22nd February 2010 Boiro

What a night we had last night!

The weather was shocking. We were parked up, nice and cosy in bed when at about 4am the motorhome started rocking and the rain started hitting the roof so hard it is difficult to put into words just how it sounded, it gradually became worse and worse, the noise increasing to almost deafening levels and the motion of the motorhome rocking back and forth was almost like being on a bad channel crossing. At one point I considered getting out and putting the steadies down it was that bad. Suddenly, it stopped. And it was that sudden, almost like (I imagined) being in the centre if a hurricane, a very strange experience indeed!

Stormy Boiro

We managed a bit more sleep and when we eventually woke up again it was by more rain. We heard via a phonecall that there had been terrible weather in southern Spain and that the Potuguese island of Madeira had also suffered very badly from the onslaught.

It still looked very grim outside so we elected to stay where we were for the day and make good use of the cafe over the road. Another lunch, another bottle of red wine and Internet access gave us a good excuse anyway. I restarted the communication with Hewlett Packard as seen in the blog post previous to this and as you can probably gather it didn’t go well with them refusing to ship a replacement hard drive from the UK to Spain, ridiculous in my opinion, particularly considering that Gaslow, a much smaller company, managed to get a replacement gas pipe to France for me within 48 hours without any trouble whatsoever. However, just after I posted the blog and was ‘tweeting’ it as an update I received a reply from Arv, the chap who obviously watches Twitter for #hewlettpackard hashtags. He was sorting it out for me and within half an hour I received a call from HP Spain telling me they would get the tech team to contact me tomorrow. So, things seem to be moving on on that front at least. It seems to me that going through the usual channels with these companies can be a lenghthy and frustrating experience but a well tagged tweet can reap much better rewards. I know the result came from the use of Twitter as the guy that phoned referred to Arv, not HP UK!

So there you have it, got a problem with a big company? Don’t bother phoning and talking to computers and foreign call centre workers who have set scripts to personalise accordingly, get a Twitter account and make use of the #hashtags, you might find you get a better response!