Chris Meistre

These premium rated SMS numbers that you can send a message to and donate a certain amount to a charity is bullshit. I initially thought it’s a wonderful idea to get people to donate to charities. I mean, what’s easier than sending an SMS? People just don’t want to give money any more or go to the banks to do a payment for them.

How much of your money is really landing up at the charities though? Cellphone companies take between 50-60% of whatever money is recieved on the SMS number. That means when you donate R10, R4 of that is going the charity and R6 of that is going to enrich the lives of the cellphone company owners. If you donate R30, only R12 is going to the charity.

What’s worse is that you pay a setup cost, anything from R900 – R2500 and a monthly fixed fee of around R250 to have this number. The only people making money with this are the cellphone companies. We’re already making them rich with the high cellphone phone call rates we are charged, now they are basically stealing money from charities as well.

The next time you want to give money, rather keep your spare change and drop it in the many containers that are available around the city.

We took off the morning to sort out some personal things again.  It sometimes feels we need to do this in order just to get everything done!

Never have I experienced so much bad service from so many different companies than I did yesterday.

The Bad

Postnet – Greenacres

We were greeted with the most uninterested person after having stood around a bit.  To have a few A3 prints done, he told us to get into the queue to use the computers to do it ourselves.  There are 2 computers that were already busy with 2 people standing in the queue already.  I looked at the counter and saw 2 staff members standing around doing nothing.  How stupid is this I thought, as I’m sure they could do the printing for us instead of having us wait in a queue for people busy using the Internet!  Not wanting to spoil our mood we just decided to leave and go make use of another shop.

Fennel’s Appliance and Leisure – Newton Park

I wanted to find out more information on running a complete household, or at least as many appliances as possible, from gas sources.  We went into Fennel’s in Newton Park to check what they’ve got and get some advice.  They’ve got a nice show room and we saw that everything we would need would be available here.  After waiting about 10 minutes we got a lady to help us and explain various things to us.  All the while the phone kept on ringing and ringing.  I initially thought she must be the only person in the building but I did see other people there.  No one answered the phone though.  Getting annoyed I told her just to answer it.  This kept on happening the whole time we were in the shop talking to her.  Up to a point where I couldn’t handle it any more and decided to rather leave and find someone else to help.  I just don’t understand why you could have a sales person on the floor that needs to walk around and answer phone calls every 2 minutes.  I don’t blame her obviously, because it’s not her fault.

Traumerei Restaurant and Coffee Bar – Moffet on Main

While waiting for some printing we went to a coffee shop in Moffet on Main.  I was amazed to be met by a grumpy looking lady.  We felt very unwelcome and decided that after our cup of coffee, even though we were hungry as well, we’d rather leave.  This is the second time we’ve been at Traumerei and left with a bad experience behind us.  The first time we were there the waitress and the chef weren’t getting along.  The result was we waited about 20 minutes to get our breakfast and were told countless times how stupid the chef is being.  All the time with, what seemed like, the manager sitting there not doing anything about it.

Voltex – Albany Road

7 customers standing at the counter, 1 sales rep busy helping while other employees are just walking around not offering any help.  The counter has place for 5-6 people to sit there, so where are all the people that are supposed to help us?  The one person actually helping someone was sitting there talking about personal matters to the client.  They were obviously friends, and this carried on all the time while we were all standing waiting to be help.  The employees seemed more interested in their year end party arrangement and to vote for people within their company that “kiss the best”, “dressed the worse during the year” and things like that.  Yes, these were all discussed quite loudly and excitedly by several staff members standing and walking around ignoring the customers.  I finally got helped, and when I went to wait at the collections counter, which also had about 5 people waiting there the clients were clearly not happy having waited there for so long as well.  At least my stuff came quickly.  Next time I’ll pay 40% more to rather buy the stuff from a place like Builders Warehouse.

Nelson Mandela Metropole Traffic Department Security Services

After visiting a friend last night to greet her before leaving for Cape Town, we stopped off at our beach’s parking lot.  It was just getting dark and I noticed that there was a vehicle stuck on the beach.  Driving on the beach is illegal of course, and I didn’t even offer to help the person.  Even though we were there with our 4×4, tow ropes and everything that was needed.  Instead I opted to phone the police who instructed me to phone the traffic department security services.  I did this because I feel that people like that are going to prevent us from getting beach driving legalised again.  This was around 19:30.  The traffic department assured me they were going to dispatch a vehicle to the scene.  At 21:30 I got a call from a friend who told me they had just helped someone on the beach that was stuck.  I asked about where it was and it turned out to be the same person we saw earlier.  So 2 hours later the traffic department had not showed up.  What’s the use in telling the public to report any wrong doings if nothing gets done about this?  What makes it worse is that I know there are at least 2 traffic officers that live in Bluewater Bay, no more than 1km away from the beach parking lot.

The Good

The whole day was not bad though! We did also receive excellent value for money service from a few other companies.

4×4 Megaworld Port Elizabeth

I’ve been going to Kurt from 4×4 Megaworld in Port Elizabeth since I got my vehicle about 3 years ago.  At that point he was the only 4×4 store that I really knew about, so that’s why I initially used him to fit all our equipment.  Since then I haven’t purchased any major stuff again, but every time we go Kurt he is more than willing to help us out with things, as small as they might be.  I needed to fit a new bash plate, have my winch repaired and my canopy sealed so I took my vehicle in during the morning and got it back, as promised, a bit later in the day.  Everything done and checked.  He even checked my spot lights while I was standing there because I forgot to ask him about it.  I know the other 4×4 shop owners on a personal level, but have never really done business with them, so I cannot say anything about how they are in business terms.  Kurt on a business level is a pleasure to deal with though.

Postnet – Moffet on Main

I’m not biased because we know the owners of the store, but whenever we go in there the staff are so friendly and we get helped with what we need.  Even when we don’t know exactly what we need they help us by providing us with choices.  After our bad experience with the Greenacres branch, we went there and within minutes we were helped and our stuff sorted out.

Pet Christmas Shop – Kings Court

This is a cute little store in Kings Court that provides Christmas presents for your pets.  I don’t recall the exact name now though!  It’s a nice little store, and the toys for the dogs are at least 30-40% of what you’d pay in other stores.  We actually checked this later in the day and were amazed how much cheaper they are.  The lady helping us was very friendly and more than helpful.  Giving advice about what people have said about the various toys, leashes, etc.  She also went up to each person that came into the store and greeted them.  It was a bit odd at first, but I realised that we’re just not used to getting such good service perhaps.

What is service about then?

It’s easy to give someone bad service, I know we’ve slipped up in the past.  Probably more than we should’ve.  We however pro actively try and guard against it now to ensure that if something does happen we try and rectify it. My thinking on it is if you do provide bad service, at least apologise and try and make up for it.  We’re all human, we make misakes, no one is perfect.  The three most important words are, “I am sorry”.

I also don’t always expect wonderful service, but when you have a day like yesterday and it just keeps on slapping you in the face the whole time you wonder what is going wrong?

I have a theory though.  Perhaps because it’s so close to the end of the year, people can already taste holiday, but yet they’ve got to work for another month.  It’s stressful with not a lot of people having had a chance to take off this year, and perhaps it’s overwhelming that another year has passed.

I hope that people have learned from the last year or so that banks are definitely Evil.  Not only do they want to suck us dry whenever they can, but they were almost single handedly responsible for the world wide recession we find ourselves in.  The consumers shouldn’t have asked for credit when they weren’t credit worthy obviously, but the banks should’ve helped the ignorant.

Now that things seem to be becoming a bit more stable, they’re at it again.  I get a letter from ABSA yesterday telling me that if I want to extend my house bond loan with them I must just give them a call.  I can borrow a certain amount and they can just add it to my current home loan.  Sure I can do it, but it will obviously increase the monthly payment I make or increase the number of months I’ll be paying off on it.  It pisses me off that other people are going to use this recklessly again and end up in deeper shit than they were before.

I ignored the letter and was just wondering how many people are going to take them up on that offer.  They’ll get more money from them, increase their house bonds, and 3-5 months down the line struggle to pay back the additional amount on their monthly payment.  Sounds familiar?

Then this morning someone from ABSA phones me offering me the same thing.  Not only are they trying to lure in people to have more debt, they are quite persistent at it as well.

Be warned, the bank has never and will never be your friend.  There is always an agenda!

On Sunday, 4 October 2009, I tried to log into my FNB online account to transfer money into my account before debit orders go off.  Instead I was greeted with a message to say that they’re offline.  I didn’t worry too much, because this was just one of the many times I couldn’t log in on a Sunday.

Monday morning came and I still couldn’t log on.  It’s now 19:30, 32.5 hours later, and I still cannot log into FNB.  Instead they are advising me “We apologise for Online Banking not being available to use currently. Our support team is attending to the problem. As an alternative you can use Cellphone Banking.”

I’ve never registered for cellphone banking and was told that I need to phone them to activate it.  After phoning the number 3 times and getting cut off after holding for about 20 minutes each time I gave up.  What has gone so terribly wrong that they have to be down for so long?

Not only could I not do inter account transfers to make sure my personal accounts have enough money for debit orders, but I’ve had to delay sending stock to clients because I couldn’t confirm proof of payments.  This resulted in at least 2 orders being canceled today.

Surely if it’s an upgrade that went wrong they can restore from a backup or at least have a roll back feature?  And I’m sure it doesn’t take 32.5 hours to find out what the problem is, especially if it’s in house software.

And up to now, no one is able to give any indication of when it will be fixed.

I’m not the only that is pissed off by this.  It only takes a Google search of FNB for updates in the last 24 hours or a search on Twitter to see people are not happy.  I am sure though that all this anger just falls on deaf ears, because the banks have us by the balls.

I attended a seminar / product marketing event of a supplier that we’d like to work with recently.  Their products seemed awesome, but the guy that came down from Gauteng to host the whole show was a bit funny.  And not funny as in haha, but funny as in weird.

You expect people that come to do a presentation about their products to have a certain way of talking to people and stay away from border-line jokes.  The jokes we heard were racists, sexist, rude and at some points bordering on filthy.  Perhaps I’m just too critical, but I expected a better performance from him especially when he introduced himself as the marketing director and owner (I might be wrong) of the company.

I’m not someone that is put off by dirty jokes or when people joke about religion, race or anything else for that matter, but when it comes to business you expect a certain type of tact when speaking to the attendees. I also felt that some other people might have felt a bit uneasy about it.  Thank goodness there were no non-whites to hear the stuff being said.

His mannerisms were also quite abrasive.  Perhaps I’m just more pedantic lately towards things, but just from the presentation I attended I will forever have the image in my head of him whenever I think about their products.  It’s quite off putting.

I’m sure if I feel like this, there must be a few other people that experience the same feeling when they’re at a seminar or presentation.  So whenever you have someone promote your product, get someone that will verbally and visually represent the way you want your product to be remembered.