Appalled!!
I’ll be leaving London again very soon (sooner than anticipated – A journalist back from Moscow (alive) will be taking my room on Sunday, booting me out in the process).
There is, as I expected, lots to take care of in order to ensure everything relating to my relocation runs smoothly. Already in the course of taking care of everything I have been appalled not once, not twice, but thrice!
- At the Indian embassy they take your passport for visa processing, and tell you “you can track the application online by just typing in your passport number.” It’s only when you get home that you realise that they have your passport and they didn’t give you anything with your passport number on it. (Well they do, but it doesn’t say passport number next to it, and just looks liek a credit card receipt, and unless you already know your passport number you can’t very well recognise that that’s what it is).
- Since the last time I had to put anything in storage both Big Yellow and Safestore, the market leaders, have prevented you from taking out insurance with somebody else. It’s bad enough that they make insurance compulsory, but to force people to take out their over-priced insurance, about five times the price of competitors, is naked profiteering. I’ve reported them to the office of fair trading, the first time I’ve ever done such a thing. In the meantime, I’ve used www.theselfstoragedirectory.co.uk to find an independent self-storage depot which is happy to not fleece you for every penny.
- I’ve just taken out a card protection plan for the first time in a few years. Like many secure banking and related services in addition to a user name and password you have to choose some pass phrases: answers to set questions. What is odd and, dare I say, appalling about CPP is that it’s compulsory to use the question “What is the name of your favourite actor?”. I don’t have one and, put in a corner, just typed in the name of the first person whom I’d seen in a few things and generally liked, but I bet I forget it at a crucial juncture in the future.In hindsight I probably should have put Rob Brydon
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Tags: big yelow, CPP, india, insurance, passport, Rob Brydon, safestore, self storage, visa