My brand, spanking new Barcelona football shirts arrived in the post yesterday. I don’t know whether it was posted from Spain or from a warehouse within the UK, but I must commend them on a quality and speed of the service.

After a bad experience a couple of years ago involving an order from the Leeds United online shop (which I mentioned on this blog at the time), I decided to try ordering my Barca shirt over the telephone. That was a bad idea…

Now I know Barcelona are a Spanish football club, but when the website is in English language and the order line has the Bristol dialling code of 0117, you would expect somebody who actually speaks English to answer.

A Spanish lady answered. I couldn’t understand her and she couldn’t understand me. After an awkward exchange of Spanish and English dialect, I was transferred to a automated switchboard “PRESS 1 TO SPEAK TO AN ENGLISH ASSISTANT, PRESS 2 TO SPEAK TO A SPANISH ASSISTANT”.

I pressed 1. Now, I may be very wrong but I am sure I was transferred back to the previous lady! This time however she was able to speak English (and very well may I add). We went through the whole order process and at the last moment disaster struck! Her computer crashed.

Working in network support, a lot of my clients actually speak Spanish. I was tempted to talk her through the usual support bollocks on how to get her connection back. I decided against this, thanked her and ordered from the website. Something I should have done all along as it worked fine.

I must always remember… order Barca shirts off the website, Leeds shirts over the telephone.

I’m now off out to Garfunkles, hopefully I’ll actually get a table this week unlike last Saturday. It’s then back to mine for a GoldenEye session and another round of Gary Lineker’s Football Challenge. :o)