The lastminute.com continues.
I had waited 3 working days and yet no word came from any of the many people I'd been in contact with and Alison informed me that no package had yet arrived.
Filled with a mixture of righteous and wrongteous indignation I fired off this email.
"FAO Hari Thukral
Hari
Hello,
I have given you a further 3 working days, as you have requested. But surprise surprise there has been no word from you, nor delivery of my gift. It's getting on for three weeks since I placed my order and still it hasn't shown up. As I have explained in detail this is extremely embarrassing for me as this is a gift for an important business client who has been very ill and for whom I am worried may pass away before you finally get his gift to him. Not due to his illness which has obviously passed in the eons since I ordered the gift, but simply from old age.
I find the small sum you have offered me entirely inadequate. And would do so even if you had managed to achieve the relatively simple task of finally delivering the gift. I am a professional writer and from now on I will be charging you for each email I have to send you. At fifty pounds a message. So you owe me another £50 now. Let's hope I don't have to write again.
I expect you will get back to me blaming the supplier and asking me for my patience, but that simply is not good enough. I am taking my business elsewhere. I need a gift to be delivered this month so I will have to order something else from a different supplier.
Could you please arrange for a full refund for the gift (on top of the generous £8.99 you've given me)? I would also be grateful if I could speak to someone in authority personally. My number is +447xxxxxxxxx. This incident has already generated some bad publicity for your organisation and I fear I may have to publish this correspondence on my webpage as well. I am frankly flabbergasted that my complaints so far have proved so ineffectual. If I was running a company called lastminute.com and a gift was two and a half weeks late I would make a point of hand delivering it to the recipient myself and if the supplier was proving so incompetent I would go to a shop and buy the gift at my own expense.
In the meantime can I please have a refund of the money my gift cost, plus an additional £50 for my professional writing services? Thank you. Yours sincerely Richard Herring"
I had an eye on your enjoyment whilst writing this clearly and I suspect my desire for payment for my work will not be fulfilled, but I think I have a point.
There was no response from lastminute.com. Not even the usual computer generated generic reply. Which makes me suspect that my emails are being sent somewhere else now. Possibly to a big burning cyber-bin.
An hour or so later (and whether this was the power of my email and Hari had travelled over from the Indian subcontinent, I can't say) Alison emailed to say there was a package, but there was no message attached. I explained what I had ordered and that it was supposed to be gift wrapped. She said that it was the item, but that it wasn't wrapped.
So the gift had finally arrived after two and a half weeks, without the wrapping that I had paid for and without the message or any indication of who it was from. What a brilliant service. I am glad I used lastminute.com. It is the perfect service to send a present to someone you don't like, who you don't want to know that you've sent them a present or why.
I wrote another email to Hari Thukral (whose name comes so close to being one that I would have looked up on the computer at BT in 1989. In fact if it wasn't for the "r" I would assume that this was a nick-name intended to indicate how much use he was.
"FAO Hari Thukral
Hey Hari
That's incredible. The gift arrived just after my last email. Did you deliver it personally? And even better, it was almost exactly what I asked for except it wasn't gift-wrapped (which I had paid for) and there was no note or message attached to say it was from me (and I did write one). So on top of whatever additional recompense you were thinking of giving me, I would like a refund for the gift-wrapping service that didn't happen and also a letter sent to Jon Thoday containing my original message and an explanation and apology for the lateness and the loss of the note. I think that if you have any dignity left you will send me a full refund for my purchase and possibly some kind of consolation gift of my own. I suspect you will only thank me for my patience I must say that this whole experience has been extremely disappointing. I hope you can see that taking two and a half weeks to deliver a last minute gift and then failing to either wrap it as requested and paid for, or include a message or any indication of who it is from is not acceptable. I would very much like all my correspondence to be forwarded to whoever is in charge of lastminute.com as I believe they should have a record of this abysmal failure. I have already written about this once on my website and I can assure you I will be doing so again tomorrow. My advice to my readers will be to use a different website for their gift purchases. I trust you can see why. I look forward to hearing from you Hari (or whichever of your friends chooses to respond). I thank you for your patience. Richard Herring"
Again no-one has responded, so presumably they have no appreciation for my patience any more. I'd love to talk to someone from lastminute.com about this, so if anyone has a contact number/email of someone who can help then please let me have it. It's not too late to try to make up for this shoddy affair.
In the meantime, as promised, I would recommend that you avoid using the lastminute.com website.
I'm not being entirely churlish and wrongteous. Anyone can make a mistake, but it takes a special skill to deal so ineffectually with that mistake once it has been brought to your attention.
I expect a job on Watchdog out of this you know.
