Paul Malpas

I have had two very difficult problems solved recently by a man with a van showing that there is a job for everyone in this world especially those willing to work and spot a niche in the market.

This last Christmas I was in Manchester visiting relations, in fact visiting my grandchildren and future grandchild.  We all went over, my wife, my youngest son, our dog and myself.  We took the mindlessly boring journey across the Irish Sea and the long car ride from Holyhead into Manchester.  I was doing the same journey 40 years ago in roughly the same time.  Nothing has improved in all that time, in fact some things have worsened.  Whereas 40 years ago you were served creamy Guiness out of a hatch, these days with vastly superior service features the Guiness tastes a little like washing up water.  Gone it seems never to return is the HSS fast ferry, whisking you over the waves in something less than two hours or the sedate and civilised overnight cruise to 12  Quays at Birkenhead.

One of the days over Christmas, my eldest grandchild, a strapping seven year old boy, approached me and said that he would like to come back to Ireland with us so that he could play our piano: which got me thinking and asking.  I asked my daughter, the young chap’s mother, who said he was always asking about the piano, but decent pianos are hard got and quite expensive.  I thought of our piano, bought at a cost years ago for my youngest daughter and which does not owe me a penny after she won a music scholarship to my old alma mater, St. Bede’s College in Manchester,  which saved me oodles of cash over her seven year stay, in reduced fees.  In fact this part of the story is worth a blog on its own and I will try to write it over the next few days.

However youngest daughter flew the nest years ago and is revelling in pastures new on the east side of Ireland.  I will here give her a little plug.  If you want discount in Dublin, she is your lady.  They call her Miss 20% due to the many contacts she has in the retail trade in the Fair City.

So having flown the nest, the piano, constructed of quality polished mahogony, has been stood in my study gathering dust and used as a shelf for my many files and papers.  Helen, my wife of many years, as good as she is at most things, is no master of the ivories.  The poor thing (the piano that is) is now redundant and that ain’t what it was lovingly built for by the family firm of Waldberg of Berlin in the early 1930s.

This masterpiece of musical manufacture would be just the thing for this budding Liberace of a grandchild but how to move it from Roscommon to Manchester without an arm or a leg being involved.  I rang a mate and told him of my problem.  This mate not only rivalled my daughter in the discount stakes in the west of Ireland but as it happened knew a man who did little else but transport pianos and similar sized objects back and forth across the Irish Sea.  I rang this man in Mayo and without batting an eyelid gave me his price which was not at all outrageous.  I accepted and he was knocking on our door at 9.00am the following morning.

Not only was this man an amenable sort, he was a Manchester man to boot.  I had enough credentials immediately.  So with the help of the inevitable Scouser I drafted in for his engineering skills, we huffed and puffed and with a few guttural curses common to our part of Ireland, this massive piece of pre-Nazi musical endeavour was hoisted into the vastness of his little white van, joining another piano that was en-route for Lincoln.  The operation was brought to a rapid conclusion without the need for a funny story but the Scouser had to remind us of the TV advert of years ago where a father and son chimpanzee were manoeuvring a similar instrument up the stairs and the son said to the father “Hey dad, do you now the piano is on my foot” whereupon the father chimpanzee said “No, but if you hum it son, I’ll play it”

So we said goodbye to the amenable Manchester man, his white van, our piano and its Lincoln mate and sure enough it arrived at my daughter’s house in Cheshire at 9.30 this morning, he was then travelling over to Lincoln with a vastly inferior instrument and then onto Kent to pick up a motorbike that was destined for Westport.

I am amazed at the smooth, cheap, easy way the whole operation was handled to a very worthwhile conclusion and I hope to hear many wonderful worthwhile musical interludes in the years to come.

I told you previously that I had two problems, the other being of the dog variety.  I explained how we had brought over our dog, a ten year old Shih Tzu of Tibetan/Chinese extraction, on his winter holiday to Manchester.  Well on Christmas Day, not happy with his lodgings, he bolted.  For five days we searched the highways and byeways and dogshomes to no avail, our oriental sentinel was not to be found.  So with heavy heart, we returned to our adopted home on 29th December, dogless.

On one of the early days into the New Year my daughter was at the local supermarket and she noticed a man tying up his dog outside of the shop, prior to attending to his proposed purchases.  This dog was a Shih Tzu, not ours, but obviously a close enough relation to strike up a conversation.  She told him of our sad story and how we had gone back to Ireland broken hearted.  A chink of light appeared, he had heard of a Shih Tzu being handed in at a kennels not far away.  My daughter, keeping a tight rein on her emotions called in at the said kennels and there was Sushi, our dog, having the time of his life with a pack of his mates.

There was immediate recognition of my daughter by Sushi or enough for the kennel maid to hand over the dog and she would not take a penny for his seven or eight days lodgings, which was really kind of her in these hard pressed times.  My daughter took him home and locked him in the stables until she could solve the problem of returning Sushi to his own little home in the west.

But blow me did he not bolt again and my daughter tearfully relayed the circumstances in a telephone call that evening but just on the off chance she returned to the kennels the following morning to be met by the smiling kennel maid.  Sushi had returned the previous afternoon.  He must have been missing his new friends.  The kind lady said “why don’t you leave him here, he seems to enjoy it, whilst you organise his return”.  Problem solved!

My daughter went home and just out of interest she googled “transporting dogs to Ireland” and there was a man who did nothing else.  Twice a week he transported a load of dogs from Ireland to England and vice versa.  There is a market and a need for everything.  Within days the man was contacted, the dog collected with the kennel maid still refusing money.  The lady said she had fallen in love with Sushi and she did not want him to go.  The man with the van and the dog were  introduced and last night in the middle of the Irish Sea, there was a great celebration with piano heading east and the dog west.

I collected him in Mullingar at 6.30am this morning and Sushi did not want to leave his new home in the Mercedes van.  It looked like the most comfortable bed he had ever had.  I had him home at 8.00am and off he went sniffing out his old mates with obviously a tale to tell and as though he had enjoyed every minute of his adventure.

So I would like you all to raise your glass to the amenable men with vans who churn out a living in these depressing times, looking after the needs of their fellow men and looking after them well.

Why is it that  all large organizations in the past few years who have set up an internet system for accepting people’s enquiries, payments etc always get it wrong in the beginning?  I know why.  It is because the people or companies they employ for setting up these systems are absolute geniuses, their websites cover all probabilities faced by the anxious customer.  Prices, payments, passwords, terms and conditions, data protection, privacy rules and in some of them you can do your business in a multiplicity of languages.  The only thing they forget about is the customer, the human being who has not just jumped out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, the human being with feelings, emotions and generally with an innate sense of fair play.  Why should they not forget?  They are web designers, anoraks, thrutches and worst of all third parties who do not inhabit this wholesome world of ours, but sit in front of screens and dream up systems.

The customer is the single most important piece in the business equation.  Without the customer there would be no business,  no employment and no need.  So what we get is high tech companies delivering high tech channels through which the unconsidered customers can send their hard earned monies to automatons.  What if something goes wrong? Well, we will set up a call centre and because the customer has not been considered, we will fill this call centre with non- empathising, unsympathetic, underpaid decendants of the Black and Tans and Auxillaries ” Saturday nights out”. They naturally have a bullying disposition and are able to spit down the phone.

Such a company is eFlow, an organization set up to manage the barrier-free collection of tolls on Irish Toll Roads which has been in operation since 30 August 2008.  Now nobody minds teething problems but when the baby is approaching majority and still suffering it is time for the alarm bells to ring.

I have been through this barrier free tolling system twice in the 16 months of its operation, so I cannot be called a frequent user or even an experienced traveller but on the 18 October 2009 coming back to Roscommon from Dublin Airport, I let myself in for the full force of this bullying, customer last philosoph,  of Ireland’s premier, barrier free tolling specialist.

It was around 5.00pm on a lovely October Sunday afternoon, after we had dropped off two of our daughters at the airport, having sampled the delights of the Shelbourne Hotel’s famous high tea.  We, my wife and I that is,were in a happy mood as we went through the said system and then diverted off onto the N4 for our two hour journey home.  So it must have been around 7.00pm when we drove onto our property and Helen, my wife of many years standing and not prone to lies, sat at the computer and through the eFlow barrier free toll website’s automatic collection system paid our €3 toll.

Imagine our surprise when, on 27 October 2009, we received a UTN from eFlow.  A UTN, to you untrammelled people of the Gobi Desert, is an Unpaid Toll Notice that eFlow send out like Dail deputies send out Christmas cards.  They informed me that because I had not paid my original €3 toll within seven days, I now had an additional charge of €3 , a total of €6 to be paid immediately.

I was alarmed and rang their lo-call number and was put through to a neanderthal Cork man, one of a team of simians working that day at eFlow barrier free tolling’s call centre.  I explained to him my plight and he grunted as only the neanderthal can, that the payment was not on the system therefore we had not paid.  Quod erat demonstrandum as they say in the maths class.  It is not the duty of eFlow to prove they had been paid but it is the duty of the customer to prove that he  has paid.  After a few more minutes lambast from the prehistoric rebel, I put down the telephone and shivered.  I decided on another approach and at 3.14pm that afternoon I availed of the email system displayed on the eFlow barrier free toll system website and explained what I had done.

Nothing until the 3 November 2009 when I received our monthly bank statement showing that €3 had been deducted from our account on 20 October 2009 and it had been credited to the eFlow barrier free toll account.  By that same post I received another UTN from eFlow barrier free toll telling me that because I had not paid the original €3 or the additional charge of €3,  I was now landed with a charge of €41.50 leaving me with a total charge of €47.50 and confirming that if I did not pay this within 56 days a TVN would be issued.  To you Gobis that is a Toll Violation Notice, demanding a further €104.50, making a total of €146 which if not paid would result in an immediate prosecution and either a fine of up to €5,000 or imprisonment for up to six months.

My blood was up and I wrote a registered letter to eFlow confirming eveything that had taken place and told them also that I charge my fees out at a very reasonable €150 per hour and would appreciate this sum of €150 for system consultancy work to be paid by return.  On 20 November 2009 I received a letter from eFlow Customer Services (I was wrong they obviously value their customers).  The letter informed me that they had checked their call centre and there was no record of my telephone call to prehistory, my ensuing email or my money on their system but the money could be possibly traced if I was to give them fresh details of my payment method, card number, expiry date of my laser card and names of bank account holder.  I was naturally and still am reluctant to divulge of this information to such a bullying, uncouth and disorganized company.  I thought of Bertie’s biscuit tin and wondered if my money might be there.  In this letter of the 20th they apologised like only eFlow Customer Services can and said “However due to the standard protocol to be followed in this circumstance this is the only method we can correctly follow in order to cancel all amounts due”

I wrote back to say that the original €3 had been massively overwhelmed by the threat of a six month jail sentence.  I felt like Ned Kelly and Jack Duggan rolled into one.  I also told them that my financial details were my own affair and their intimidating behaviour was the cause of my reticence and I also upped my fee  to €200 having not received any recompense from my original charge.

December dawned and with it another eFlow letter apologizing for their poor service so far and the fact that my correspondence had been forwarded to their IT department.  Perhaps this is a euphemism for their Accounts Department and perhaps I might receive my consultancy fees.  They went on to say that I had made a “genuine attempt to pay your toll on time and correctly” but that they could not close the notice and they requested the same financial details and went on then to say “We acknowledge that you made a payment” but the notice still stands.

Can anybody out there tell me:-

1)  Where is my money?

2)  Will I get my consultancy fees?

3)  What should I do now?

4)  What is life like in Mountjoy?

5)  Why is the world full of idiots and companies full of idiot systems held together with idiot protocols?

6)  Where is Scotty?

7)  If my original bill was €3 and my original fees were €150 does it mean that every employee of eFlow will get:-

€3      =      6 months

Therefore €150 = 300 months (or 25 years penal servitude).

Is it a little hard for writing idiot letters?