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‘Customer service’ is a difficult thing to achieve.  It’s a bit of a buzzword for corporatedom… but does anybody really think what it is?  Well, really, it’s about giving people what they want, for a price they think is fair (or better still, a bargain!), and the icing on the cake is to throw in something unexpected to delight them.  All done with friendly politeness, but not descending into uncomfortable obsequiousness (I will never take pleasure in a person older than me calling me Sir!).

That’s my take on it anyway, as a customer, that’s generally what floats my boat.  I suspect many people’s ideas of what constitutes good service might vary slightly – but I think the core of addressing your needs, for a price you’re prepared to pay and polite/friendly are pretty core to all but perhaps a sado-masochist or similar.  That might not be good service at the ‘Be a Gimp for the day’ emporium, for example, but that’s another train of thought entirely…

So anyway, over the last couple of weeks I have encountered what I believe to be the very Apex of my experience of such things.

It all started when the dreaded note popped up on my car’s display – “Service C due in x miles”.. naturally the number of miles was sufficient to procrastinate away for a while; but after a while I started to think about actually planning getting the work done.  I checked the prices at the Mercedes dealership, was revived from the floor, and then decided to opt for something else.  You see, having had work done there before, they’re very good – and they’re polite (teetering on the brink of fawning, though), but so fecking expensive it’s untrue.

Which is why I was chuffed as hell to discover MB Nottingham.  If you have a Mercedes in Nottingham, or indeed if you are unfortunate enough to live in Derby or Leicester, then it’s worth keep these guys details.  I dropped them an email from work, they got back to me pretty quickly quoting a price much much much lower than the main dealership – still using Mercedes trained mechanics, and still using Mercedes approved parts.  That was me sold, so I duly booked in.

They had offered to collect and return my car, but I opted instead to drop my car in on a saturday morning – upon doing so, was offered a lift to and from the City Centre rather than hanging around or making my own way somewhere else – how cool!  So I mooched around Nottingham for an hour and a half or so before getting a call from the garage, a few filters and things not included in the service were worn out, did I want to replace them too?  Also the brake pads were 95% worn and the front tyres were heading to be borderline legal soon…

… “Argh!” thinks cynical I, “This is where they make the cash!”… not so, having asked for a breakdown of prices, the service, filter replacements and the brake pads would come to a smidgen over the Mercedes service alone.  I had asked them to hang fire on the tyres so I could shop around a bit.  So, another call when it was ready, and a car waiting to pick me up where we’d arranged – rock and roll!  They hadn’t got the brake pads they needed, so had ordered them – so I booked the car in for the following weekend, and asked for a price on the tyres too – which were, as it happens, very competitive too, so I asked them to do that too.

Fast forward to this saturday, I again took the car to them, confirmed everything and handed over the keys – and as an afterthought asked them to check the wheel alignment for me, as I’d noticed it pulling slightly to the side.  This was all agreed, and this time I opted to wander from the garage down by the canal to get a coffee and some breakfast whilst the work was going on.

The bottom line is I got what I needed – my car being serviced, as well as some needed maintainance both pointed out to me and remedied once I’d given it the go ahead, I wouldn’t say I was happy to hand over the amount of money it cost, but I know had I taken it to the Mercedes garage it would’ve cost a great deal more – so I do believe I paid a fair price.  The team I dealt with were all polite and friendly without being obsequious, and – to top it all off – a follow-up letter arrived in the post in between appointments with a card entitling me to free breakdown cover from them for a year.

They come highly recommended from me.

I wrote before about using the live mpg measure in my car as a bit of boredom relief when commuting; well today I’m proud to say I’ve smashed all previous records! Normally I’m ecstatic (well, okay, quietly smug) if I exceed 50mpg on my cross-city commute!

Given the ongoing concerns over ridiculous fuel prices, it’s a good thing to make it last a bit longer! Of course, it’s absolutely no coincidence at all that the school summer holidays started this week, now is it? 🙂

So I can feel a little better about my carbon emissions for today at least! With reports of fuel prices coming down tomorrow, fingers crossed I can save even more on ever seemingly-spiralling fuel costs!!

This isn’t a ‘things ain’t want they used to be’ kind of ponder.

Far from it.

Anyone who knows me even reasonably well will know that I’m a big fan of technology and gadgets; and it was upon sorting out my portable music into a state of anally-retentive organisedness that I started thinking about all things technological.  It’s pretty amazing how things have changed in my relatively short time on the planet on the consumer technology front.

The first computer we had was a Spectrum 48k when I would’ve been about 9 or 10; something like that.  It wasn’t an integral part of life, more an interesting diversion.  I can remember when I first encountered a video tape, thinking it was most peculiar.  Indeed, when my Granny first got a Microwave which we had assumed was a television in the kitchen – how decadent that seemed!

And so, as I was arranging my music into portability, I noted a few stats down – 2171 songs, lasting 5.7 days currently sit on my iPhone.  They’re all labelled up properly with id3 tags and album artwork, and I was thinking that if you rolled back 20 years or so, how much effort you’d need to go to without the Internet, a device like an iPhone and a laptop with iTunes to compile a reasonably-sized music collection for portability.

Well, you could’ve just about had a cassette-based walkman I suppose.  Now assuming you had 12″ vinyl or tapes of the music you wanted, or – and I remember doing this – perhaps you tape the songs you like from the radio – you could’ve made a stack of tapes to carry with you to accompany a walkman.  Let’s be generous and assume you are using C90 tapes that lasted an hour and a half – to have 5.7 days of music you’d need not only your bulky Walkman, but you’d need an amazing 91 tapes.  It’s hardly portable is it.

Also Lord help you if you wanted to find a specific song; you would have had to meticulously written the track listings on the tape inlays and memorised some kind of order; and then undergone a series of rewinding and fastforwarding to find the song in question.  And shuffling is pretty much out of the question.  So how amazing is it the leaps and bounds we’ve come on in just those two short decades?  It is bloody phenominal when you think about it like that, and that’s not even starting to scratch the surface of the ability to stream media over the airwaves etc.

I can’t wait to see what insanely advanced gadgets we have in the next 20 years!

Alas, I fear the novelty will never wear off!!

I used to be quite a fan of car boot sales as a young’un – say early to mid teens, it was an invaluable source of Amiga games and utilities if nothing else; as there’d inevitably be a stall with stacks of dodgily copied disks for sale… also it’s a great place for people watching.  The same went for the occasional foray into selling too, having a big clearout and getting rid of stuff and some banter with the fellow carbooters.

Since the advent of eBay and internet shopping / downloading I’d kind of assumed that the notion of carboot sales must’ve died somewhat; but clearly not.  As part of Rich and Ed’s Mongol Rally fundraising we took a fine and wonderous array of donations to sell to the great public of Nottingham at Colwick Racecourse – and given that it took us an hour to snake our way around the carpark to simply get into the site to set up our stall, clearly they are still very popular!

The weather helped too; immediately upon arriving, the sales team of myself, Rich, Ed, Granny and Aunty B gamefully attempted to get our stuff from the cars in some semblance of order, whilst fellow traders usually of Eastern European or Asian origin cruised around seeking mobile phones or Nintendo games – none of which we had.  It was an interesting experience to be sure; and despite having a number of things we’d tagged jokingly as ‘unsellable’ – we did manage to shift the majority of stuff we took – given that we filled two cars getting there, the fact that only the Rally Car was needed to take stuff back to the charity shop was a testament to our success.

A grand total of £124.93p profit was made; which is perhaps not that much when you consider there were five of us working full time on the stall from around 8am (7am if you include travelling time!) until around 12:30pm… and Cat joined us later too… but even so, it’s money for stuff people didn’t want, so it’s a bonus – and it was quite entertaining people watching – particularly the people who seemed compelled to buy any old crap when we introduced a ‘everything 10p’ policy, followed by an ‘everything 10p and get another thing free’ policy to try to shift more stuff.

All in all, an interesting morning – however I’m definitely not a fan of alarm clocks going off at 6:15 in the morning on a Sunday!

One of the many splendid things about having a brother like Rich is his penchant for finding out random things that are doing down in ‘Hood Town’ or further afield.  It was on one of these random diversions that saw us meeting up for a quick Subway (with Reggae Reggae Sauce – rock!) before hotfooting it over to Broadway Cinema…

… a favourite author of both of us, Irvine Welsh, was doing a book reading/signing as well as a Q&A session there; and it was excellent.  Upon meeting Jez we took our seats and enjoyed him reading a section from his latest book Crime in very animated and entertaining style before being quizzed by a local author (whose name I regretfully have forgotten), before having questions being opened up to the great unwashed.

Having remembered thanks to one of the questions that Irvine is a big Hibs fan, Rich duly had the brainwave that Forest had signed cult legend Brian Rice from them; upon checking quickly via the wonders of the mobile internet, Rich duly had the microphone in his hand and asked him about his thoughts about our cult hero… he was pretty bemused that he still had hero status (after a fashion) in Nottingham, but remembered him as one of the better players in a struggling Hibs side.

I too grabbed the mic later and, whilst it somewhat trivialises how highly I rate both his writing, and his ideas, I asked him how he felt to have introduced such a fantastic array of Scottish slang and swear words into a wider vocabulary.  He was understandably nonplussed, commenting that he was merely writing in his native tongue – and indeed, was surprised that words like ‘Radge’ are commonplace as far south as Newcastle… and in that spirit, Rich and I are now proud owners of copies of Irvine’s latest book, Crime, complete with inscribed expletives – so an ambition to have Irvine Welsh to say “Fuck off you doss cunt!” to me has been realised; albeit in a civilised manner!

After this was over, and a break, it was on to a screening of the film that perhaps was responsible for shooting him to prominence – Trainspotting.  He introduced the screening and beat a hasty retreat, saying that whilst he loved it, he felt he’d seen it enough – which I guess is fair enough.  I love the film, and indeed the book – however it’s not his best work, and of course a film based on your writing is never really ‘yours’ – so when he spoke of the popularisation of the multimedia behemoth that Trainspotting has become, it wasn’t surprising he felt somewhat divorced from it all.

The film was ace though, of course – it’s a very familiar one to me, and interestingly the two times I’ve watched films at Broadway recently, they’ve involved gravity defying babies (in very different settings!)… although I’ll never quite get my head around people’s impulse to clap at the end of films at times such as these; it’s just, well, a bit odd – it would maybe have been more understandable had Irvine stuck around for the screening itself, but well, who knows!

So there you go, another unrealised ambition achieved – being called a ‘doss cunt’ by Irvine Welsh, who is an absolute gent, so I doubt he would’ve done it for real had I not asked him!

Last weekend saw friends Kat and Andy tie the knot in a splendiferous wedding and reception down in Naarwich, where much fun was had by all.  There’s lots of photos on Facebook, but a couple I took combined rather well to show the bride looking suitably radiant, and the groom well, being a typical bloke!

In a what-happens-on-tour-stays-on-tour kinda way, it wouldn’t be appropriate to chronicle Andy’s stag do in too much detail in a public environment; not that it was remotely as debauched as such events can be, the groom-to-be made sure of that by locating the weekend in the scenic Lake District to make sure that he was as far from possible away from any dens of inequity.

The plan was to head up on the friday morning, indulge in a spot of Snowboarding en route in Manchester before arriving in our campsite just outside Keswick; from where the Saturday and Sunday would be spent Kayaking, Mountain Biking, Ghyll Scrambling and High Ropes.  Since I’ve not been on a bike for years, and it sounded like hard work, I opted out of the biking but did the rest.

So, Snowboarding first – with a number of the others in the crew I went for the ‘taster session’ since I’ve never been on a snowboard in my life – and it was great fun, I might consider checking out lessons at Tamworth so I can have a bash on the main slope eventually.  An hour is literally enough to literally get a taste and not much else, but it ‘tasted’ good!

Driving onward to the Lakes was delayed somewhat by probably my most chimpish moment of the weekend, in that upon loading some stuff into my boot ready for the off, I closed it only to realise too late the keys were inside.  I hadn’t realised my car would lock itself in this scenario, but that’s just what it did – leaving myself, Mike and John stranded.  Fortunately John’s AA membership covered us, and in less than an hour a chap was with us and had successfully broken into my car – he was a scouser, so I guess it’s a talent he was bound to have anyway!

So, playing catchup I got my foot down up the M6, only to encounter traffic – with my passengers in dire need of the toilet it was an interesting stop on the hard shoulder for John and an increasingly inebriated Mike to relieve themselves before we headed off again.  After the traffic cleared it was easy going, and I actually did an admirable job of catching up with the rest of the party as we arrived on the campsite ready to pitch our camp for the weekend.

Having decided my two-man tent was a bit pokey should I end up sharing, I’d cunningly procured a four-man tent from Argos for the princely sum of £22.50, which Andy kindly helped me assemble (“We won’t need the instructions!” he announced, before clearly requiring them..  in no time the camp was pitched, including Cos’s impressive 12-man beast of a tent (which became known as ‘The Turdis’ owing to the flatulence).  Aside from being pitched on a slight hill, it wasn’t too bad.  Andy, spotting an opportunity to get a bit more room, quickly claimed a place in my tent!

After that it was a brisk walk up the lane to the nearest pub/hotel, proudly wearing our ‘Forest legends’ t-shirts that Drei had organised.  Upon establishing that our venue of choice was prepared to accept a group of 14 or so lads, we duly got stuck in to some drinking; and some food.  It was all quite civilised (aside from Chris’s bowels) until some slightly-unpleasant-things happened to Mike when he was, erm, resting for a moment in the pub.  One of the barmen looked like Jim Bowen’s ‘special’ younger brother too, which was quite amusing.  For some reason Mike still doesn’t like him very much.

Upon getting back to the campsite after a lengthy walk down a pitch-black lane, there was time for a few more beers before sleep; in the morning we stocked up on food and grabbed breakfast in Keswick before heading to the activity place – we started with Kayaking which was ace fun, tricky at first but it was great to see the lake from being, well, on it!  As we’d split up, we didn’t have Andy to pick on, so Drei took a bit of punishment, including a number of near-sinkings… although Mike once again possibly ended up on the losing side after a number of exchanges with Chris!

The afternoon saw my ‘half’ of the group go mountain biking, so Rob and I went to get provisions for the rest of ’em as we were without activities for the afternoon; and having got back to the campsite duly broke out the camping chairs and a few beers to wait for the others to head back, both keen to not ‘do a Mike’, however!  Aside from Rich getting lost and needing directions, the group were back on time, and Drei manfully ensured they got showered and ready for a group of taxis ready to take us off to a rather nice hotel/pub for dinner.

At dinner we were ably waited upon by ‘Big Phil’, who – despite where we’d travelled there from – was the campest thing we’d seen all weekend.  They dealt gamely with us, despite the place being quite a quiet spot, but it became increasingly apparent that they wanted rid when they repeatedly offered us a taxi to get into Keswick, which we took and ended up getting rather drunk with a number of dubious shots making an appearance which causes the memory of the evening to get a little hazy; except that Paul, our kayaking instructor, joined us which made for entertainment, particularly on Sunday morning as he looked as rough as us!

Sunday morning saw Rich’s careful plan for the weekend come to fruition, he’d brought a microwave in his car much to the confusion of our fellow campers, it was so he could warm up a parmo he’d procured from a trip to Middlesbrough; a parmo is basically a heart-attack inducing delicacy found in the area, and one beloved of Andy and his university compadres (and indeed, myself from a visit to see him up in Boro on a couple of occasions!).  He didn’t actually eat it, which was wise, but the microwave provided an easy way to cook bacon for breakfast too!

Ghyll Scrambling was our first activity on the Sunday, and it was – frankly – fucking awesome.  Donning my throwaway Matalan trainers and tracksuit bottoms, numerous layers, a cagoule borrowed from the activity place, a floatation aid and finally my Forest Legend t-shirt, we walked up a fairly sizeable hill to the top of a Ghyll (which is basically a stream heading down a hill with numerous small waterfalls etc).  Upon being invited to get into the genital-disappearingly cold stream, we were soon almost acclimbatised to the temperature and ready to make our descent – in the stream!

It was quite pleasant at first, splashing our way down, sliding down rocks that had formed like waterslides, until we faced our first waterfall.  “Right lads,” said Aaron – our guide along with Paul – “just stand on the edge, hands behind your back, and let yourself fall!” he said, whilst doing that very thing, and dropping about 6 feet or so from the ledge onto the stream below.  Hmm.  That’s a pretty sphincter-twitching moment even for slight adrenaline junkies such as myself!  Naturally, we made Andy go first, and upon his successful plunge we followed suit!

The next such moment involved a 20 foot plunge into water, this involved us clambering up above a plunge pool before doing an ‘extreme chicken dipper’ (‘extreme’ meant to cross your arms infront of you and tuck your elbows in to prevent injury, ‘chicken dipper’ basically means landing with knees bent to take the pressure).  This one was hairy, Andy did it successfully, I relaxed my legs so much I landed on my arse, whilst Mike and John tried to headbutt the overhanging branch which wasn’t easy to avoid!

Once in the plunge pool we had to reach through a gap in the rocks underwater and be pulled through it by Aaron.  This wasn’t pleasant, it was a tight gap for a big lad like me – but having got through it was pretty pleasing; although Alex thought he’d give Aaron a scare by not grabbing his hand and causing a flurry of activity to ‘rescue’ him; turns out Alex can hold his breath pretty comfortably and wasn’t in any distress at all, unlike the rest of us!

The next challenge was the worst; on top of a shallow slope, we had to dive headfirst about 20 feet into a very very narrow part of the stream.  I was bricking it at this point, but having seen numerous others do it, I duly followed, and landed on a combination of my nose and somewhere I thought had fully retreated due to the cold temperature!  That smarted a bit!  It was a fantastic rush, though!  All that remained was a blatant fib about a ‘vortex’ that most of us fell for, before forming a human dam in order to send a big surge of water into Andy to take him to the end of the scramblable portion of the water.

Fantastic fun.  If you even get a chance to go Ghyll Scrambling/Gorge Scrambling or Canyoning – then do it!  It will scare the shit out of you, but you’ll feel great!  Tell you what too, not a hint of a hangover once we were in that cold water too!

The afternoon involved high ropes, a combination of rope-and-wood swings, climbing, bileting and tarzan-type swings.  The zip-wire landing was rough for me, landing arse first onto a step, then Mike bounced up three steps on his arse which made me feel a little less sorry for myself.  High cables, I wasn’t a fan – but felt very pleased when I’d done it, before a bit of punishment for Andy before playing the ‘making one person go up and down a tree’ game – which was a good laugh to end it with.

Sunday night was a barbecue.  Given the length of drive I had in the morning I laid off the drink, meaning I have fairly vivid (and frankly disturbing) images of the conversations that were flowing during a course of the evening whilst Alex manfully fed us with the help of three disposable barbecues.  As the night wore on we retreated into the big tent and carried on briefly, before sleepiness took over.  The morning was a case of clearing up, packing up and shipping out.  I’m glad I opted out of drinking, as I felt pretty good and was able to make it home in very good time, dropping off Mike in Long Bennington en route.

An absolutely top weekend; and whilst I’m generally not a fan of camping, I did enjoy it – I think any more than three days and I’d start to get a bit grumpy… as it was, it was just about perfect, and of course, next weekend is the wedding itself, so we can look forward to a catchup very soon indeed!  Bring it on!