Appeal Accepted - Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) Cancelled

As per my previous blog post, on Saturday (despite paying for my parking using my mobile phone) I found a Penalty Charge Notice stuck on the window of my car.

It was the first (and last) time I had parked in the St Andrew's Parade car park in Kettering.

I'm please to say that the matter has now been resolved as I have received an email saying the Penalty Charge Notice has been cancelled and they apologised for any inconvenience and stress caused.  Although the charge has been dropped and the matter is closed, I wont be returning to this car park and I certainly wont be paying using my mobile phone as I can no longer trust this payment method.

St Andrews Parade Car Park - Kettering

DO NOT PARK HERE

If you ignore my warning then BEWARE - do not use your mobile phone to purchase a parking ticket as not only will you pay an extra 45p for doing so but (if like me) you will end up with a bill for £70.

This is a relatively new car park and up until now I've always driven past it.  Yesterday I decided to park my car in it as it was pretty much empty and to be honest I can now see why...

I didn't have any change on me at the time so I was pleased to see you could sign up to Dash Parking and pay using your mobile phone.

I downloaded the free iPhone App, registered and then paid for my ticket.

Halfway through shopping I decided to drop off the couple of carrier bags I had to my car before I continued what I was doing and to my horror when I returned to my car I had a £70 parking ticket stuck on my window.

I immediately called the number on the back of the ticket to explain their mistake but I was told they only collect payments at the weekend and I would have to call back on Monday!

I have an invoice in my email and a screen-shot of the text I received confirming that I have paid for my parking yet they still gave me a ticket - it seems they may have the technology to allow you to pay by phone but they don't seem to have the technology to check it.

NOT happy, NOT impressed and will NEVER park here again or use Dash Parking ever again as £70 to park is far too expensive.

:(

**UPDATE**

I've had a response from the company involved, you can read all about it by clicking this link:

St Andrew's Parade Update

LoveFilm 6 Month Subscription

The other day I came across a special offer on Amazon for a 6 Month Subscription to LoveFilm for around £35 which is an absolute bargain!

The subscription should be with me by the middle of the week so by the time I've created my LoveFilm account and selected items I want to rent I should be watching a couple of new DVDs by the weekend (hopefully).

LoveFilm have a reputation when it comes to their special offers.  If you are so much as 1 second late in cancelling then you have to pay full price for another month before they end the subscription.

The Internet is littered with tales of disgruntled customers, some fall foul of the notice period you need to give them to cancel and some mention shoddy salespeople not telling them the full story when they stop them in shopping centres.

They're now owned by Amazon so I would like to think that they have cleaned their act up now.  Needless to say when the paperwork arrives in the post I will be reading the terms and conditions very, very carefully and making a note of any important dates on my calendar.

Why Do We Put Up With Poor Customer Service In The UK?

In 2010 when Best Buy opened its first UK Store I thought great!  We'll now have an electrical store that has as its best selling point, excellent customer support and technical knowledge.

Sadly at the end of 2011 they announced that they were closing all their UK stores and would no longer be trading in the UK.

It seems that we don't want good customer service and we are happy to carry on with the poor customer service we tend to receive in the UK.


At the moment we're having a new kitchen installed so we've been out buying a couple of electrical appliances.

Times are tough at the moment in the Retail Sector so we decided to support a locally run shop that has a reputation for good customer service.

Within 2 days of our brand new Fridge Freezer having been delivered the Frost-Free freezer section from Frosting up so we called Supervision and was told to call Hoover.  We rang Hoover who said it would cost us £100 plus parts to fix the problem.

ITS TWO DAYS OLD AND THEY WANT TO CHARGE US TO FIX IT!!


We went back to Supervision who MOANED at us because they would have to sort this out with Hoover which is a painful process for them.

We had to threaten legal action before they would finally do something about - they didnt want to repair it and gave us our money back instead - they didnt even appologise and offer to sell us something else, clearly they are doing so well at the moment they can turn away customers and their money.

I would stronly recomment that you DO NOT BUY from SUPERVISION as despite their website claiming "Excellent Customer support" their customer service is appauling.

We need to buy an under-the-counter Freezer as well so not only have they lost out on one sale, but two.

We ended up buying a Fridge Freezer from Currys and the small Freezer from Comet.

Both of these have a fantastic Customer Services department at their Head Offices that are just one phone call away and whenever we've had problems with them in the past (and there have only been 1 or 2 over the years) they have always sorted them out straight away and we have purchased several items from them again because of this.

We will NEVER be shopping at Supervision again and strongly recommend that you don't either, unless of course you like poor customer service.

Goodbye Safari, Hello FireFox!

I've been using Safari for a couple of years now and I've been reluctant to change as I didn't think that one particular feature that I liked was available in FireFox.  What feature I hear you ask, well let me tell you, it's the Top Sites feature.

 
It's a fairly simple idea, but also very useful - so useful in fact that I put up with the odd website taking ages to load (and sometimes fail to load at all).

One website in particular that it struggles with, is my own website and today I finally got fed up with it and after spending less than two minutes on Google I found a FireFox add-on called Speed Dial...

After installing the latest version of FireFox I went on to the Add-Ons site and searched for Speed Dial, I then clicked on the Add To FireFox button, restarted FireFox and hey presto!  Speed Dial was now installed.  A few minutes later I had added all of my Top Sites from Safari (just by copying and pasting the URLs).

Then I realised that you can have 'tabs' (known as Groups in the Add-On) so just like you have tabs in your browser, I can now have tabs with all my top sites!

If only I had bothered to spend a couple of minutes searching on Google a year ago...