So, I haven’t even blogged about the weekend in Paris, strangely I managed to upload the photos almost as soon as I returned but I kept putting off saying something because I wasn’t quite sure what to say and in my head I had the notion to construct something worthwhile, to do it justice.  I will do that but for the moment let me just say that I spent a very enjoyable weekend in the company a finer group of stranger you could care to meet.  The bloggers in question were Jenny, Claire and David and each brought a friend, or in David’s case his charming wife.  I invited Tanja, possibly the strangest 5th date but I think she enjoyed it.  In case you are new here the weekend was courtesy of the Comité Régional du Tourisme of Paris Ile-de-France as a result of a piece I blogged about back in December, the original trip was postponed due to the problems Eurostar had dealing with the wrong type of snow. Anyway, as I said, I’ll return to Paris at a later date…

Last week I attended the monthly London Bloggers Meet-up which was sponsored by Greene King IPA.  They’ve introduced a new fan-dangled pump dispenser that gives you either a Northern or a Southern style pint.  Now, I have to say, I’m not an ale drinker.  Until a few years ago I wasn’t even a lager drinker. Cider and Guinness were my pint sized tipples of choice.  So I felt a little strange appearing to be the only person drinking lager at the event but I finally relented and tried the IPA; obviously I had to have 2 pints, 1 Northern and 1 Southern just to compare.

As it happens the ale wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I’d tried drinking it many years ago but just couldn’t get over the feeling that I was drinking flat beer.  As I write this out I’m actually enjoying a glass of Greene King’s Ruddles Ale which was included in a very generous goodie bag.  I discovered that the bottled ales are carbonated and this therefore reminded me of McEwans Export which I used to drink when I lived in Glasgow.  Maybe it’s the bubbles that make it more palatable to me?  Anyway, I’ll probably write separately about Greene King as I have a stack of info on the new dispenser and they’ve offered a tour of the brewery so I may take them up on that and blog about the whole thing as one.

Finally, tonight I was very fortunate enough to attend a preview screening of the new Spike Jonze short film I’m Here which was done in collaboration with ABSOLUT vodka.  You may recall I wrote about it earlier this month. All I can say is it was awesome!  It won’t be released on the website until 1 March so obviously I can’t tell you too much about the story other than you MUST watch it!

I enjoyed everything about it, from the music to the story to the conversation afterwards with Chrissie as we shared our thoughts and discussed the many layers Spike created in just 30 minutes.  The venue for our screening was the basement of a car park and it was terrific, from the bubble-wrap carpet to the cardboard boxes that revealed self inflating mattresses just prior to the screening, Chrissie and I were very rebellious and chose to sit on the cardboard boxes instead, took me back to the gruesome 2 weeks I spent sleeping in the one under the Royal Free Hospital, only this time ABSOLUT had provided some cocktails.

There were even the obligatory ad-men prats who sat on shooting sticks, probably so coked up they didn’t realise they were not being hip, cool and trendy and people weren’t looking at them enviously, only as a re-affirmation of how their lives weren’t as bad as they thought the were!

So, that’s me more or less caught up with things, I’m sure I’ve missed a thing or two but c’est la vie!

I ordered a box of cigars from a company in Switzerland on Friday 15 January, I’ve ordered from them before so they were not unknown to me.  I received confirmation of my order and notification that they would be posted to me on the next working day, on Monday 18 I received a further email saying the package had been sent together with details of the Swiss Post tracking number, I logged on the next day, Tuesday 19 January and there it confirmed that it was in the system. So far, so good.  Then it all went wrong…

After being posted on 19 January my package went on a bit of a mystery tour

19.01.2010      10:32   Mailed – (Swiss Post have got it)

20.01.2010      02:14   Arrival at border point of country of  mailing Zürich (Here it arrives at the Swiss Border)

20.01.2010      02:14   Departure from border point of country of  mailing Zürich (Here it leaves the Swiss Border)

20.01.2010      15:16   Arrival at border point of destination country (Here it arrives in the UK)

At this point I have a look on Royal Mail’s tracker and get very confused when it advises me that Royal Mail has received my package and is preparing it for delivery abroad. Huh? NO! I shout at the screen, I don’t want you to deliver it abroad, I want you to deliver it to me! Suspecting those highly efficient postmen at Royal Mail had returned it, for whatever reason, to Switzerland I kept an eye on Swiss Post’s tracker, sure enough it was updated again.

24.01.2010      13:21   Arrival at border point of destination  country (Here I suspect it arrived in Switzerland)

Figuring those smart Swiss postman would realise that the delivery address was in London UK and not Switzerland I waited for it to return and sure enough the tracker was updated.

27.01.2010      17:57   Arrival at border point of destination  country (Déja-vu? Here it arrives back in the UK)

OK, so now I figure it’s back in the UK and Royal Mail’s tracker tells me it’s been received but them more confusion when I look at the Swiss Post site because it tells me that…

28.01.2010      07:50   Delivered (Delivered to where? Certainly not my office!)

I have a look at Royal Mail’s site over the weekend and it seems to suggest it’s been delivered to the delivery office but I wait a few days and still nothing so on Wednesday 3 February I brave Royal Mail’s customer service telephone line and endure 6 minutes of button pressing and inane announcements until I finally get to speak to a real human being.

The incredibly helpful gent I spoke with looked up the package number and confirmed what I had suspected, it had arrived in the UK and for some reason had been sent back to Switzerland before being sent back to the UK.  Why he couldn’t explain but he could tell me it had been delivered that day.  Hold on a minute I said, It can’t have been delivered because  I haven’t received it hence my telephone call?! It’s in your PO Box he told me.  A PO Box I don’t have… Swiss Post’s tracker was updated that evening…

03.02.2010      11:54   Delivered (To the EC OFFICIAL PDO)

As far as he could tell no one had collected the package so he would make a request that it went from the office that was holding it to the delivery office, he gave me a call reference number and the telephone number of the delivery office.  It seemed that I was getting close, close but no cigar!  I called the delivery office who stated they should have it the following day, if I call back then they’d be able to tell me if they had it.  I did, they didn’t.  It was still in the PO Box in the Mount Pleasant sorting office they told me, give them a call.

I then called the Mount Pleasant office and spoke to a relatively helpful guy who complained that the delivery office were always giving out the sorting office number to the public when they should be dealing with the queries themselves. He punched in the tracking number only to tell me it didn’t exist, despite me entering it at the exact same time on the Royal Mail website and reading out to him that it had been delivered to the EC OFFICIAL PDO the previous day. Yes, that’s here he said but my system isn’t recognising it, call customer service and they’ll be able to track it down… At this point I had to go make a cup of tea as I was getting just ever so slightly annoyed.  Little did I know what was to come!

Here’s the screen shots from both Swiss Post and Royal Mail’s tracker, sadly Royal Mail’s overwrites itself so I can’t show you the earlier messages.

So, at this stage I know my package is sitting in a PO Box, probably the Custom & Excise Departments, in the Mount Pleasant delivery/sorting office.

Google Maps estimate that it would take me 24 minutes to walk the 1.2 miles to get there, probably the same time as the 38 bus from Charing Cross Road.

Again, I punch buttons, listen to messages and finally get a human voice.  This is voice was one of the rudest, arrogant and dare I say most obnoxious people I have spoken to in a number of years.  I started to explain the problem, I gave him the call reference number of my previous call and asked him if he could contact the Mount Pleasant office to find out what was causing the delay with my package.  The voice then proceeded to tell me that there was nothing he could do for me as I wasn’t Royal Mail’s customer! I was a little taken aback and tried to reason with him, I should have known better, by repeating that I had spoken to numerous people, had the problem logged in the system but the voice was adamant, “How much did you pay to post the package from Switzerland?” When I stated I didn’t post it, he repeated mantra number 1, “As you are not our customer, you need to contact the sender and have them contact Swiss Post who will then contact us and we’ll discuss it with them.”

I got tired of going around in circles so I asked to speak with his supervisor, here came the voice’s mantra number 2, “That’s not gonna happen” Huh?! I was gobsmacked, so I asked why to which the voice repeated mantra number 1.  I then asked for the call reference number for my conversation with him to which I got mantra number 2, “That’s not gonna happen” I then foolishly asked for his name so that I could make a complaint to which he replied, can you guess? Yes, I kid you not… “That’s not gonna happen” when I queried this he told me he was not obliged to give me his name.

Now, I should explain that I once worked for Royal Mail, in their customer service call centre in Islington no less and I had the misfortune of working alongside people just like the voice. They knew they could pretty much get away with saying anything they liked to customers because they were only obliged to give out their first name and most staff used false ones, technically frowned upon but a blind eye was usually turned on those rare occasions when they were found out. You might call it an abuse of power, I couldn’t possibly comment.

So, when I told the voice that he was required to at least give me his first name he told me it was Ben, true or untrue is anyone’s guess.  When I stated that I fully intended to make a complaint, in the vain hope that the much fabled ‘recorded calls’ existed, I could hear the smirk in his voice and he was no doubt thinking, “That’s not gonna happen!”

Now, I do know that the recording of calls are kept but without knowing which call centre your call is passed to you’re really hoping for miracles that anyone is going to listen to the hours of conversation to find yours, nevertheless I pressed on. I recalled how the call centre managers hated having to listen through them when complaints were made so nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say…

After another cup of tea I searched the Royal Mail website for a way to make a complaint and eventually found an online form which I completed, going over the whole sorry saga, giving them the package number, the call reference number and the approximate time of my call to Ben on 5 February.  On 8 February I received the following reply:

Thank you for your recent e-mail about an item you are expecting from overseas.

I would like to explain that under the Universal Postal Agreement, any enquiries regarding your item have to be initiated in the country of origin. May I therefore suggest that you contact the senders and ask them to provide their postal administration with the posting details. This will enable an investigation to be made from the point of posting.

My colleague was correct to advise you that he could not log your call as we cannot investigate items that are sent from abroad as the tracking information and posting details are held with them.

I’m very sorry to hear of your recent experience with one of our colleagues. Our employees are trained to a high standard and receive continuous coaching, with a strong customer focus – so I apologise if you did not receive the high standards of service that we attain to on this occasion.

I have passed the details of your complaint onto the relevant manager to action accordingly.

Please be assured that we take our customers feeling let down seriously and will use this information to make further improvements.

Thank you for your e-mail and if we can be of any more help, please contact us again.

Regards
Nicola Gavin
Customer Service Advisor

So it seems Ben was right, even though Royal Mail’s system shows it has been delivered to a Royal Mail controlled PO Box in London, Royal Mail don’t have any tracking information on it because it was sent from abroad and as such the call can’t be logged, which would of course have indicated just who Ben was. However feeling a little hot under the collar I replied the following day, Tuesday 9 February:

Dear Nicola

Thank you for your email in response to the complaint I logged via your website.

I note with interest your comments that I should refer my query regarding the whereabouts of the package sent to me to the sender in Switzerland. I find it difficult to accept that when Royal Mail’s online tracker shows it has been delivered to a PO Box within London (only after Royal Mail attempted to deliver it back to the country of origin the same day it arrived) that no one in Royal Mail is ‘allowed’ to assist me in tracing it.

This is all the more apparent as it would seem that 4 or 5 staff members have breached these guidelines when they assisted me in tracing it and also logged it onto the system, under the reference number xxxxx that I previously mentioned.

It seems absurd that in order to try and have it delivered from the delivery office that is holding it I have to contact the sender in Switzerland who in turn has to contact Swiss Post in order to contact yourselves. Quite where the customer service benefit lies in this is anyone’s guess.

I note that your response does not make any mention of your colleague’s refusal to allow me to speak with one of his supervisors. Am I to believe that this is also Royal Mail’s customer service policy?

In short I am still not satisfied with your response to my complaint and if this email is not sufficient to ‘re-open’ it, please advise what steps I need to make.

On Friday 12 February I received the following reply:

Thank you for your further contact with Royal Mail.

I am sorry to learn that you were dissatisfied with my colleague’s previous response.

Having reviewed the details of your claim, my manager and I feel that our colleague dealt appropriately with your complaint. Therefore, I cannot change the original decision or take any further action outside of that already taken on your behalf.

If you are still unhappy with this decision or have any other questions regarding our complaints procedure, you can access further information any time via our website at www.royalmail.com/customerservices, where you can also view the terms and conditions of our services.

Regards

Evelyn Thomson
Customer Service Advisor

So, I’ve contacted the sender to ask them to contact Swiss Post to have them contact Royal Mail to find out why my package has sitting in one of their PO Boxes since 28 January.  In the meantime I’m building up the courage to navigate Royal Mail’s complaints procedure though I’m not sure why I’m bothering as they’ll no doubt send me a reply consisting of a few copy and paste standard paragraphs assuring me that they have taken my complaint seriously but at the end of they day they have done no wrong…

To be continued…

VBS.TV have a new feature coming out on 12 February which is a love story of an altogether different kind.  Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. It also examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.

The film is co-directed and produced by Vice UK’s editor Andy Capper and Mike Leigh’s son, Leo and was filmed between Spring to Winter 2009 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.

Focussing on Amy & Cornelius, Lee & Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills; Andy and Leo following them around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse, they fall in and out of love and you get to meet their families and drugs workers.   You also get to meet their drug dealers as well as members of Swansea’s mining and docker community who talk about how the city has changed.  In place of industry there are bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets and racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.

Here’s a short trailer for the film which will be released over 6 days from 12 February 2010 only on VBS.TV

However, if I tell you that the film is a 30 minute love story by film maker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, Human Nature, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak) you may not be too surprised to learn that the film in question, I’m Here, is actually a love story featuring two robots.  Yes, robots fall in love too!

The film came about when ABSOLUT approached Spike and asked him to make a film and then gave him full creative control to make the film he wanted to make. Throw in an original score by Sam Spiegel and you know you’re going to see something good.

“It was a pretty incredible opportunity,” says Jonze. “They (ABSOLUT) didn’t give me any requirements to make a movie that had anything to do with vodka. They just wanted me to make something that was important to me, and let my imagination take me wherever I wanted.”

Spike’s first love story premièred as part of the first-ever Opening Night’s Shorts Program at the Sundance Film Festival and will be shown at the Berlin Film Festival before being shown, in it’s entirety, on-line at www.imheremovie.com from 1 March 2010 but just for you I have a sneaky peak clip that those nice people at ABSOLUT sent me.

If you check the website just now there is an opportunity to get tickets to see the film at exclusive screenings on the big screen and as with most thing’s there is of course the obligatory blog.  So, whatever you’re doing from 1 March be sure to leave 30 minutes aside to sit back and enjoy what promises to be a very interesting love story.  Mr Omneo can’t wait!

Like a lot of people here in the UK, I was in last minute panic mode because I had decided to leave doing my tax return until the last 10 days before the deadline for submission.  My brain knows that it would be so simple to just do all the paperwork at the end of each month so that submitting my return will be a breeze but does it listen to itself? Of course not!  So I had a marathon session with a years worth of receipts and bank statements and finally crunched the numbers, filed it on-line and bit the bullet and paid the tax man what I owed…ouch!  Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not going through all that again so it’s definitely going to be month by month from now on, I only have a few months left before it’s technically time to do it all again!

One of the things I’ve been really keen to blog about is the documentary that’s been running over on VBS.TV, The Vice Guide to Liberia.  Now, you may or may not know much about Liberia, I certainly didn’t know much.  I roughly knew that there was talk of child soldiers who took drugs and what I assumed was media hyped tales of human sacrifices.  One of the reasons Liberia is back in the news, in some places, is due to the ongoing trial of former Liberian President and accused war criminal Charles Taylor at The Hague.  So it seemed appropriate for VBS.TV to release their documentary on what life is really like out there and boy is it scary!

The documentary has been released in 8 episodes and is probably not for the squeamish.  To give you an example of what I mean there’s one scene where a kid of around 13 holds up the heart, freshly removed, from a Liberian General and proudly proclaims that he’s going to eat it.  Yes, this is real life!  They sacrifice innocents (young children) and drink their blood before going into battle, fired up after smoking heroin and cocaine.  Brixton and Croydon seem like nursery school in comparison!  Here’s a little taster of what you can expect.  It’s compelling viewing.

Now, I know that’s quite depressing but fear not, let me end on a slightly more upbeat note. I went along to Gloom Aid which was a charity night in aid of the Depression Alliance.  I swear I’ve never laughed as much as I did that night, after 5hrs of comedy and music my jaws were aching from laughing.  People who know Mr Omneo know he doesn’t laugh a lot so you can be sure it was funny!  I particularly loved Angelos Epithemiou who I had never heard of before, likewise Frisky and Mannish had be howling with laughter so get along and see both of them if you can!