John Lewis: incompetent, unresponsive and dishonest

You may remember from last time that John Lewis failed to deliver our new dishwasher, didn’t even trouble to tell us that they weren’t coming, and wouldn’t prioritise getting it to us subsequently. Everything that’s happened since has made a bad situation worse. The upshot is that three full weeks after I placed my order, I am sitting at home, unable to go food-shopping, in the pathetic hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll do what we paid them for.

Catastrophic failure by John Lewis

Our old dishwasher died. Fair enough — it’s nine years old and has served us well. So we needed to order a new one. Having figured out what model I wanted, I did the comparison shopping, but chose not to go for the cheapest option: instead, I paid slightly more to order from John Lewis, because of their reputation for competence, professionalism and reliability.

Big mistake.

SPOILERS! In which I whine about Doctor Who again

It’s really not Doctor Who‘s fault at all this time.

But, oh boy, I am annoyed.

For tedious practical reasons, we weren’t able to watch Dark Water, the first part of the two-part series finale, on Saturday night when it came out. So instead we carefully avoided all information about it, and sat down as a family to watch it on Sunday afternoon.

And we thoroughly enjoyed it — the sense of mystery, the truly dark horror, the building tension, the series of carefully calibrated clues, and finally the reveal of exactly what the skeletons in the fishtanks were. A moment of shocking recognition, one of the high-points of the series.

Except that some genius at the BBC decided to use this image as the episode header on the iPlayer, so we all knew what was going to happen.

How unutterably rude Skype has become

I turned on my Macbook this morning to be greeted with this popup:

What the heck, Skype? That’s not how upgrades work. How unutterably rude you’ve become since Microsoft bought you.

Coincidence?

Replacement plate for Daewoo microwave

Wo own a cheap Daewoo-brand microwave oven, which I picked up at Lidl one time for (probably) £19.99. A few days ago, the glass plate that revolves in the middle of it broke. So Fiona phoned them up to see if we could order a replacement.

“Sure”, they said, “It’ll be with you on 17th October”.

Which is four months away.

??!

 

 

Dear charities: stop spamming me

And while I’m complaining …

Last night, I opened my big backlog of snail-mail. When I say “big” I mean that if I could have got it all to stand up in a single stack, it would have been between two and three feet high, and that I was up until 3:30am ploughing through it.

TalkTalk want £10 for a 13-month-old bill

I’m putting together my expenses for running the small home office where I do my work. One expense is my phone line. I went to the web-site of TalkTalk, my phone provider, only to find that they won’t show me the older bills unless I pay them £10: