up North down South

Posted on September 20, 2006
Filed Under Outside Dublin, bureaucracy, chancers, pub, restaurant, work | 4 Comments

Despite the UK Met Office issuing a severe weather warning for Northern Ireland, I started the day in a pleasant mood as I drove over the Glenshane Pass from Dungiven to Belfast. The Glenshane Pass is a major mountain pass cutting through the Sperrin Mountains in Northern Ireland. It’s a spectacular place to visit during the warm, sunny months but, imo, it’s just as nice during the humid, rain-sodden days we seem to be experiencing at the moment. The Ponderosa pub is located in the Pass and claims to be the highest pub in Ireland but my guest at a later lunch reckoned Johnnie Fox’s pub in the Dublin mountains is higher.

It was very overcast as I drove along the A6 and there was quite a bit of, not fog exactly, but low-lying cloud. Ever now and then, a gap would appear in the cloud and a bit of jutting mountain would stick out and divert my eye from the very large lorries all around me. I was tempted to pull over and take some photos but (a) it would have been too dangerous and (b) the police up there are very efficient and just love to write tickets for ‘Southerners‘. And anyway I was going to lunch in Paul Rankin’s Rain City restaurant in the Malone Road area of Belfast.

Rain City in the Malone Road area of Belfast is actually on the Malone Road (!) and I’m pretty sure the only time Paul Rankin cooks these days is when he gets out of bed and makes toast for his family. Still, it’s pretty nice and, in a previous life, I used to bring clients there. Today, my companion had garlic bread for starters and spag bol for the main while I had a Totilla thingy and a veggie burger. All of it was very tasty and I’d recommend it for lunch to anyone. One thing though, I forgot to read the menu properly and my burger had rocket mayo on it. And I hate rocket.

See the table in the photo with two cups on it? That’s where we sat. Fascinating, eh! The guy at the next table must have been an arts lecturer from the nearby Queens University because, querying the menu with the waiter, he asked, ‘Where it says ‘rocket mayo’, is that rocket with mayo or just rocket mayo?‘ Like it mattered. And he wore a purple tie. Q.E.D. Arts Lecturer. Maybe Sociology.

So far, so good. I really should have paid more attention to the storm clouds and all those black ravens flying around the fields of rural Ireland. I got back to the Dublin office about 5p.m. only to find out the phones had been disconnected by Eircom. It seems we hadn’t paid our bill and fair’s fair, I guess. Our finance dept could easily be re-named another 7-letter word that begins with f, ends with -ers, and has -uck in the middle.

After several acts of random violence involving calculators and razor-sharp pencils on people who are good at maths, I calmed down and thought, ‘hey, I’m isadub, I’ve got a company credit card and I can fix this. I can fix this‘. So, onto Eircom’s website for background info and, eureka, you can pay your bill online by credit card. I am the master of the universe! A quick click for registration & filled in the details, only to be told, we cannot register you because you’ve been disconnected.

Hmmm. Tired and hungry, and definitely not a master of the universe, I clutch at straws and ring Eircom’s customer service helpline. A computer voice interrogates me for a little bit. At one point, I mutter, ‘not this sh*te again‘ and the cheeky computer says, ‘sorry I didn’t understand you‘. Yeah, right! I’m put through to a queue for the next available ‘customer service operator‘. After awhile I get bored so decide to go home.

At this point, I should say I was using my mobile phone (latterly with a car kit) and it has a loudspeaker function. The ‘we value your custom‘ stopped after approx 5 mins. By this stage, I’d pretty much figured out what was going to happen but, as an experiment, I wanted to see what would happen. So I locked up the office, got in my car, drove home, stopped at various red lights, turned into my driveway, unlocked the front door, emptied my pockets etc. And the whole time, I’m listening to the same 3 minute muzak song. Why can’t they change the song every, say, 10 minutes?

After 43 minutes, a ‘customer service agent‘ answered the phone. Yes, I wrote fourty three minutes. ‘What’s your account number?‘, she asked. I gave her the number. ‘Are you the customer?‘, I think she said. ‘Yes, I am a customer’, says I. ‘If you’re a customer, then I’m not going to help you‘, she said. Only joking??? She actually said, ‘You’ve got the wrong number, you should ring 12345678 and choose option 3‘. Now, I know from experience there’s no point in arguing with someone who can (and will) point at her computer screen and tell you ‘it’s on the computer so it must be true‘ so I hung up.

I rang the right number (it’s now about 6.30pm) and the computer voice says, ‘we’re only open 9-5‘.

Comments