A few more brickbats and bouquets

It has been a while since I did one of these but I am feeling a bit cranky in the heat so it is time.

A first bouquet goes to Country Energy. They are our provider of electricity and are generally excellent people to deal with. The particular episode that gets them a bouquet was when our supply crapped out in a thunderstorm. It was a big storm so they had lots of folk to attend to, but their guys turned up at 23:15 and after working through a few options found that the problem was a circuit breaker not being reset (by me). No aggro just a pleasant "there is nothing on the breaker to tell you how to reset it , see you later". Excellent work ethic and PR. They have been included in a "Thank you" note to CE (to which they gave a very nice rply).

The first brickbat goes to whoever manufactured said circuit breaker. As far as I can see no-one else in the area has ones that require the switch to be flicked fully down to reset it.

Needless to say petrol companies get a large serve for setting the price of unleaded at $1.249 per litre on the weekend of 1 February. I presume they have realised that a lot of folk will be getting back from hols with ACT schools starting on Monday and are gouging as per usual.

Also on the petrol front Woolworths get a large bouquet. I got an email from them saying that due to a promotion I'd got a 7c a litre discount voucher loaded to my loyalty card. There were two problems with this:
  • I hadn't taken part in the program in question; and (perhaps not surprisingly)
  • the voucher hadn't been loaded to my card!
However, on raising this with Woolies (thinking the email might have been a virus transmitter) they said "oops sorry our mistake" and then gave me the discount voucher anyway!

My ISP (Netspace) and TELSTRA get a joint faecal award. Our landline crapped out shortly after the thunderstorm which caused the electricity issue. I reported this to Netspace (from whom we also purchase voice services) on 23 January. They said there would be a delay because of the public holiday on 26 January. On 1 February I was eventually able to find out from Netspace that a TELSTRA techo would be round on 3 February to investigate the issue. Far Canal: if said techo finds out it is a problem inside the house we will have further delays in trying to get a techo to come and service our bit of the system.

This causes me to think that the CEO of TELSTRA is a guy called Sol with slicked hair and a Fuhrer style mo. Castrol used to use an ad featuring a mafioso and a dumb offsider. The mafioso had slicked hair and a Fuhrer style mo while the stupid offsider was called Sol. Obviously the genetic engineering module of TELSTRA has combined some attributes of the two entities - not including the mob connection - to create their CEO.

This leads on to a HUGE BOQUET for Ray Crome, of Crome Electronics. He was the techo we asked to come and check things out after Telsttra and Netspace couldn't find a problem on their bit. ray fronted within 18 hours of being contacted (rather than the 13 days it took Telstra) and in an hour had found the problem and fixed it. He also charged very reasonably. What a King!

A further bouquet goes to Craig Wisdom of Kingston Physiotherapy. After two months of gradually increasing decripitude - getting to me not being able to run for more than 100m without my hamstring seizing up - I took myself off to Craig. After a bit of massage and some good advice about stretching I was able to run 3km for the ACT Vets Handicap on 22 February and come across the line first (unfortunately not being eligible for any awards in that event).!

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