You find me not with my head but my feet in the oven. I haven’t fallen out with my girlfriend or had a particularly unhappy Christmas. It’s because part of my central heating has broken down. With the benefit of hindsight I can say with confidence that it is a very minor fault but it will take many hours of mind-bending phone calls and about 15 minutes of actual work to fix.
To explain why we must embark on a tale of two systems and the hapless souls trapped therein. It’s a journey that may, I fear, lead us back into the murky fields of customer service mentioned in a previous entry but there’s every hope that we will emerge, blinking into the bright light of a new dawn in shiny happy customer relations. Yeh, right.
Such is the complexity of our domestic infrastructure that you might care to skip the rather lengthy first movement. I would have done so myself but I wasn’t offered that option. Maybe rejoin us at the second movement?
First movement: andante con brio
Paradoxically the new extension on our house - the bit with energy-efficient glass and weather-responsive thermostats – is attached to a second-hand combined boiler and oven that is similar in design and construction to an Aga but rather less expensive. Let’s give it a good old fashioned, no-nonsense name like Stanley, if only because that’s what it’s called. Periodically Stanley roars into life, deafening conversation, using hugely expensive amounts of gas every second and burning my loaves in no time flat. We love it.
Behind this slightly tattered, hot black box is a medium-sized cupboard in which Mark, our hunky plumber, created a dizzying array of pipes, valves and expansion vessels so complicated and mysterious that it serves as the high point of any tour of our house. ‘And here,’ I proudly exclaim, as I throw open the door to this Aladdin’s cave, ‘is the control centre!’
Nearby, in our old-fashioned larder (or should that be a pantry?), sits an unobtrusive white box on the wall. Let’s call it CBR54a. It occasionally hums a bit and has a light to tell you that it’s efficiently and economically heating up the rest of the house.
It is to the servicing of these two different systems that our path leads. Stanley is checked out annually by the only company in my part of the world that seems to know anything about his raw, northern ways - a husband and wife team who live very happily in the 1980s. Once a year Mandy rings me up to tell me that Alan will be over next week and could I please remember to switch Stanley off the night before because, otherwise, he’s too hot to work on and Alan will have a wasted journey! (I didn’t and he did once.) When our little dogs were alive, the first thing Alan would always do was to play with them, while he drank his first cup of coffee, and say how he and Mandy had always wanted dogs like this. Eventually he’d get his stuff from the van and, still chatting, would begin the delicate operation of de-coking Stanley.
As for CBR54a, John South send me a reminder letter every year and we fix a day when their plumber can call. We never saw Mark again. He had evidently moved on to advanced rocketry installation and left servicing of his creations to lesser mortals…a succession of young men who all look very smart but whose first move is always, worryingly, to open the instruction manual.
I was away when my son sent me a text asking why the house was cold but, as soon as I returned I could see why: the boiler was dead. Not Stanley, the old work horse. But CBR54a, the smart, always-efficient, and recently serviced boiler.
Thank you for staying with me through the first movement, as it were. Stop here for a comfort break if you’d like. My feet are nice and warm thanks but I’ll just pop on a hat. Welcome back those who chose to skip the preamble. You join us as we attempt to revive CBR54a.
Second movement: allegro moderato
I called John South. Yes, they could send a chap out to look at it. He arrived the next day and diagnosed the problem as a faulty circuit board. They had one in stock and could fit it the next day. Total damage £300. Done.
At this point, for some absurd reason, the word ‘insurance’ popped into my mind. When I renewed my household insurance policy back in the autumn, I noticed that it included a section on household emergencies. ‘Oh, I won’t be needing that’ I quipped to the salesman, ‘I tend to fix most things myself and the boilers are serviced annually anyway.’ I can’t now quite remember how he persuaded me. There was some discussion about legal cover and the cost of taking things off a policy. And it was only a few pounds. So, rather grudgingly, I kept it.
Now in my hour of need, it seemed a shame not to use it. I rang the broker who was positive: yes, they did cover this and I only needed to ring their helpline to sort it out. I should have spotted the warning signs: a freephone, national number, a customer reference number, a call management system – all indicative that I was moving into a parallel universe where service engineers provide complete solutions that delight customers, not one where blokes in vans come to fix things.
I got through in the end, despite an unexpectedly high volume of calls. (Did I mention that it was Christmas? Not just any old Christmas, but Christmas 2010: the coldest snap for 40 years. Lots of pipes freezing, people with feet in ovens. Busy time for plumbers…and insurance companies.) I was allocated a slot several days later when their engineer could come and check CBR54a for himself to confirm that it was indeed a circuit board that had died. It took him about three minutes to do this and a bit longer to find out that they didn’t hold stock but a replacement could be ordered and was promised to arrive in two days time…about five days after John South could have fixed it. And counting.
I am sure that wise and intelligent readers such as yourself will not be surprised to hear that the circuit board wasn’t faulty at all. We found that out when the new board was fitted and nothing happened. All credit to the engineer who diagnosed that there was in fact a break in the power supply, which he fixed before firing up the boiler and disappearing into the snow and ice, together with a our seasonal good wishes and thanks.
Cue sound effect of hollow laughter. How was he to know that there was another, second fault? It took us a couple of days, as we piled on extra layers of clothing and the temperature in the house continued to hover around zero before I called the insurance hotline again and explained that we needed yet another service engineer to make our complete solution complete.
Third movement: alla zingarese
At this point, it all gets a bit surreal. Imagine you’re part of the Alan and Mandy team who service Stanleys for a select but loyal group of customers in the south west. Like lots of small, self employed people who are on the road most of the time, you invest in a little PDA or laptop with your customers' details and appointment times.
Now imagine that one day your system crashes - it's a case of When not If - and, because life is too short, you don’t have a back up. So you have to scrabble through lots of invoices and post-it notes to find telephone numbers and ring all your customers, explaining that, sorry, damned computers and all that, you’ll need to make another appointment. Phew! Big job, lots of embarrassment but you get it done.
Now imagine how you'd feel the next day when the same thing happens again. How would you possibly begin to explain to your bemused clients that, not only has your system crashed again, but you completely failed to learn the lessons of the day before by making a copy of some kind? Alan might get away with it but what if you’re not a two-man company but a massive, national organisation who relies on sophisticated logistics to manage your vast work force?
Fourth movement: Misterioso
We are now perhaps at the heart of this jolly tale. I know it’s been a bit of a slog and it may seem that I have a bit of problem with large companies. But I’m sure not alone in finding it bit odd that their response to the above question is: you don’t bother to try and explain because you don’t have to.
‘But you phoned me only yesterday to offer me an appointment when I already had one,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah yes, there was a fault in the system of the company who refer all these dockets to us: it just deleted them all,’ was the reply. As if that explained anything.
‘Can I make another appointment for you now?’
It deleted them all!! What kind of inefficient, tinpot company could possibly allow that to happen? Well, actually, it was one of the biggest emergency repair companies in the country. One of those whose vans almost certainly shout about ‘total solutions delighting our customers’. Total garbage more like. And not a hint of apology or remorse. I’m just a cog in this giant wheel. Not my problem. Do you want an appointment or not?
In the immortal words of the Spice Girls, ‘I’ll tell you want I want,’ and I suspect that it’s not available in this particular plumbing universe. Next time I’ll rely on ordinary people who look at the whole job, not just their bit of it. They may be small but they are sufficiently in touch with the real world to understand what customers really want.
All together now: big can be beautiful; national can be great; insurance can be reassuring ….but don’t bet on it. For the record, CBR54a was fixed in the end, though I’d gone to spend Christmas in Cornwall by that time. I’m choosing small, local and flexible next time. If I can walk that is: my feet are beginning to smoulder.
