You know what they say about 'best laid plans'? In my last Leader, I promised not to leave it so long between broadcasts, but it's been even longer! Not that I've not been thinking about the industry of course... Thanks to a degenerative spine condition my dementia-suffering mother has gone from hospital into a care home and the conversations and paperwork this has involved - not to mention sleepless nights and worry about my lovely mum's bewilderment, have taken a huge toll. Sincere apologies!

Indeed if anything, I've been thinking about the industry more than usual. If you're a regular reader of my musings, you may recall the saga of my fridge freezer two years ago... It had started playing up in just over a year and broke completely shortly afterwards. I had quite a fight with the mass-market supplier (used as it owned the brand offering the biggest capacity appliance) whose repairer messed me around so much that I was without the appliance for weeks. When the supplier replaced it with an identical model, (after Christmas!) I kept the original, intending to have it repaired for donation to charity. I never got around to it and it still looks like new - as does the replacement, which tellingly, has gone exactly the same way, in the same amount of time.

The engineer who'd tried to fix the original came to fix its replacement. He'd not been told by head office he was supposed to be repairing both so wouldn't touch the original and - as before - didn't have the required part. Before leaving, he expelled all the gas, saying he'd order the part and return when he had it. Next visit he still didn't have the part so said he'd try and repair the original, before expelling all the gas from that one too and going to meet a colleague "who might have the part on his van," never to return. I've since learned that his company doesn't repair gas canisters, and that he's rendered both appliances useless as no-one else does either! It wasn't just him but the administrators too, who should be ashamed of their incompetence - most of which I've not revealed here.

You'd think, with so many companies going into administration and social media having such influence, a savvy manager would realise that the customer is once again king. I'm about to enter my eighth week without a fridge freezer, all guns blazing - and I'm expecting to share good news with you in our next issue on 18th December!

Yours,

Jan Hobbs