Tuesday, September 2, 2008

National Foods are Crap

Monday 1st September 2008
Many years ago, back in the depths of time, Ian was sitting at the bar in the Public bar of the Kings Head in Barnet High Street chatting to one of the old boys (old Men) who used to frequent the pub on a regular basis. This particular night, whilst trying to put the world to rights they got onto the subject of people making life hard for you at work, and for no particular reason other than the fact that they didn’t really give a damn about you because they were good at bull and knew how to pass the buck.
Well this old boy, we’ll call him John, had managed to avoid working for most of his working, or not working life and had a lot to say to Ian about how badly you get treated at work and how the blame when anything goes wrong, always lands on the guy on the ground floor.
Ian remembers thinking at the time that someone must have told John about this, according to local folklore John had never worked anywhere long enough to gain this much in depth information. It turned out that John was actually a very good worker if he was working the right hours, most people used to give him work starting at 7am or 8am and expect him to work till 5pm when what they should have done was give him work from 2am till 10.25am. The problem was that for some reason he always got a headache at about 10.25am which just happened to be 5 minutes before the pub opened, now the pub opening at 10.30am was quite handy for him because it was somewhere to go to get a drink to wash down the Aspirin.
Unfortunately he used to wash the Aspirin down with a pint of Mild which would give the Mild a foul taste, he would then have to drink another pint of Mild to get rid of the taste of the first one, by the end of which he would invariably be in discussion with somebody, telling them where they are going wrong. He would stay in the pub until 2.30pm, go home for a nap and be back in the pub for 5.30pm to pick up his money for the couple of hours he had worked that morning.
Now we know this has absolutely nothing to do with the HoJo Axbridge to Oz thing, but the one overriding thing that Ian remembers about his four or five hours of putting the world to rights with John, was his final comment before he staggered off home, “come the revolution we’ll line em up against a wall and shoot the bloody lot of them”.
Now we get to the nitty gritty, this is how Ian feels about one of our suppliers at the Café, he has mentioned this lot in the past, in fact if we remember rightly he was quite rude about them.
Just in case you have forgotten who we are talking about, it is National Foods, our milk supplier, sorry ex milk supplier.
Two Saturdays ago our Milk order didn’t arrive, when Ian rang the customer care line he was told that the reason it didn’t arrive was because “you don’t have a delivery on a Saturday”. Ian duly pointed out to them that “we have had a delivery every Saturday we have been here apart from the odd occasion when your company has made a cock up”, the Customer don’t Care person then told Ian that according to their system we don’t have a delivery on a Saturday which is why despite the Fax having Saturday down as delivery date, they booked the delivery for Monday.
The Customer don’t Care person did say that she would contact the depot to see if they could send someone out with our order and then get back to us. We know from past experience that on a Saturday the local depot do not take calls from Head Office and as Head Office is on the other side of the country, there is nothing they can do about it, so we bought our milk at Coles Supermarket.
We haven’t got an account manager at the moment because they can’t find anyone bright enough to take over the South West sales area but Stupid enough to work for them, hence we had no explanation or apology from the company during the week.
This Saturday as Ian drove into work he passed the milk lorry going in the opposite direction so expected the milk delivery to be waiting for him when he arrived, it wasn’t there. Straight away Ian rang Customer don’t Care and asked about the delivery, because we had run out of order pads earlier in the week and this Mickey Mouse firm had failed to send us some more Ian had to ring in the order on Friday Afternoon.
The first thing the Customer don’t Care person said was “you don’t have a delivery on a Saturday” to which Ian replied “we always used to”, Ian told the girl to find the order and when she did she said “it’s been ordered for next week”. Ian hit the roof and demanded a delivery, the girl said “I will contact the depot and get back to you”, Ian said “it’s a waste of time ringing them because they won’t answer the phone”, to which she replied “they have to”. Ian then said “if they have to, why didn’t they last week?” she said “I will contact them and ring you back”.
After about ten minutes she rang back and said that she had made contact and they were trying to sort out a delivery, when Ian questioned her about how she had managed to contact them, she eventually admitted that she hadn’t actually contacted them, she had left a message. When Ian pointed out that they will not answer it she said “they have to”, how bloody naïve can you get, Ian duly pointed out that there are several thousand miles between this depot and anyone with any authority so there was absolutely no chance that they would answer the call. She said she would call when she got a reply, so we bought our milk in Coles Supermarket.
After a couple of hours without a call and Ian getting really wound up by their attitude, Ian decided to call them again only this time he asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor took all the details and said he would call back, five minutes later he called back and said that for some reason the delivery had been booked for Wednesday 3rd September instead of Saturday 30th August.
At this point Ian got his sarky head on, pointing out the similarities of the two dates and how it must have been an extremely difficult mistake to make. Ian told him to stick his milk round up where the sun doesn’t shine and left it at that, we haven’t had any word from the company again today hence the rant.
If you live in Australia don’t invest in National Foods shares, cos as John once said “come the revolution we’ll line em up against a wall and shoot the bloody lot”, we are now refusing to deal with them, they are one of the biggest companies in the country and they can’t even get a milk round right.
Not a lot happened today, no Phone call from National Foods, no phone Call from the Shopping Centre Managing Company about our plans for the Take Away, Marisa loves Cubs and Kristian Hates Cubs.
Michelle and her boyfriend are still talking, but she had a good night at the party on Saturday and is making him work hard for her attentions.

4 comments:

Glowstars said...

I'm not sure why you want all that milk anyway - the only thing it's good for is a skinny non-fat, high sugar cap! lol

Ganeida said...

My oldest girl works in retail & we are regularly subjected to similar rants...& you should hear the whole island go rank if the milk order gets screwed over because there *is* nowhere else to go to get it!

Liddy is off her rocker at present over the Sunday shift where she gets the newbie girls who spend half their working time fluttering their lashes at the teenage louts hanging round. When the guns come out Liddy'll be lining 'em up.

The HoJo's said...

Vic - our mainstay is coffee :o) we sell a lot. Just as well we are opposite a supermarket.

Ganeida - we are lucky, we can get most things we need locally, at a price, I struggled when we lived in a village with no shop. As for Sunday girlies, I am so with her on that one!
xc

Elena said...

are you serious, the behaviour by national foods is unbelievable. who are you using now? (i hope u didnt write that in the blog)