Hooray! Now it can pour down and I won't get washed off the internet! Telstra were here pretty early yesterday morning and the techie that fixed the line was a lovely fellow.
He had it all fixed up in no time, had Jane's phone line fixed too (the particular part that was damaged serviced both her place and mine) and fixed up a phone line for Ken (Jane's father). He lives in a studio apartment on the property and there was a phone line into his place but no phones would work on it. So this lovely guy had a look, fixed it up and gave Ken a free phone as well. Now that's service!
Jane is very happy that Ken now has a phone in his place because over Christmas he was very sick with vomiting and diarrhoea, plus had a very nasty urinary infection. He was so weak, he couldn't get up off the toilet. Fortunately, Jane went over for some reason and was able to help him into the shower and then to bed. Now that he has the phone (a cordless), he can have it with him all the time and if anything untoward happens again, he can contact either Jane or me.
Ken is a big man - stands 6' 5" and is one of those people that, at just turned 78, has no cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes or anything - he is not on a single medication. Jane and I are very jealous! He can eat whatever he likes and it makes not a jot of difference whereas poor Jane is like me, we have to be relatively careful (not that we have been lately!).
Anyway, I digress...Seeing that the Telstra techie was so helpful and such a lovely person, and everything is now running smoothly, I have recovered from my spack attack and decided not to invoice them. I probably wouldn't have been paid for it anyway, but I thought it might have given them a message.
However, I have another beef. My sister-in-law in New Zealand wanted some man-made frangipani stems so I put five stems aside for her and emailed her the price plus the rough exchange rate. She duly sent me a cheque (which took a fortnight to get here, rather than four days) and I banked it. To my annoyance, out of the $NZ110 I only received $A84.15, then looked closer at the conversion slip and the bank had taken $10 out for conversion, something that took about 30 seconds. Work it out, it's a pretty good hourly rate!
It doesn't end there. I was waiting for the cheque to clear - about 3 to 4 days, I thought, given it's an overseas cheque. Wrong! Thirty days - in this day and age, with the technology we now have, you'd think it would be more efficient. However, what the banks do, is put the money on the overseas money markets to get as much as they can from our money. There was something on TV about it some years ago. But even so, thirty days is a bit much for such an insignificant amount of money. Even though it's an overseas cheque, New Zealand is not Timbucktoo or Uzbekistan, where maybe it would take longer to process, it's just next door for goodness sake!
I am going to look into that and I have found the appropriate channels to query it - the bank and finance Ombudsman. So on Monday, that's what I'm going to do as a matter of principle.
So that's tantrum number 2!
I've just previewed this and Blogger makes no sense. Sometimes I get paragraphs and other times I don't. I can't figure it out because I don't do anything different.
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2 comments:
Robyn,
Whew, Glad you're back on line.
I always remember that banks are out to make money. If they're nice to me it means I'm giving them some dough in return. With the advent of internet banking, banks are trying to make money in ways never before tried. Have a go at if you must, but they'll probably charge you a fee for reviewing your complaint. ;-)
rel
Good on you, Robyn..go for the jugular! Thirty days is a ridiculous amount of time...and as for the charges, well...that is way, way over the top!
You know, you should still invoice Telstra for lost income etc., when your phones were down...they will give you a credit...they have done so a couple of times to a friend of mine when he has done similar.
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