However, yet again pretty disappointed by the the lack of information given and attitude of the person I spoke to.
Sorry Jase, you seem to be extraordinarily unlucky in dealings with my business.
I've asked all my colleagues whether they remember this conversation, but we talked to literally hundreds of people over the weekend and I'm sure you'll appreciate that to a certain extent they all tend to blur together. For example I remember a bloke who was cycling from Lands End to John O Groats, and I remember a bloke who was asking about whether he could put his Tamron lens on a Canon RP, and I remember a bloke who wanted to get something delivered to his father in law in Kendal, but I honestly couldn't tell you now whether or not they were all the same person, and I couldn't pick him / them out of a line-up.
Anyway, one of my team does remember a visitor saying he'd talked to somebody on Talk Photography, who he thought might be called Peter or something like that. Perhaps that was you. But if it was you, then you didn't get my name right and you didn't say that "Peter" is the owner of the business, and the way you broached the subject didn't make it apparent that you'd talked to anyone from the company (as opposed, say, to some random stranger on Talk Photography). Sorry I can't be more definitive about the details, though.
I must admit that I'm baffled by the answer you say you were given. It's the easiest question in the world for my team. If you want to use a lens on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then that's a 3-day hire. It really is utterly straightforward and if you had asked the question like that I honestly can't imagine why the answer would have been anything different.
Where it can get confusing though, is when people ask when the lens will be delivered. If your hire is Friday to Sunday, will the lens be delivered on Thursday? That's up to you. Our website will offer you delivery on Thursday, as a courtesy, or delivery on Friday if that's more convenient to you, and there's no price implication one way or the other, but you do need to choose the delivery day. And then when people ask will it
definitely be delivered on Thursday, then it gets interesting. We use DPD for our deliveries and they're pretty good: we get about 98% delivered right time. But not 100%, even with the best will in the world. Sometimes the recipient is in the toilet and can't make it to the door in time, or on the phone and doesn't hear the doorbell, or things like that. So what we often recommend to customers is that if it's really really important that they have the lens on a certain day, they might want to consider building in an extra day or two at the start of the hire which doesn't cost much - to minimise the chances of disruption.
I hope you appreciate that this area can be complicated.
I'm afraid the bit about taking no responsibility for when the lens arrives doesn't sound quite right to me, and unfortunately none of my staff remember this particular aspect of the conversation. I think the answer you got here will have depended very strongly on how you asked the question. In a narrow, technical sense, once we've dispatched a lens it's out of our hands and we can't control when it's delivered. That doesn't mean we wash our hands of it, though. Some companies are happy to point the finger at their suppliers and subcontractors when something goes wrong, but we don't. After all, we choose our suppliers, and we accept responsibility for those choices. So if there is a problem with delivery, we will do our utmost to overcome it. We once put a camera on a bike to Durham (a 550 mile round trip), at a cost to us of around £300, to fulfil an order after DPD had had a problem. The week before last, one of my team met a customer at Gatwick Airport at utterly stupid o'clock in the morning to deliver an item after there had been a delivery problem. And a few weeks ago when the weather forecast said there would be disruptive snow, we pulled all our deliveries forward by a couple of days to get them into customers' hands before the bad weather struck. So we do our best, and at the end of the day, if a delivery goes wrong and we can't cook up a viable Plan B, then we offer customers a full refund at least. If you think that counts as not taking responsibility then I'm happy to agree to disagree.
Anyway I hope this addresses your questions and concerns. If you every feel like sending me (via PM) your phone number and email address, the offer is still there to look into what happened when you said you couldn't phone us and didn't get a reply to your email 2 months ago.
