Rants & Complaints

Animal Airlines respond

After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched 🙂

DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY – YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS – FOR JOINING OUR ‘COMPLAINTS CLUB’ – I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON’T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN’T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS – YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY ‘FIRST’ MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU ‘HONARY LIFE MEMBERS’ AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY

Avoid Animal Airlines!

Animal Airlines really seem to be a cowboy company and are really unorganised and I really recommend avoiding them.
I’d be intrigued to see if anyone has had any success with importing their cats to the states with them. We fly out on the 20th April (hooray!) and are having major hassles getting straight answers out of “animal airlines” who are meant to be the people to send the cats with.
We are flying continental from Manchester to Columbus Ohio and have been quoted £1500 for the three cats by continental who say we need to go via animal airlines. However animal airlines gave us a quote for £735 but when we tried to book it they then bumped the price up by £135 by saying we needed to have the cats sent to cincinatti (and we would have to pick them up from there – a 3 hours drive from Columbus). When we reluctantly decided to try that route, the price went up ANOTHER 3% as we wanted to pay by credit card – NOW they are saying that they could decide to use Continental and we might have to pay that – but they’d decide on the day – oh and we’d have to throw the cats out of the airplane window as they can’t be dropped off at the airport until an hour *after* our flight has left. The fact that a quote (which is meant to be legally binding) has increased in value by £135 is just not right and I wonder if trading standards would have something to say…….
This company seem to make the rules up as they go along and I just don’t trust them – but £1500 is VERY expensive for three cats and I’m not sure we can afford that with everything else we have to pay out in the first weeks of moving.
The whole experience is really frustrating. Kristen managed to speak to another company this afternoon who said that they had had a lot of people coming to them after getting the runaround from Animal Airlines and who had not been very happy with their service.
(Hopefully this rant will get a high rating in google as I couldn’t find much on them in google (which is a bad sign by itself))

linksys support :-(

apparently all I have to do to fix my linksys problem is open a webpage to http://192.168.1.1 and log in as……
I think they didnt read the bit which says that the router returns a connection refused when you try to connect to it with a browser,ftp,smtp,pop3……
However I do have access to another linksys router which i’ll try to install later in the week but I’ve not seen any good reviews on this product at all – stay away from the Linksys WAG54G

Bad driving.

Neil posted about a woman getting knocked down at a zebra crossing in Bradford. Last night in the space of 10 minutes we were almost in 3 accidents in Congleton.
The first was coming up a steep hill at about 7.30pm and a car came towards us with no lights on. Thankfully they had to stop as there was only room for one car to pass. They couldn’t work out why I was flashing them to turn their lights on and wouldn’t roll down their window so they could hear me saying “put your lights on”. Eventually they got the message.
3 minutes later there was a car parked in the middle of the road outside the shop. As it went to move off, it didn’t bother to look or signal and almost hit the car that was forced to “undertake” it to get by.
Then outside blockbusters a car dropped off a lady passenger who then tried to run in front of our car. The car stopped about 50 yds down the road with no signal but looked like it was stopping. As I overtook it then started to pull out into my path. As I hit the horn the driver jumped in his seat.
Was yesterday “Bradford and Congleton drive like a lunatic day”?

6 weeks for a radio.

6 weeks and 1 day after Gateway Peugeot took my radio out of the car as it wasn’t getting a signal, the replacement has finally been fitted. The excuses for the delay ranged from “Peugeot will not send a replacement out until the old one is received” (which was the first excuse for a couple of weeks), then I got “They have to be shipped from abroad” (I could walk “abroad” and back again in 6 weeks). Finally last Wednesday I told them to have one fitted by the end of the week and was told that “we will have to contact Peugeot head office to get that authorised” so I told them they’d better hurry up and do it. I also complained to the head office last Friday @4.36pm (a week ago) via their online website contact page as there was no contact phone number supplied. Monday at 11.51 I got a reply acknowledging receipt of my email. 3pm it was given a case reference. So it looks like it takes 3 hours for emails to travel between departments in Peugeot.Yesterday (Thursday) at 6pm I got the reply “Thank you for your email dated 15th March. May I first of all say how sorry I was to learn of your disappointment with your vehicle and apologise for the delay in reply. Indeed, it is always a cause for concern should any customer express disappointment with eitherour product or the service that our dealer network provides. I should explain however, that although we are of course, interested in the overall operations of authorised dealers, they do operate independently and are therefore, responsible in their own right for their day to day trading activities. I am sure that in view of the aforesaid information, you will appreciate why it is difficult for us to comment in detail at this time and therefore, I have sent copy of your letter to Gateway Motor Co. for further investigation. You should expect to hear from myself in due course with the outcome of my investigation. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Yours sincerely, Aina Ogunade-Paul Custoemr Care Manager”
So basically the company can trade under the Peugeot name, they can sell Peugeot cars (and only Peugeot), goods need to be authorised by Peugeot but they are totally independent and Head Office can’t do anything about it.

The only good side of things is that I didn’t have to order some bright paper and a pen to create a sign for the window saying “If you buy a car from this Gateway Peugeot dealer you may end up waiting 6 weeks for spare parts and have a car in the garage at frequent intervals – Beware!” and then park the car outside the showroom.

Incidentally the first song I heard on the Radio was Shania Twain’s I’m gonna get you good which has some weird misheard lyrics