Arantor
Well-known member
- Joined
- 24 May 2022
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Well, I didn't expect to be posting *this* from a hotel this evening but there you go.
So, a few weeks back we bought a new mattress. There was one hitch: the delivery company wouldn't take the old mattress (since different vendor), and since it's a super-king-size (6' by 6'6" / 180x200) mattress, we don't exactly have anywhere to store it... so I arranged for collection of the old mattress on the same day as the new mattress.
This was Thursday.
Collection happened as ordered. Delivery, on the other hand... they apparently came to the door, rang the doorbell, got no answer, phoned the landline, got no answer, rang my mobile, got no answer, and so left.
What *actually* happened is that they went to the wrong address, and of course got no answer. Then they rang the *wrong* landline because the number they had written down had transposed the first two digits. Then they rang my mobile and I was in a meeting with my boss so I couldn't just answer it. But this counted as a failed delivery and I was told - quite rudely - that they would call me back with a new delivery date. But only once I'd called them to find out what was going on. Delivery was supposed to be about 10.30am apparently, I called them at 11.30am.
I sent them an email a little after 12 to follow up (so paper trail), with a 'if there's any way to pay for expedited service for them to come back, e.g. covering your fuel and labour costs, I'm happy to talk about that'. But no, and after I called up again at 2pm to get some kind of status non-update, I was told I'd get a notification in 2-4 working days as to when redelivery would be.
Note that I'm now facing an indeterminate amount of time without a mattress to sleep on.
We phone the mattress vendor, ask them if there's anything *they* can do, they say they'll call and see what they can do.
We figure, for Thursday night, we can slum it on the sofa/floor/whatever in the hopes the vendor will kick them up the butt.
Friday morning, vendor has managed to get someone to actually a) answer the phone at the delivery company and b) give us an update, and we get a notification that it'll be Monday morning.
Urgh. FINE. Whatever.
So we resolve ourselves to 'I'm not sleeping on the floor/sofa/whatever', and we look at hotels. We live in Brighton, the entire seafront is hotels and seafood places, so finding somewhere at short notice won't be a problem, it's just a 'wish I didn't have to'.
We pick a place that seems nice enough, book in for 3 nights, and while this is going on, my partner's laptop has a moment, powers down, powers back up and there's now a confused Booking.com acknowledgement of 'change of dates', instead of Friday->Monday, it's now thinking it'll be Friday->Saturday. But we figure we'll sort it out at the hotel if there's a problem, and so we get to the hotel - it's like 15 minutes walk from our house - and they have it down as 3 nights. Fine. We also figure that since we're in this position we might as well treat it like a mini-break so we load up on our laptops etc. to settle in for a weekend of gaming.
What's less fine, however, is that we're on the fifth floor, and the lift is out. (And, as we later learned, it was the 10th or 11th time this year it was out.)
But you know what? A room's a room. We haul our stuff up the 5 windy flights of stairs, drop them off, head down again (ooof) and go and get some food. We eat at a lovely Greek place we haven't been to since the Before Times and stumble back to our room up the stairs and sort of collapse on the bed in a heap and fart around with iPads for a bit.
Then we try to plug them in to charge them for the night. Nope. What about a cup of tea before bed? Nope. It's funny, my partner was like 'will they have a kettle? I don't know what I'll do if they don't have a kettle'. I reassured here that every little B&B or hotel I'd ever stayed at had a little kettle with teabags for a cuppa. And they did - just the kettle didn't have go-go juice and I hear kettles like that.
We phone down to reception and the guy gave us the most IDGAF attitude of "Well, there's nothing we can do" - not even, say, "nothing we can do tonight" (because it was quite late) but "nothing we can do, sorry". We go to bed grumpy.
Saturday morning, we get up, head downstairs with our bags, head down to reception with 'we'd like someone to look at this please' and a not-so-subtle 'if it can't be fixed, we'll either need another room or we'll go elsewhere'. An evening without devices is annoying, but essentially 2+ days? No. It wouldn't even matter if we weren't playing games, the amount of digital travelling out there, you can't not have a charge point for a phone or similar.
They took a look, figured out it was a fuse and fixed it. Meanwhile we went and had hotel breakfast.
Sigh. So, they asked if we wanted tea or coffee - we both said tea, and they asked if we wanted apple or orange juice, and we both asked for apple juice.
Well, we got apple juice alright, but the tea? I'm still not sure if it was tea-flavoured coffee, or coffee-flavoured tea but it wasn't breakfast tea like we'd asked for.
As for breakfast... my partner ordered pancakes with yoghurt and fresh fruit - my reaction was "did you want some pancakes with your yoghurt?" and I ordered the full English. They asked what kind of egg, scrambled, fried or poached - I wanted fried. What I got looked like a boiled plastic bag with a yellow blob in it that charitably could have been called poached.
I *could* have sent this all back but honestly... I didn't care enough at this point. I knew I'd have to deal with going back up 5 flights of stairs and I wasn't sure I wanted to risk a second round of 'breakfast'.
So we trekked back up to the room, and started to unpack laptops for gaming, and my partner found she hadn't packed her mouse. She did valiantly try to drive Guild Wars 2 without a mouse, but she's not a keyboard-first kinda person and honestly, with the day we had in mind, mouse was pretty essential, so I hauled my butt back to the flat to pick up her mouse, a change of clothes (because all the stairs had got me pretty icky) and I swung by the supermarket on the way back for some actual lunch.
The actual afternoon was pretty chill, we had a solid day of gaming, doing a few big events in GW2, picking up some achievements we've had kicking around for ages (years in some cases), we had fun. I noted that my key didn't work in the door but since I went out on my own, my partner could let me in.
Then we made the mistake of thinking perhaps we'd like some dinner. The hotel's website had mentioned that they had pizza in the bar, so what the hell, get a drink, get a pizza, ignore the football... well, it was frozen pizza reheated (not entirely perfectly) but it was edible I guess. Thus ended Saturday with a vague unsettled feeling. (And I'd gotten my key refreshed.)
Sunday came, we decided we'd just sleep in and not even bother with breakfast - but I had to pop out and collect my meds from the pharmacy, and while I was at reception, I asked if there was a problem with the reservation, because my key had stopped working again since the night before. (This time I had the sense to try it before going downstairs just in case.)
Especially since on Sunday morning I'd had a 'thanks for staying, please rate the hotel' email from Booking.com and a 'welcome to your stay, your reservation is from Friday to Saturday' meaning that the booking confirmation was sent to me (again) after my stay had ended. Good job! But no, none of that had been sent to the hotel, it wasn't that my card was locked out because actually computer says no, but simply because it's super super sensitive to being demagnetised by wallet contents and not because Booking.com had finally caught up with the hotel and decided we were only staying one night. I had also had other reason to wonder: housekeeping hadn't been through the hotel to make the bed, refresh the linen or the drinks thing. I had really began to wonder if actually they thought we were only staying the one night.
Anyway, we put up with the nonsense on Sunday, we don't even bother going out for dinner in the end - since my trip to the pharmacy had also coincided with a trip to the supermarket for food.
Monday morning (this morning) we were out of there by 7:20am and couldn't make our way home quickly enough.
I had my phone out, charged, waiting for what was going on. The delivery slot was 10am-1pm and I wanted the mattress to be here so this weird little episode would end and just be a funny story.
Nope.
1pm came and nothing. I played phone tag with the delivery company a couple of times, the story at 1pm is that 'they're probably just running late and it'll probably be 30-40 minutes, if not call us back'. Sure enough, 1:50 I call back because still nothing. This time, the guy tells me he's not sure what's going but he'll find out and call me back.
Maybe 20 minutes later, he does, and tells me the vehicle has had a breakdown but a backup vehicle is on the way. He'll call me to let me know what's going on.
That call didn't come. Of course it didn't.
So my wife - who bought the mattress - phoned the vendor, trying not to cry out of frustration. She's at the point of 'well, it needs to be no later than Wednesday, I can't sleep on the floor, and I can't keep paying for hotels and if it's not here by Wednesday we can cancel the whole thing' - it needs to be by Wednesday because I'm out of the house Thursday-Saturday on a work trip, and if they deliver it, we have zero faith that they'll do anything than shove it in the hallway and leave ASAP. Assuming they even get it inside the building which I'm not convinced of.
But apparently it *will* be Wednesday. So we grudgingly book a hotel room (again, but a better one) for two nights.
This one has lifts. And it has... a door that doesn't let us in. We only _just_ got the keycards but nope.
But I wander back down with the lift, the reception guy is super apologetic and fixes it for me, and we get in and dump bags, grateful to have a room that has working electrical sockets without having to ask.
We set off downstairs for dinner and a drink - it's rare we both drink alcohol but today was a day we needed it. Then back up to the hotel room where I break out the laptop and start just trying to unwind.
Then the room door opens, apparently someone else also has a keycard to 201 because they've double booked the room by accident.
-sigh-
*violins play*
So, a few weeks back we bought a new mattress. There was one hitch: the delivery company wouldn't take the old mattress (since different vendor), and since it's a super-king-size (6' by 6'6" / 180x200) mattress, we don't exactly have anywhere to store it... so I arranged for collection of the old mattress on the same day as the new mattress.
This was Thursday.
Collection happened as ordered. Delivery, on the other hand... they apparently came to the door, rang the doorbell, got no answer, phoned the landline, got no answer, rang my mobile, got no answer, and so left.
What *actually* happened is that they went to the wrong address, and of course got no answer. Then they rang the *wrong* landline because the number they had written down had transposed the first two digits. Then they rang my mobile and I was in a meeting with my boss so I couldn't just answer it. But this counted as a failed delivery and I was told - quite rudely - that they would call me back with a new delivery date. But only once I'd called them to find out what was going on. Delivery was supposed to be about 10.30am apparently, I called them at 11.30am.
I sent them an email a little after 12 to follow up (so paper trail), with a 'if there's any way to pay for expedited service for them to come back, e.g. covering your fuel and labour costs, I'm happy to talk about that'. But no, and after I called up again at 2pm to get some kind of status non-update, I was told I'd get a notification in 2-4 working days as to when redelivery would be.
Note that I'm now facing an indeterminate amount of time without a mattress to sleep on.
We phone the mattress vendor, ask them if there's anything *they* can do, they say they'll call and see what they can do.
We figure, for Thursday night, we can slum it on the sofa/floor/whatever in the hopes the vendor will kick them up the butt.
Friday morning, vendor has managed to get someone to actually a) answer the phone at the delivery company and b) give us an update, and we get a notification that it'll be Monday morning.
Urgh. FINE. Whatever.
So we resolve ourselves to 'I'm not sleeping on the floor/sofa/whatever', and we look at hotels. We live in Brighton, the entire seafront is hotels and seafood places, so finding somewhere at short notice won't be a problem, it's just a 'wish I didn't have to'.
We pick a place that seems nice enough, book in for 3 nights, and while this is going on, my partner's laptop has a moment, powers down, powers back up and there's now a confused Booking.com acknowledgement of 'change of dates', instead of Friday->Monday, it's now thinking it'll be Friday->Saturday. But we figure we'll sort it out at the hotel if there's a problem, and so we get to the hotel - it's like 15 minutes walk from our house - and they have it down as 3 nights. Fine. We also figure that since we're in this position we might as well treat it like a mini-break so we load up on our laptops etc. to settle in for a weekend of gaming.
What's less fine, however, is that we're on the fifth floor, and the lift is out. (And, as we later learned, it was the 10th or 11th time this year it was out.)
But you know what? A room's a room. We haul our stuff up the 5 windy flights of stairs, drop them off, head down again (ooof) and go and get some food. We eat at a lovely Greek place we haven't been to since the Before Times and stumble back to our room up the stairs and sort of collapse on the bed in a heap and fart around with iPads for a bit.
Then we try to plug them in to charge them for the night. Nope. What about a cup of tea before bed? Nope. It's funny, my partner was like 'will they have a kettle? I don't know what I'll do if they don't have a kettle'. I reassured here that every little B&B or hotel I'd ever stayed at had a little kettle with teabags for a cuppa. And they did - just the kettle didn't have go-go juice and I hear kettles like that.
We phone down to reception and the guy gave us the most IDGAF attitude of "Well, there's nothing we can do" - not even, say, "nothing we can do tonight" (because it was quite late) but "nothing we can do, sorry". We go to bed grumpy.
Saturday morning, we get up, head downstairs with our bags, head down to reception with 'we'd like someone to look at this please' and a not-so-subtle 'if it can't be fixed, we'll either need another room or we'll go elsewhere'. An evening without devices is annoying, but essentially 2+ days? No. It wouldn't even matter if we weren't playing games, the amount of digital travelling out there, you can't not have a charge point for a phone or similar.
They took a look, figured out it was a fuse and fixed it. Meanwhile we went and had hotel breakfast.
Sigh. So, they asked if we wanted tea or coffee - we both said tea, and they asked if we wanted apple or orange juice, and we both asked for apple juice.
Well, we got apple juice alright, but the tea? I'm still not sure if it was tea-flavoured coffee, or coffee-flavoured tea but it wasn't breakfast tea like we'd asked for.
As for breakfast... my partner ordered pancakes with yoghurt and fresh fruit - my reaction was "did you want some pancakes with your yoghurt?" and I ordered the full English. They asked what kind of egg, scrambled, fried or poached - I wanted fried. What I got looked like a boiled plastic bag with a yellow blob in it that charitably could have been called poached.
I *could* have sent this all back but honestly... I didn't care enough at this point. I knew I'd have to deal with going back up 5 flights of stairs and I wasn't sure I wanted to risk a second round of 'breakfast'.
So we trekked back up to the room, and started to unpack laptops for gaming, and my partner found she hadn't packed her mouse. She did valiantly try to drive Guild Wars 2 without a mouse, but she's not a keyboard-first kinda person and honestly, with the day we had in mind, mouse was pretty essential, so I hauled my butt back to the flat to pick up her mouse, a change of clothes (because all the stairs had got me pretty icky) and I swung by the supermarket on the way back for some actual lunch.
The actual afternoon was pretty chill, we had a solid day of gaming, doing a few big events in GW2, picking up some achievements we've had kicking around for ages (years in some cases), we had fun. I noted that my key didn't work in the door but since I went out on my own, my partner could let me in.
Then we made the mistake of thinking perhaps we'd like some dinner. The hotel's website had mentioned that they had pizza in the bar, so what the hell, get a drink, get a pizza, ignore the football... well, it was frozen pizza reheated (not entirely perfectly) but it was edible I guess. Thus ended Saturday with a vague unsettled feeling. (And I'd gotten my key refreshed.)
Sunday came, we decided we'd just sleep in and not even bother with breakfast - but I had to pop out and collect my meds from the pharmacy, and while I was at reception, I asked if there was a problem with the reservation, because my key had stopped working again since the night before. (This time I had the sense to try it before going downstairs just in case.)
Especially since on Sunday morning I'd had a 'thanks for staying, please rate the hotel' email from Booking.com and a 'welcome to your stay, your reservation is from Friday to Saturday' meaning that the booking confirmation was sent to me (again) after my stay had ended. Good job! But no, none of that had been sent to the hotel, it wasn't that my card was locked out because actually computer says no, but simply because it's super super sensitive to being demagnetised by wallet contents and not because Booking.com had finally caught up with the hotel and decided we were only staying one night. I had also had other reason to wonder: housekeeping hadn't been through the hotel to make the bed, refresh the linen or the drinks thing. I had really began to wonder if actually they thought we were only staying the one night.
Anyway, we put up with the nonsense on Sunday, we don't even bother going out for dinner in the end - since my trip to the pharmacy had also coincided with a trip to the supermarket for food.
Monday morning (this morning) we were out of there by 7:20am and couldn't make our way home quickly enough.
I had my phone out, charged, waiting for what was going on. The delivery slot was 10am-1pm and I wanted the mattress to be here so this weird little episode would end and just be a funny story.
Nope.
1pm came and nothing. I played phone tag with the delivery company a couple of times, the story at 1pm is that 'they're probably just running late and it'll probably be 30-40 minutes, if not call us back'. Sure enough, 1:50 I call back because still nothing. This time, the guy tells me he's not sure what's going but he'll find out and call me back.
Maybe 20 minutes later, he does, and tells me the vehicle has had a breakdown but a backup vehicle is on the way. He'll call me to let me know what's going on.
That call didn't come. Of course it didn't.
So my wife - who bought the mattress - phoned the vendor, trying not to cry out of frustration. She's at the point of 'well, it needs to be no later than Wednesday, I can't sleep on the floor, and I can't keep paying for hotels and if it's not here by Wednesday we can cancel the whole thing' - it needs to be by Wednesday because I'm out of the house Thursday-Saturday on a work trip, and if they deliver it, we have zero faith that they'll do anything than shove it in the hallway and leave ASAP. Assuming they even get it inside the building which I'm not convinced of.
But apparently it *will* be Wednesday. So we grudgingly book a hotel room (again, but a better one) for two nights.
This one has lifts. And it has... a door that doesn't let us in. We only _just_ got the keycards but nope.
But I wander back down with the lift, the reception guy is super apologetic and fixes it for me, and we get in and dump bags, grateful to have a room that has working electrical sockets without having to ask.
We set off downstairs for dinner and a drink - it's rare we both drink alcohol but today was a day we needed it. Then back up to the hotel room where I break out the laptop and start just trying to unwind.
Then the room door opens, apparently someone else also has a keycard to 201 because they've double booked the room by accident.
-sigh-
*violins play*
And a continuing one, too. It's got so many bad things coming together at once that if this was a movie, one would say, "nah, too implausible", yet it's happening to you for real.
Even better that you love it!
Hopefully, it's just a nuisance cold and it will pass.....sigh.
