Charles Horton, Managing Director of Southeastern, is no doubt patting himself on the back after winning awards. Quite how their incompetence and unpleasantness elsewhere has gone unnoticed bemuses me, especially in light of the recent Department for Transport consultation about the SouthEastern Franchise. No doubt Mr Horton and his PR drones are doing everything they can to try and spin their way to an utterly undeserved renewal of the franchise.
Southeastern Response: Placatory Garbage?
My complaint to the London Assembly got a response from Southeastern’s Mike Gibson. Looks like the usual placatory garbage to me, so here are the relevant bits for your review along with some comments of my own. The spelling mistakes contained herein are straight from the e-mail.
Comments appreciated.
Southeastern FAIL – Complain Loudly!
Yesterday the expected snow hit the London area. We knew it was coming yet Southeastern trains capitulated like the Information Commissioner’s Office. Whenever the weather plays up the usual friendly greeting tends to be a shuttered ticket office and no announcements. I wasn’t surprised to see that yesterday morning. Getting home was a nightmare mainly because of the complete lack of coherent information from Southeastern.
When the weather plays up I don’t mind the odd delay. When there’s no information coming from the train operators and a complete lack of customer care that’s when there’s something very wrong going on.
When I eventually got back home I logged on to Twitter and watched the #Southeastern hashtag unfold. I’d been one of the fortunate ones. I e-mailed Caroline Pidgeon, the Vice Chair of the London Assembly Transport Committee. Here’s an extract from that e-mail:
Paperchase & The Increasing Voice of Social Media
Paperchase have finally come clean.
And not before time. I’ve already said that this was an issue which they could and should have handled much better. CEO Timothy Melgund’s apology falls short of what I believe is in order, namely a full apology for and retraction of his comments to the newspapers about Twitter and its user community, but it is at least an acceptance that Paperchase did not handle the situation at all well.
Hidden Eloise writes some Final Advice To Paperchase which includes the following:
“Here is what I propose instead to Paperchase.
- Make a clean and public apology for the bad research that led you to the conclusion that no copying was ever done.
- Acknowledge publicly that the plagiarism was real and my allegations correct.
- Retract publicly the damaging comments you made regarding me and all the Twitter users.
- Put the infringing items back on sale and give all profits from this range of products to a charity of my choice, supporting something that we both hold dearly: independent artists.”