YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP!

Life is getting sillier by the day.

Insurance Industry

Earlier this year I booked a Thames Cruise in a holiday boat. Of course I was asked to take out travel insurance. I found a company on a price comparison website, and applied for insurance for the dates of this UK river cruise. Having completed all the questions on destinations, dates, health matters, etc., they took my money and sent my insurance policy.

Two weeks ago the ship company said they were being forced to make alterations to the boat to meet disability access regulations. Reluctantly they had to offer us alternative dates for the cruise. (Good news - at a discounted price!)

So I notified the travel insurance company of the new dates, whereupon they came back and said your insurance policy is invalid: we don't insure cruises in the UK. (Good news - they agreed to refund my money). Forgive me for wondering why they would issue me with a policy in the first place!

Power Industry

The glass front of our electricity meter got damaged a week or two back, by an electrician doing some re-wiring in our house. I notified the power company and they sent me a letter saying someone would call on 31st March to replace the meter, and it would be between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.

By 4.30 p.m. he hadn't turned up (though at some stage my wife had noticed a meter company van near the end of our road). We rang the power company and were told that the meter man had been unable to find our address. We asked what address they had given him, and it was incorrect. We were instructed to phone again in the morning to arrange a new date.

Next morning (after negotiating a 7-item phone menu list, and being held in a queue for 15 minutes) I was notified that the power company would have to notify the meter company of our correct address and this would take until the 7th June (!!!) Would I then please phone them again to arrange a new visit date. When Margaret Thatcher privatised the electricity and gas boards we were told that this would lead to much greater efficiency than the old nationalised industries were capable of.

Bathroom Equipment & Courier Industries

We are clearing out the bathroom, reorganising it, and fitting a new bathroom suite. The other week the new toilet unit was delivered. The cistern had two great chunks knocked out of it.

The suppliers sent a replacement. (Good news - very quickly). The cistern arrived in three broken pieces. I suggested to the supplier that they change their courier. The guy said, "We're on our third one now."

The next replacement was OK. Then the vanity unit (mirror and shelves above the wash basin) arrived. When I started to attach the three shelves to the back board, I found the holes drilled and plugged in the back edge of the shelves were set 96 mm apart, and the equivalent holes drilled in the back board were set 100 mm apart, and at three different distances from the left-hand edge of the board. Also one of the three shelves was marginally larger than the other two.

The replacement is awaited.

The UK Government IT Industry

The firm I work for uses a payroll and income tax program provided by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. After downloading a recent update to the program we couldn't get it to work.

We e-mailed the Help Desk, and they came back with this classic ..

Please be advised that we have identified that there is a bug in the
system which causes the CD-Rom not to function on the last day of any
moth which has 31 days. This should however have returned to normal
from the 1 April onwards.

Aside from the unbelievable concept of critical software that doesn't understand the days of the month, we couldn't help noticing that in their response they managed to mention the word bug and moth in the same sentence!

Enough of this nonsense. Onwards and upwards!