What Fools

Another day, another online ordering fiasco. The erroneous "electronic" transaction appeared this morning under the name "Whitcoulls". The bar stewards have indeed charge us twice. I did a bit of googling and managed to find a number for head office and rang up to find out what on earth they thought they were playing at. The poor woman on the other end seemed resigned to being shouted at, but I declined to do so, since all she was able to do was to put a request through to head office in Australia, who would allegedly contact me "within 24 hours".

Mightily annoyed by all of this, I decided to dispute the transaction with Westpac. Unfortunately, they were not much more use than Whatfools. Apparently the transaction is not final until about 7 days after it occurs and as such cannot be disputed until after it is. Westpac explained that what happens when you use your visa debit card is that a pending charge gets put on your account, reducing the balance and the balance available. Until the merchant finalises the transaction, it just sits there. This is allegedly to stop you going overdrawn, which I have to admit it does do, but at the expense of needing to keep a large balance in the account to cover Tom, Dick and Harry applying pending charges willy nilly. They did give me a fax number for their credit department, allegedly so that Whitcoulls (if they ever responded) would be able to sort this mess out.

A little later Di received an email which claimed to have despatched 19 of the 20 books ordered. The value of this despatch ties up with the extra charge we have incurred and I'm guessing that they've found one book missing and shipped a different order or something in order to get round it. What sort of crappy software they're using I can only wonder at.

Craig arrived home from his new job with yet another basket of doughnuts, buns and pizzas. If he carries on at this rate, we'll be as big as houses, or be paying a fortune to chuck it all away. My lack of gratitude resulted in some choice words being exchanged and accusations of grumpy old bar stewardness. But seriously, it's nice once in a while, but we are on pay-per-throw here (one has to purchase pre-approved sacks for rubbish disposal) and anything we don't eat will cost to chuck out.

With the end of the school term approaching, Di has rented a pool key from the primary school. This means that we can go and use the school's pool any time we like out of school hours. We decided to give it a whirl and took Vicky and kids along too. The pool can't be much more than 10 metres long, and is not very deep at all - I can sit on the bottom quite comfortably and enjoy a dry beard. Still, with the sun beaming down, it was a most pleasant way to wind down the late afternoon.