BabyUnique.co.uk

as many of you know, perlmonger and I are about to become grandparents. Well, step grandparent, in his case. But I digress.

as part of this process, we volunteered to purchase The Pushchair. Much research was done. Decisions were made. The Mother To Be settled on a particular model. We Googled, and went “eek” a lot, and clutched our credit card in panic.

the best deal to be found seemed to be at www.babyunique.co.uk. I read their site, particularly the bit that said “next day delivery”, and ordered it on Monday.

on Tuesday, no sign. On Wednesday, no sign – so in the afternoon, I got a bit twitchy and mailed them. Then phoned them – an answering machine, with no opportunity to leave a message. I repeated the mailing (to different addresses, and via their web site) and phoning.

on Thursday morning, fairly rattled (because I’m going to Norwich tomorrow and want to take it with me), I phoned again. A rather dozy girl answered the phone, and went off to check, and informed me that:

  1. they were *closed* on a Wednesday [boggle – this is an internet business]
  2. they had tried to phone me several times on Monday, but “the phone cut off”. Why didn’t they e-mail me? (and the phone is fine anyway).
  3. “very few e-mails get through to us” – boggle once more. Why the fsck don’t they get that sorted out forthwith! Apparently “their internet chap is trying to sort it out”.

the perambulating conveyance has, thankfully, turned up this morning, but I do most strongly suggest that – in the unlikely event of any of you who read this wanting to purchase baby equipment – that you avoid this outfit.

Ikea

if one *has* to go to Ikea, then Wednesday night at 8 p.m. seems the optimal time, at least at the Bristol store. We stopped for supper in the cafe first – haddock and chips for me, and an unfeasibly large number of meatballs for perlmonger.

then round we hurtled – curtain rail and curtains, various kitchen gubbins, a futon mattress and more were purchased, all to be conveyed to kalunina‘s new flat at the weekend. Lets see just how much an old Saab can hold, shall we?

in other news, www.kestrel.org has pretty much fallen off Google, due to a corrupt robots.txt file (lord knows how that happened), so this is a little kick for the spiders.