Tag Archives: customer

Musings

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Interesting day in the shop. It started with me arriving early to find all the parking had gone, and as I parked to cause maximum possible inconvenience to the people using our spaces one left, which left me with a dilemma. Continue to cause maximum inconvenience, or grab the slot and secure a parking space for the day with no need to move or argue.

I decided to park in the newly available space. As it was, we had a customer later and he blocked the bad mannered parkers in, so the woman in the big black car was still put to some inconvenience when she wanted to move. This is good, as it may make her think twice about parking outside the shop again. However, I know it probably won’t, as most people who park in our spaces think they have some sort of right to do it. Like the one who told me “I pay my taxes . . .”

Until then I didn’t know you could pay a tax that allowed you to park where you want (I am, of course being sarcastic here, as we don’t).

Bamforth comic card

The photo has nothing to do with the subject of the blog but I saw it whilst searching and thought I’d put it in.

We had a couple of questions – one surprisingly clear and one, unsurprisingly, the ramblings of a man who appears to think e can fill in the gaps with our mind-reading skills. He wants to know if he can offer us £50 for a coin. Well, I can’t stop him. What he really means, in his woolly-headed way is is if we will accept £50 for a coin. Confused? Me too. Traditionally questions like this come with a little more information, like which coin. He has obviously got one in mind on a drop down menu. Coins on the menu start at £35. I would be happy to sell him a £35 coin for £50, but I don’t think that’s what he has in mind. Most of the coins on the menu are £85 to £100. I imagine that is what he is thinking of. If we were making so much money we could afford to offer that level of discount I’d have retired years ago.

Harlow Carr Gardens – this may be too ambitious as a retirement project, but you need to have ambition.

At this point my thoughts always turn to winning the lottery and installing bollards that go up and down so we could keep people out of our spaces. Of course, what I always miss in this scenario is that if  won enough money to even think about retractable bollards, parking at work would no longer be an issue. Actually, I just checked. You can buy a cheap bollard (retractable or folding) for as little a £60, though I wouldn’t really trust an eBay dealer with my security needs. Around £100 labour to fit, they say, but it’s probably more. It’s always more . . .

There are, of course, more expensive choices.

However, getting back to the main question – if I won a significant sum on the Lottery would I let it change my life. Yes, I certainly would. Now that I’m on the verge of retirement I am getting impatient. I’ve just been looking up garden sheds, greenhouses and raspberry canes. Once I get a flat and easy to maintain garden I am going to take more interest. There are too many steps and slopes in our current one.

It’s strange what a difference a few months makes. When I first realised it was looming I grew afraid of retirement. Now I can’t wait.

Fat Rascal at Harlow Carr. In retirement I am going to do more baking. I may even buy a mixer to do the difficult bits.

 

Gold £2 Coin 1995 End of WW2 Reverse

Day 137

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Arrived home at 4.30, crammed with good intentions. It is 8.44 now and the intentions, though still there, are starting to leak out slowly as I subside, like one of those faulty Christmas Santa decorations people have on their lawns at Christmas. All I’ve done is eat leftovers and buy something on eBay.  Eating leftovers is good, buying stuff on eBay is not quite so good. I am not short of stuff.

I was going to get some submissions sorted tonight and look up some recipes. So far I have watched several actors reciting poetry on You Tube. And this. OK, I’ve looked at a couple of on-line auction catalogues too. As I work in antiques and collectables this counts as Continuing Professional Development rather than wasting my life and filling the house with junk.

We had an interesting customer on eBay. He emailed us this morning. The gold medallion he ordered a couple of days ago ahs arrived and he is unhappy that it is so small. Our details included the information that it weighed half a gram, was 11mm in diameter and, as if that wasn’t enough, included a picture of it next to a ruler. There is a market for these tiny gold coins and medallions, though I’m puzzled why anyone would want one.

We don’t want him to be disappointed, so told him he was welcome to return it, though we did point out that we had been accurate in our listing.

So he decided to start an argument.

Time is money and we don’t get paid for spending time winning arguments, so we just ignored him. That seemed to annoy him even more so he launched another rant.

I really don’t know what makes some people tick.

Antidote to Happiness

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I had an interesting phone call today – someone trying to sell me “old coins”.

They were actually sets of football medallions from the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, which were sold or given away in supermarkets at the time. They are virtually worthless and even with the help of eBay they are almost unsaleable. We buy them if they come in with other things and even then we try to avoid them because they clutter the place up and encourage people to bring in even more useless junk.

Like Gresham’s Law, in which bad money drives out good, a shelf of unsaleable crap seems to just grow and grow until you become a junk shop rather than a coin shop. Actually, that’s more like Topsy, but I’m trying to sound intellectual.

I apologised, even though it’s not my fault, and said that we didn’t buy them. This started an argument as the caller pointed out that we were a coin shop and these were “over 30 years old” so we had to buy them. (As I write that, I realise they are only 20 years old).

I’d been in the middle of a tricky email, using Google Translate, to an idiot on eBay, and this new idiot had interrupted me, so I’m afraid I didn’t put things as tactfully as I might have done.

I could have been less blunt in telling him we had coins that were 2,000 years old so 30 years wasn’t a selling point.

But the problem really started when I told him they were medallions not coins. He couldn’t understand the difference. And I, unfortunately, was even less tactful in my explanation of why they weren’t coins. Well, to be fair to me, I was tactful on the first and second time I tried to explain it. I was, I admit, a bit sharp on my third attempted explanation. He just couldn’t grasp the ideas that not all round flat things are coins or that I was free not to buy them.

It ended with him shouting “I’m not an effing idiot you know!” and disconnecting the call. (I have altered the language slightly.)

Of course, he was wrong in that too, because he was an idiot.

After that, I went back to the email. We have an unhappy Spanish customer but we aren’t sure why. He has now sent us two messages in Spanish and the translation websites are struggling. I can’t work out what he is actually unhappy about – it seems that I got it wrong on my first attempt but his second email is no more help. I’ve composed a message using short sentences and very simple concepts in the hope that the translator won’t garble it.

No doubt we will sort it out one way or another.

This was probably the sort of day I needed as an antidote to my recent unusual happiness.

Stitches, Cloves and a Happy Ending

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Thursday started with a visit to the dentist. Again. The stitches were supposed to dissolve, but one set didn’t. They just sat there and refused to budge. I tried pulling them but the only result was a sore gum. They began to irritate my gum and cheek.

Eventually, as the pain became constant, and it started to feel like an abcess, I decided to contact the dentist. I’ve had dealings with abcesses before.  I’ve also had dealings with stitches before, though that was in my pre-blogging days.

I once had a set of stitches dissolve too quickly after a biopsy. It took two hours to stop the bleeding. Another time I had a set heal into my eyelid. That stung a bit when they came out. And then…

Well, let’s just say that I don’t do well with stitches.

After a bit of tugging and squeaking we got the stitches out (they were non-dissolving despite what I’d been told) and packed the socket with something that had a complicated scientific name.

Image result for cloves

It tasted bad and smelt like oil of cloves. It did, however, fix the infection – everything feels good now.

We had a good day today at work too – one of the customers brought us Cadbury Creme Eggs.

That’s all for now, but I’ll be back with more scone news in the next few days.

Mistakes…

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Did you know that the Cook Islands Dollar and the Isle of Man have some obverse designs that are almost identical on their coins? I didn’t until this morning.

However, after opening a complaint from a customer that got a Cook Islands Dollar featuring the Coronation coach when they had been expecting an Isle of Man Crown featuring the Coronation coach I am now well aware of the fact.

I used a general coin photo at the top, just to remind you how grim these things are.

A simple enquiry would have sufficed. It’s bad enough having to sort everything out without sarcastic demands for explanations. I have hundreds of irritatingly similar coins, I was in a hurry as the post office closes early on Saturday, I should have organised things better, I made a mistake. It’s the first time in approximately 700 parcels that I’ve sent the wrong thing out.

I waited a few minutes before responding to their sarky note. It’s better that way.

The man who rang later that afternoon was not so fortunate. As I sat brooding on my mistake and throbbing with toothache, he told me he was from British Telecom and he needed to access my computer…

To be honest, there’s something quite satisfying about being rude to a wannabe fraudster.