I want to honour S for bravery under fire – she got our toilets back.
We have been ordering stuff for the house – and doing our best to economise by buying everything from places on the internet with the keenest prices. So S managed to find three of the toilets we wanted (concealed cisterns, decent amount of flush and a wide-bore pipe, if you catch my drift) for a good price on a site called diy-home-solutions.com.
Perhaps we ought to have known better – and maybe we tried too hard to economise – but anyway, three days later they took the cash for the toilets – £750 – but mysteriously failed to respond to any of S’s emails to enquire when the goods would arrive.
S got a sinking feeling and we looked up the DNS registry to find the address of a Mr Steve Upton who runs the show and a phone number which unfortunately didn’t work. Getting more and more suspicious as the days wore on – the only hope we had was that delivery was stated as “up to 14 days” on the site.
At 14 days, S sends a letter registered post to request a refund immediately otherwise we’ll go and speak to Trading Standards.
And as it happens, S is on her way to Bristol to see friend M, and on the way is Trowbridge where Mr Upton runs his show. M, who’s a small lad, puts on three jumpers and a beany hat and acts as the “heavy” while S turns up in her highest boots to knock on the door of the residential house on an estate where he.is.
Mr Upton is somewhat apologetic and sheepish and rather than being the fraudster we imagined, turns out to be just a rather terrible business man whose business is “going down the pan” (no pun intended) and who rather dishonestly tried to put £750 of our cash into the hole his sorry little enterprise had left behind.
All credit to S and M for their illustrious work – perhaps a new career in loan sharking awaits?
We have new toilets, delivered for a lower price in 2 days by another supplier. And I have to say all the other suppliers we’ve used have been superb.