You may know the old adage “customer has good experience he tells a couple, a bad experience he tells many more” they even did a study in 1980 for Coca-Cola about it and concluded an average of 5 people hear about someone’s good experiences with companies and products, but 10 will hear about a bad experience. Well with Twitter and Facebook, you can times that by thousands, tens of thousands even.

I just put up a one page website at gripesite.org.uk to let everyone know what a nightmare I am having with MBNA Credit Cards in the UK trying to pay my balance in full and close my account, something that should be really simple, I have been trying since January and I am now being told it will close in April but then said it would be February and then March so I am not holding out much hope.

Anyway read the full story over at gripesite.org.uk and please ReTweet if you’re on Twitter or Like if you’re on Facebook the site, or both I am sending MBNA Credit Cards a clear message, improve your customer service and stop treating people so poorly.

This is my name in binary.

Clarke Duncan = 01000011 01101100 01100001 01110010 01101011 01100101 00100000 01000100 01110101 01101110 01100011 01100001 01101110

Handy to know The thing is it’s probably the most common version of my name around the world with details being transferred from computer to computer

What’s it like, new website after new website but this time it’s nothing to do with work, my personal website gets a make over as it was looking a bit dated. Only of interest to Family and Friends but please do check it out

Just like to say thanks to everyone who either posted online or sent me a card. My Facebook profile was flooded with Happy Birthday Messages, and my email software started treating it as spam as so much came in yesterday LOL.

Anyway thanks, I had a lovely day and Leona, Adam and Fraser got me some lovely presents and special thanks to Graeme who sent me the complete Guitar Hero World Tour band set, was so much fun last night. However I will need to practice on the drums, as turns out I am better on the guitar then the drums, who would have known!

Yesterday I went to Rosshall Hospital in Glasgow, I been waiting to be seen on the NHS however it would be several months before my appointment would come through and while it’s not an emergency I didn’t fancy waiting this long, so I looked in to Private Hospitals. Initially I thought you could only visit one of these if you have Private Healthcare Insurance but it turns out they operate a self-pay scheme meaning you can be pretty much seen for and treated for most things in matter of weeks.

I called up last week and was given a brief outline of the costs involved, and was asked what Consultant I would like, having never been asked this question I had not expect it so hadn’t done any research. I was speaking to one of the ward nurses and ask her, who would you pick and she recommend one to me. I then looked him up on Google to see what I could find, interestingly he is one of the top consultants at the Royal Infirmary Hospital and if I was going the NHS route I probably would not have got to see him or if I did he certainly would not be the one carrying out the operation as it’s pretty minor as these things go. In fact what I found very interesting is that if you have the money you can pretty much meet a specialist consultant in most fields in matter of days, however you do need a referral letter from your local GP (and that I found took longer to get than the appointment to see the Consultant, madness!)

So the consultant explained what would happen and offered next week for the operation, now clearly he is undertaking this work after hours and on his days off from his NHS work, so not impacting anyone waiting to see him on the NHS but it got me thinking, why doesn’t the government pay these guys who want to work extra hours and days money to do this, wouldn’t everyone get treated and seen much quicker that way?

One interesting thing came out of the conversation with the consultant, he explained two things I didn’t know, 1st that most private hospitals in Scotland don’t treat children, you can meet a consultant who can explain what the problem is but you can’t get treated as most places don’t have paediatric nurses, kind of making Private Healthcare Insurance a bit of a waste of money for children (however I have a friend who has had very positive results going private with her kids) and 2nd thing was he doesn’t have Private Healthcare Insurance himself, simply said your better taking the money you would pay each month and saving it up, this way when you need access to Private care you can pay for it yourself and probably over the years have money leftover and I guess if you think about it, it costs £1,000+ a year for most people and if you have not been to hospital much or at all for many years and generally healthy that could be a considerable amount of money building up and besides long term conditions are not covered anyway.

So looks like the best idea is to apply for a BMI Card (the hospitals credit card that can only be used for medical stuff inside BMI) as you get 0% interest free for 6 months after any health care purchase and then a typical APR of 9.9% and save up the money I pay on Private Healthcare Insurance in something like Premium Bonds each month.