As you can see from the length of this blog entry I’m not having a good time with companies right now. Some are minor issues and some are more serious. I keep forgiving them due to the pandemic and the lack of finding staff to do work these days, but to a certain extent, it really isn’t my problem.  If they make promises, they should keep them.

Restoration Work

I won’t name the companies yet for this work. An upstairs neighbour had a water leak which came down two floors into our apartment. It caused some minor damage. Going through our insurance company it took a little while for them to agree to pay for the damages, however, they said they wouldn’t chase after the insurance company of the household that caused the damage, they should have done.

The restoration company they are using to do our work is next to useless.

The first thing their project manager said to use “we always get bad reviews”, well, I can see why:

  • Their project management is non-existent.
  • Poor communication with us ignoring emails and requests for answers.
  • There is poor communication between their company and sub-contractors.
  • Suggesting we should pay for something which their sub-contractor said is not needed.
  • Promised work would start within 2-3 weeks yet it’s been 2 months now.

We were told this is not an unusual practice and performance levels from restorations companies in this area. Sigh.

Amazon

I had previously complained that their drivers are speeding in our neighbourhood. Well, they keep on speeding. Just like other complaints Amazon just pushes out a copy and paste message.

The company are now raising their Prime subscription by $20 which is quite a jump. Is it worth continuing with that subscription based on the poor performance of the company, I have experienced:

  • One-day delivery is rarely that, usually three days minimum.
  • Their TV offering is poor compared to other services.
  • The continuing poor behaviour when driving in our neighbourhood.
  • Poor treatment of staff; anti-union and more.

Beezer

This is the company that my data might have been uploaded to as a result of a hack at our property management company. Since this was a GDPR request they should have responded within a month, but they failed to do so. I will have to investigate my next steps.

Costco

I had quite a lot of issues with them this past month, in particular getting repeat medication. They were constantly faxing back and forth to obtain authorization from the doctor. In one conversation they mentioned my “wife” making the assumption I was straight, yes, it seems some people still do that which is extremely tiring.

On my last visit, they said they still hadn’t got anything back from the doctor despite him faxing them 2 days prior. A whole bunch of their staff got involved and they eventually found it in their system, they had received it. What a mess.

Netflix

They finally notified me of a change in fees. They should have informed customers when they announced it to the media, Amazon did this.

SkyNews

This UK TV channel had been broadcasting over YouTube until a message appeared saying it wasn’t available for my region, meaning Canada. I noticed on Twitter that people in other parts of the world experienced the same issue, including South Africa and Cyprus. The service is still available in the US, India and other countries, I VPN’d to check.

Contacting SkyNews was problematic. It took a stream of tweets for them to respond. When they did they provided me with an email address. Someone responded with a non-answer as though they performed zero research, sounded as though they just wanted to get rid of me.

Staples

Since Amazon had issues obtaining ink cartridges for my printer I thought I would try elsewhere. Despite being $20 more expensive Staples was the cheapest of the bunch. I checked on their website and they had 8 in stock at the local store so we drove there.

When we got there they said they had none in stock. I asked why it stated 8 on the website and they gave no comment. I tweeted about it, the usual copy/paste comments back from Staples, I didn’t want to get into another back and forth with another company. Eventually, Amazon delivered the cartridges which is good news.

Telus

As our community of 400 homes are all with Telus Home service we eventually got our 25% discount. Not only good for us but also the majority of people living here are seniors on a limited pension.

Telus hadn’t responded to my multiple reports of poor mobile signal in our area. I called them again and after being transferred from one person to the next I finally got to speak to someone who could help. Well, they couldn’t help much but they did try and at least they were friendly.

Eventually, I decided to buy their home telephone service. I had no choice given their poor mobile signal. The setup wasn’t without issues but eventually got it in. Of course, the phone is connected to fibre, so if that goes down our internet, TV and phone will experience downtime.