Good & Bad
Thoughts on the joys and problems of modern life
Praising good products and services is for us, just as important as highlighting the bad ones.
A few years ago Barbara had such outstanding service on an flight that she wanted to thank the crew and the airline. This was almost imposable as everything is geared to complaints. After searching various company registration sits, we found the e-mail address of the Chief Executive who immediately thanked Barbara for her kind remarks and promised to pass them on to the flight crew.
So I thought that I should include a few thoughts on this GOOD & BAD page, but it’s for the reader to agree or not.
GOOD???
BAD ???
Amazon to the rescue:::::::::::
We are of an age where browsing around shops is tiresome, so buying on-line allows us a far wider market place linked to careful research from our desk. After the UK’s “divorce” from mainland Europe, the increasing cross-border tariffs and taxes and bureaucracy involved, forced most small businesses to stop selling internationally altogether. AMAZON has filled the gap by enabling their vast network of partners to sell globally. While some items come directly from the UK their network of warehouses has facilitated the distribution of British goods, even English books throughout Europe at reasonable prices. We have to be a little careful with specifications, but have the choice of both the UK and French Amazon sites!
In praise of La Poste
It naturally flows on from shopping on line to the delivery. We would like to praise La Poste here in France. We are happy when Amazon tell us that they have consigned our delivery to them as they often deliver sooner than the senders stated time! If its a large parcel or something requiring a signature, they will let you know if they will try to deliver next day or, in the worst case tell you where and when you can collect your package ‘locally’.
Of course there is a growing army of delivery services ranging from pretty good to really bad. There appears to be a lot of collaboration between the different delivery companies and we notice that even some of the major international couriers use La Poste for what they refer to as the ‘last mile’ of the delivery.
The French post office La Poste is one of the few public services in France that gets high praise from the public for the quality of its service. It is not just the amiable postman that wins it for them, but the widespread presence of post office counters in most towns and larger villages of the country, largely because it also offers Insurances, Banking and other public services, even Mobile ‘Phones. France has one of the highest number of post-boxes of any country in the world.
Whilst La Poste is currently a state owned service, under EU regulations it is planned that postal services in France will be fully open to competition, at which time the French post office will become a company, with the government remaining as the majority shareholder.
There is concern amongst consumer groups that private enterprise may lead to the closure of uneconomic post offices and, while this risk exists, a public service agreement will be in operation that should protect many smaller rural post offices.
Bottle tops to you:::
For many years we have been saving plastic bottle tops for charities to recycle, as experts in plastics had told us that this type of plastic is more valuable than the the rest of the bottle. Why then have all European bottle tops suddenly been permanently attached to their bottles which often makes them difficult to pour from and re-seal? Why is this? Or is it just a ploy to stop us drinking out of plastic bottles?
Recycling:::
We are all for “sensible recycling” glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles, packaging, printed paper and cardboard – that’s fine if its clean enough not to attract animals and insects to the bins. Making sure that the containers are empty and rinsing in the washing water is fine, but sorting out contaminated food packaging is not on!
We compost vegetable wast where we can, but I used to like a good clear-up in the garden during the winter when it was safe to burn the trimmings. I normally used a garden incinerator, but when I wanted to replace my old rusty one, I was told that the sale of these was banned! Apparently city dwellers were using them to burn rubbish on their balcony’s. Most country people understand the danger of forest fires but clearly there are too many idiots about who make life difficult for us all. Now I need a trailer to take my garden wast to the recycling centre (round trip 20km). Is that environmentally good?
Filling up you car:::::::::
We are old enough to remember when you drove onto a garage forecourt and the attendant came to you, filled your car with petrol, took your cash and often cleaned your windscreen too. Then, as the oil companies, discovered, that self service pumps could bring customers into pay in their newly discovered ‘shops’ and buy all sorts of things that every traveller needs??, the major supermarkets quickly got into fuel retailing, as it now seams likely that more than half of the motor fuel used in the UK and France is sold by them.
Supermarkets have been investing heavily in new re-fueling areas. Motorists may benefit from competitive prices, choice and convenience, but there are problems. These filling stations are usually sited in remote parts of the supermarket’s vast parking area and the trend now is to remove the payment kiosks in favour of fully automate pumps. So you are obliged to use a card for payment. Surely there are the security cameras but nobody seams to replenish the gloves and paper towels or clean up spillages. Many times we have slithered about on a build-up of stinking diesel spillage which ends up ingrained in our car mats.
We go along with this new regime, but supermarkets, get you act together, have a regular clean-up and please, please make sure that your card readers are in working order!
MODERN LIFE or LIFE AFTER THE COVID PANDEMIC!!!
The Covid pandemic of the early 2020’s has a lot to answer for. Its not only the tragic loss of life and all the associated medical problems, but the way in which the attitude of governments, businesses and indeed populations in general has dramatically changed. There is no doubt that technology was already changing the every day lives of most ‘developed’ and other nations, to such a extent that some of the economic damage caused by restrictions imposed during the pandemic were limited by access to the internet. Generally we were already shopping, doing our banking and our taxes over the internet, but the whole on-line industry was accelerated by the pandemic.
Now most institutions, governments and businesses, even doctors, only wish to communicate by text message and e-mail. The good old telephone can be consigned to the recyclers along with the telex and fax machines, remember them? If you insist on talking to a person, rather than a bot, you must hang on the line, at your own expense, listening to caned music, interrupted with occasional apologies, until you finally give up and send a rude e-mail.
My real complaint is that it is now expected and actually demanded, that the customer or client dose the all the work themselves. So communications always come in the form of “we need this document, please contact this other department, you can find this on our website, or you need to fill in this on-line form etc. etc.”. I keep thinking that, if I wasn’t retired, I would not have time to do my own job alongside all the work now require by the businesses and institutions for our modern lives.
There must be a lot of, predominately older people, who are not computer literate or indeed have no internet connection anyway. I am so sorry for them, but again, they will have to be tolerated until the grim reaper eventually removes them from the system anyway.