such an old fool. But at least, I told myself, I’d only opted for the three-month subscription option.
So imagine my horror slash rage when I got an email from damned Glossybox telling me that a FOURTH box of tat was on the way! It took half a morning to find out what the hell was going on - Glossybox do not make it easy to ask difficult questions or to leave their orbit. They’re the Hotel California of beauty boxes. In the end it turned out that Glossybox puts every subscriber on an “auto-renew” subscription and you must actively opt out of it. Am I alone in thinking this is just a really morally wrong thing to do? Anyway while I repent at my leisure, some teenagers in my life are about to get lucky.
How about you? Have you had any Customer Service dept. wins or losses recently? My favourite stories are the ones where you got delivered e.g. a giant spanner by Zara instead of a pair of jeans. Please amuse us all in the handy box below.
Further reading: here is my column from yesterday about Kate Middleton.
The Customer Service (or just any service really) from Sports Direct makes me wonder how on earth the company is so massive, and its owner so rich & successful...
Of the three things I ordered for my son from their website, one went out of stock in the time it took for my order to trickle down to the Wish Fulfilment Department, and a pair of sunglasses that did arrive, were fairly obviously and dramatically scratched (ie: unwearable). Of course, there’s no telephone number you can call, and the website Help page takes you on an endless loop of questions and decidedly unhelpful answers. I chatted with a Bot called Suzi for ages before realising “she” couldn’t help me either, and as Suzi eventually morphed into Karl, I thought I was finally getting somewhere when Karl promised to send me another pair of sunnies. Things were looking up, until I received an e-mail ten minutes later saying my replacement order had been cancelled as, guess what, the sunglasses were now out of stock!
I’m genuinely curious, has anyone ever had a good experience with Sports Direct??
Argh passports. Be careful with the renewal of small children (?<13) as you DO need their photos revalidated by an approved person, whereas you don’t for older kids, which I fell foul of. They’ve changed the list of people who can confirm identity too 😫