Week Forty- Four Don Quixote – AND ME!
I have proper inherited one or two of my mum’s main drives in life. A deep seated rage against those who perpetrate the stuff that leaves people ‘˜downtrodden’. That is, bullies. Since I got big enough to menace the West End ticket tout who had accosted us outside a London theatre one Boxing Day, with an ‘OI! THAT’S MY MOTHER YOU ARE TALKING TO!’ I realised that I can do something about bullies and bully them right back and that it felt good.
Sometimes, though, the bullies are big organisations and then, like Don Quixote, I will don armour and literally tilt at the windmill. Only the sorts of emails that I send are on occasions, mightier than the sword. I definitely shifted the mill a full building’s width with a huge insurance company recently. Their loss adjuster had been making it increasingly clear that my chum getting her truly horrible break-in claim paid was down to her being ‘˜nice’ to him and well, UGH. I can tell you that my words got a horribly vertical response.
And while EE miss-selling this, is just a wideboy called Ryan, who took advantage of a little old lady with learning difficulties and sold her a tabletwell, damn it, here’s the mail, plus their own Facebook page topper. Share the hell out of this if you think EE were OOO. I sent it to the PR firm in London.
‘Hey, let’s do this in public, after all. THIS just emailed to you guys. It’s an invitation to pour oil onto an over eager EE sales dude who sadly flummoxed a sweet little old lady who has learning difficulties: I wonder out loud if this will be allowed to remain on the page? G’won, impress me and impress your client Everything Everywhere – EE. And get them to do as suggested below and be the Good Guys. Make Bacon Proud, guys!
The E-MAIL:
‘Many thanks for your time just now and apologies for the peremptory ending of the first call (which came via the EE head office switchboard)…
It was the Beeb. As I do get to do bits of ‘punditry’ for the BBC. Sadly, they don’t pay for local radio – this is BBC Radio West Midlands today at 5:25pm. It’s about how many Range Rover Evoques are being stolen in London these days. You don’t get paid for local but do for Radio 2, Scotland and Wales…and it has lead to the sofa in Salford for BBC 1 Breakfast more than once. Hell of a drive…point is, I can call Jeremy Vine up. I even Google better than the actor of the same name as me.
I am the son of the late Claire Rayner OBE. My brother Jay does a bit of telly, too.
To come to the point, a thrusting young executive sell-anything-to-anyone type at the EE store at 2 Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, recently sold a tablet called an Eagle (I think) to a little old lady, aged 74, who happens to have learning difficulties and just came in for a phone ‘to get texts on’.
She cannot even turn it on and has signed a two year contract.
My childhood friend Julie Anne, is her neighbour. Her name is June MacDougall. Julie spends much of her time abroad as an international photographer and was away when June did this. Julie helps her with all sorts of things and called to tell me about this, once she had learned what had happened.
Sadly, the manager at the shop, whose voice is easy to recognise (I am primarily a car AUDIO reviewer, hence the involvement with phones for music – they call me the Jeremy Clarkson of car electronics) has an ugly stripe of smugness right through her and treated the approach to the shop in a way so far off brand message, it was like a piece of the damn PHONESHOP programme. I did call the shop as well – and well, got hung up on as soon as the subject was raised.
For me, that’s like calling Marty McFly ‘chicken’ and kinda guarantees personal urge as well, sadly. I am nothing if not honest.
I know there is a due complaints process but this just stinks and is a 24 Carat social media vertical take off job, were it to get publicised right.
Now, do try this:
Go to my website of the same name as the email but .co.uk, (no link to fret about) pick a reviewed item and Google it. then see how 1.4 million pages and 140,000 hardcore mobile audio and electronics geeks a month, sticks out like a candle in a cave. Google cannot tell between MY work and that seething forum. so I ‘Google like a beast.’ I have extensive Facebook page reach as well.
I admit emotional involvement as my mum HATED the weaker being trodden on and I inherit. And this is a dear friend’s vulnerable neighbour.
I heartily recommend and urge a delightful, sweet, POSITIVE and ‘up’ solution to this one, which is to admit a simple miss-selling and to allow the device to be returned, that contract revoked AND to get the simple phone-for-texts supplied that June came in for in the first place.
Although she really needs one of the newest super-simple pensioner phones with a few big buttons and labelled direct-dial to loved ones buttons too. I don’t know if such phones are available outside of newspaper advertising.
Anyway, I invite the sensible top-end folks at Nelson Bostock to spot the lovely positive that can be had for their client in this and to recognise just how keen I am to set fire to this story.
I have to look my mum’s ghost in the eye, after all.
Yours very sincerely,
Adam Rayner On Line Editor