Today I had an email from the very first International school I contacted in Holland when I began my job search. They are looking for someone to work with a particular child and were wondering if I was still interested. Looking back at my email (a very handy feature in gmail!) I noticed that I had originally contacted this school in October 2006. ‘Wow, four months before they responded’, you exclaim. However I was not surprised at all. Yes four months is slow even by Cloggie standards but I am slowly getting used to the idea that communications in Holland are very slow. For example:

1. I originally attempted to embark on a Dutch postal course from the very well known LOI. Even Ann Frank took courses from them. Their main downfall however was that even though they were offering a course to people who did not speak Dutch they only sent letters, materials, etc in Dutch. I decided to cancel my request and sent a complaint letter…it took one month before I got a response.

2. When my transavia flight was diverted from Rotterdam to Amsterdam and me and my fellow passangers were left for ages all alone with no further help at 1am it took just over one month to even get an acknowledgement that I had sent in a complaint.

3. A job I applied for one month ago has just recently got back to me to discuss my application further.

So you see, I believe the Cloggie’s have introduced a one month rule into their customer services approach. No one is allowed to respond prior to one month passing. It must be a target with severe consequences. This for me is going to be very hard. I love complaining about injustices to the fellow shopper. Today I was off to PC World in order to assertively shout at the sales team about why they cant fix my computer without shipping it off to goodness knows where and managed to get a USB keyboard and a refund on my coverplan all in the same day…one month just wouldn’t do!!

So I am thinking I will need to come up with a very creative system to predict what I will be complaining about in the future and get my complaint in then. That way the one month rule will have passed just as the complaint actually needs to come into effect.

Off to ponder…

Cloggie In Training