Customer Service

I have had the worst experience of customer service lately. Most specifically, I had the worst day of customer service on Friday.

It all started when I decided that I wanted to leave work for lunch. Grant wasn't interested, being busy and all, so I asked Andrew if he wanted to come with me. Andrew sits next to me at work and we have become quite close and chatty recently, so he was up for going out to lunch and we shut down our machines at 12:00pm and made our way to Red Cafe. I was quite keen to try out the new weekly menu that they had introduced, and so was Andrew. We even booked to ensure that we got a table - this is how keen I was. In any case, we arrived at Red Cafe just after 12 and got seated at a small table in the corner. It was incredibly busy, so it was a good thing that we booked. We got handed menus and then waited around 10 minutes before the only waitress in the place finally got a chance to get our drink orders. Not her fault, but still a little annoying. We then waited a further 20 minutes to get our drinks, only to find out that they were not serving the new menu during the day - only at night. It was now halfway through our lunch hour, and we knew that there was no way we were going to make it back on time if we ordered food. So we downed our drinks as fast as we could and made our way to Nandos.

Nandos in Grahamstown has a terrible reputation for being incredibly slow. We knew this when we decided to go there, but we figured that since we were running late anyway, we might as well order, pay and have them deliver. We had the vain hope that by paying first, they would be quicker on the uptake and bring us our food within an hour at least. An hour and a half later, our food had still not arrived. After scouring the web for a phone number unsuccessfully, I finally managed to get the number for the Grahamstown branch off a menu that someone had lying around the office. I phoned them and was told that the food was on its way. Phew. Ten minutes later, it arrived. Or some of it did anyway. Out of the three orders that we had placed, only one and a half arrived - one pita meal (out of the two that were ordered) and a vitality meal minus the salad - and they were all cold. We were furious, and Grant and I made our way to the Nandos branch to insist that we get our money back. They gave it back to us very unapologetically, and we made our way to PnP instead and bought some rolls and chicken to make sarmies with. We weren't very happy, but the situation had been resolved and that was that.

Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the end of my day of bad customer service. I wish I could say that it was, but there was yet another terrible experience to come. Andrew, Badger, Kath, Emma and I had decided to go and see Harry Potter on Friday night and we had decided to go to dinner before hand. Since the sushi place was around the corner anyway, we decided to go there and we figured that giving them an hour to make sushi for 5 people should be more than enough. But it really wasn't. Once again, I had to feel for the owner a little - there was one chef, one helper and one woman running around trying to ensure that everyone was happy. It was a difficult situation, and she tried to make up for it by giving us free saki. Unfortunately, that didn't stop us from being 20 minutes late for our movie and missing the beginning of it, and it didn't stop other people from threatening to leave when they saw us being served. They insisted that they had ordered before us (despite us arriving 15 minutes before them) and were incredibly upset that our orders were being seen to first. We didn't stick around to see the end of this argument, as we had a movie to catch, but thankfully I can say that it was the end of my Friday of bad customer service. Only because I didn't go anywhere else after the movie though.

Andrew and I are now convinced that we are cursed. Badger has suggested that he go out to dinner with each of us individually so that he can decipher who exactly the curse is attached to. Since I felt nauseous after my dinner out last night and got the wrong pizza delivered today, I have a sinking suspicion that it is attached to me. Here's hoping I'm wrong!