The claims process

What's been happening in the last few days? Well not as much work as I would have liked to be honest.

Ever since I was knocked off my motorbike around 6 weeks ago, I've had the most horrendous experience trying to get my claim sorted out. You'd think it would be easy seeing as I was hit from behind by two cars (so no issue with who was to blame) but I was wrong. BLD (so called Biker Legal Defence) have been unable to supply me with a suitable hire bike and I've now had to take one and a half days off just to phone them to make a complaint and try and get them to provide me with a bike I can ride. They are supposed to call me every week with an update regarding the claim however I've not had a single phone call so far and whenever I call them, the staff are extremely rude.

Today I got so fed up with them that I decided that I no longer wanted to deal with them. I called Swinton to arrange for another company to handle my claim and to my horror, I found that BLD are the only bike claims handlers that they used so I had no choice but to stay with them. At least Swinton did take my complaint seriously and were not happy with the way that I'd been spoken to by the staff at BLD. For example, after complaining last week and trying to get the situation sorted out, I finally accepted their offer of a 125 (apparently the only bike they've had available in the last 4 weeks) as a temporary measure for a few days until the CBF600 came in. When the delivery driver dropped it off, he laughed at me for accepting it and said the only point of a 125 was to pass your CBT and he said he was unable to remove the L plates. Needless to say, I've not ridden it after that experience. I felt like a complete idiot for agreeing to take it and it felt to me like this was not the way they normally treat their customers. Perhaps male bikers just won't accept it?

Overall I've been really disappointed with my claims experience. Still it's a valuable lesson in how not to deal with customers.

First Blog Post

Today has been both incredibly infuriating and exciting at the same time. Infuriating because I know that I signed up to Blogger some time ago but have been unable to sign in with my username or retrieve any of my user info so I have given up. This is obviously what you get when you have to use specific email addresses rather than just your normal email address. I had exactly the same problem with Flickr as I signed up with them a while ago but then couldn't remember what my sign in details were. Fortunately with them, I did manage to recover everything. Unfortunately with Blogger, I did not.

I had then had the problem of trying to work out how on earth this idiotic website works. It's not user friendly at all and then the template was taking forever to update...snore. I still haven't got it to look how I want it to - ah well perhaps the website designer can work it out for me because I haven't got the time. It's a bit like Word 2007 - everything's all gone into symbols that you don't understand and it just makes you want to throw the PC out of the window - is that a Mac thing - the symbols, I mean (as well as wanting to throw Macs out of windows as well of course!!)?

On the plus side, my new uploads to Flickr today were getting steady hits. One person even added one of my photos as their favourite! That made me tweet. How sad. Blogs, Flickr and Twitter - I think I may have overloaded my social networking universe!