Tag Archives: no reply

Saturday 11th June 2016 – YESTERDAY AFTERNOON …

… I sat down and sent off a whole ruck of e-mails about accommodation, asking for appointments to view for this weekend. And how many replies do you think that I’ve received?

Krys guessed right (good old Krys!). She said “none”. As I have said many times before … "and you’ll say many times again" – ed … there is no such thing as a recession. There is just a whole load of people who are letting all kinds of income-generating opportunities melt away before their very eyes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall dozens of similar occurrences – solar panel suppliers in March 2009, caravan suppliers in July 2015 – two examples that spring readily to mind.

And not forgetting two suppliers of slide-in camper units for Strider whom I visited, one in New Hampshire and the other one in Quebec – and asked them to send me quotes for the Spring so that I could order one ready for the summer. That’s an order worth over $12,500, would you believe, but it’s too much trouble for any of the sales staff to reply to me.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. I have better things to do.

Like waking up at 07:00, long before the alarm, finding out that two of my friends are on line already, and having a chat that went on to … errr … 13:00, with me missing breakfast. And then just as I was about to nip off, Liz came on-line for a chat and so I was here for another 90 minutes.

Not that I am complaining, of course. Far from it. It’s nice to see friends and chat aimlessly for ages. I’d much rather chat to a friend than eat breakfast. That’s much more important.

And so I eventually made it out to buy a baguette for lunch. Dunno if I mentioned that yesterday I finally discovered a boulangerie so I went there first. But by that time they had long-since sold out. I ended up at the Bio-Planet where I bought a lovely artisanal baguette, sampled a pile of delights and had two free cups of coffee. You have your money’s worth in the Bio-Planet.

Back here in my room it was stifling, but I’ve managed at long last to force the window so that now I can open it, and listen to the arrival of a serious rainstorm as the weather has broken.

But not before I went out to make my tea. The chick peas left over from Thursday had gone off already and so I ended up with pasta, tinned vegetables with chick-peas already mixed in, and tinned mushrooms followed by the usual pudding.

Tomorrow will be an exciting day for me as I’m taking all of my possessions to my new digs in Leuven. I hope that they are okay but for the money that I’m paying to stay there, I’m not expecting too much. It’s all a question of money’s worth, as you all know already. I’ll put up with inconvenience if I’m not paying very much – I’m on the economy package.

So i’ll clear off now and listen to the rain. It sounds lovely outside.

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Tuesday 27th April 2010 – Well, I finished …

… my tract on distance learning. Normally we can get through one page of dialogue in the 5 minutes that we have, and by the purest coincidence the tract that I prepared was exactly 4 pages long and with breaks in the right place at the end of each page. Now how about that?

But a depressing feature of this article was that I sent a whole heap of e-mails out to all kinds of institutions involved in distance learning, making it quite clear that I was offering some kind of free air time to those organisations concerned.

And do you know how many of these organisations took the trouble to reply? JUST ONE

And do you know what their reply actually said? “Thank you for your recent email.  I am writing to confirm that it has been passed on to xxxx, Head of Media and Public Relations and she will reply to you in due course”. And seeing as we are in the studio tomorrow recording, it will of course be far too late for her contact to do any good.

But one thing that I am learning, and learning quickly, is that there is no such thing as a recession. There are loads of customers queueing up at places with loads of the folding stuff waving around, but British (and some other) companies just can’t be bothered to get off their collective derrieres to go and get it. Employees far too busy on their Social Networks during working hours to actually do any work. And when the place goes t|ts-up as it inevitably does, then there are all the tears and the weeping and the pleading. And in the meantime the customers are fed up of waiting and have p155ed off elsewhere.

Just trawl through the pages of this blog – especially during the summer of last year when I was in the UK – and see exactly what I mean. I know that if there was the slightest possibility of getting my organisation or business some free air time to a whole host of captive customers I would drop everything to do the necessary. It really is unbelievable.

Next stop was down to Liz and Terry’s to see how the not-very-patient was doing and to plan the remainder of our radio programmes – such as the events for the month. And here was another thing – we have (as you can probably imagine) abandoned our idea of contacting the local government offices for information as they can’t be bothered to reply either and instead we have approached regional Government for their assistance. They very kindly sent us an extremely useful booklet with all kinds of helpful information. But as we were scanning through it, it didn’t look quite right. Colser examination revealed that it was the booklet for …. errrr …. 2008.

I tell you what – I am getting thoroughly sick of this. It must be dreadful trying to do this kind of a job for a living – with 90% of all enquiries going unanswered, 5% replying too late, 5% when they do reply not taking it seriously. Invited guests who promise to attend suddenly disappearing and leaving us holding the baby.

And do you know how much Liz and I get paid for doing all of this? Absolutely nothing at all. And there’s no expenses budget either. We travel at our own expense, pay for our own phone calls and the like. And last month at the studio they didn’t even offer us a cup of coffee, despite the plainest of plainest hints.

Yes, it isn’t easy being famous and my hate goes off to everyone else who has made it to the top like Liz and I are going to. They talk about dogged perseverence, sheer bloody-mindedness and all these other characteristics that are essentials for stardom and having been celebrities for just a couple of weeks, we can understand exactly what they mean.

And that reminds me, said her, abandoning yet another good rant for the moment – we have to wear our best bib and tucker tomorrow because we are going to be photographed by the press.

In other news my 3D modelling has been restarted now that I’m home. And I did manage to find a freeware canoe so that my characters stranded on the beach could paddle off to safety. Had I not managed that they would have been up the creek without a paddle. But as I was preparing their getaway I came across a freeware flying bathtub.

Now isn’t that much more exciting? it can take my characters onto a whole new plane.

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