Monday 17th June

It is definitely getting warmer and having fed and watered the Perry’s I see them out of the front door, and depart for the supermarket. For the first time this year I manage without a jacket or top, but in just a T-shirt, the next thing you know I’ll be breaking out the shorts! The supermarket is fairly empty and so I’m able to whizz round following Mrs P’s meticulous list. I then stop off at the bank, the butchers and the library (I’m sure there’s a nursery rhyme in there somewhere.)

Having returned home I get a call from the ailing one. You may remember the Olympic Holiday saga last month. Well to update you they have still not provided the refund and cancellation invoice they committed to provide a month ago. Somewhat typically for faceless corporate companies they are happy to take your money but not so quick to help when you have a problem. Well, following weekly what can only be described as begging emails to them, nothing was proceeding, despite their commitment. So yesterday I had a web chat with someone at Olympic, and followed it up with a strongly worded email which elicited a call from Olympic to the ailing one this morning, informing him they were just now processing the refund and printing off the cancellation invoice. This has been a very poor experience, and it is now unlikely that the folks will book with Olympic Holidays again because of it. If only Olympic Holidays had done what they promised. If only service issues were easier to raise. If only it was easier to complain; complaints normally need to be submitted in writing (by letter)! If only Olympic Holidays had phone numbers that didn’t cost you to call them (they use 0844 numbers), I might actually believe there was a customer service ethos in the company. But no, there most assuredly is not. If you cared, why would you charge your customers to call you?

I’m invigilating in the afternoon, and for all the pupils it is their last exam before leaving the school. It’s a short one at an hour and passes quickly, and the pupils leave on a wave of relief. I’ve mentioned tongue-in-cheek to the girls in the exams office that they really should bring us a cup of tea, during the longer exams, and so today they present me with a flask so I can do it myself. A useful gesture as the flasks we have at home are a few years old and now have that flask taste, that makes all drinks taste the same.

There is no ironing today as Mrs P got it done over the weekend, and so I get tea ready on time. The teenagers have no homework today in this post-exam time, and so the Perry house is quite relaxed. The eldest is off out and takes the car for the first time on her own. Mrs P and I are slightly anxious for her as she pulls off and disappears down the road. She returns an hour later with both her and the car in one piece, which is a relief.

We put her on the insurance at the weekend having trawled the internet for prices, the range of which was frankly staggering.  The eventual price to put her, a teenager, on a policy is considerably more than a week’s holiday for the Perry family in Wales, to put it in context. An absolute rip off, but what can you do.

I pop out to football in the evening and get a decent sweat on, only to return home to be told in no uncertain terms by Mrs P, that the eldest had posted a photo of me on Facebook, that made me look ridiculous (and there was me thinking that was my job!) To be fair it was a horrible picture and I instructed the eldest to remove it. That is the first time I’ve been caught out by the invasiveness of social networking, and I don’t like it.

Yours considering training to be a Luddite.

Jay