The final touches
Wednesday evening Mr W went out, and I had to sort out the flowers and the table stationery for our wedding. It really, really annoys me that both of these (and in fact the band too) require cleared funds to be in their accounts a certain amount of time before the event, otherwise they will not provide flowers/ give you the table stationery/ play, but they still insist on not sending out invoices until incredibly late.
Take the stationery. We’re picking it up Tuesday evening this week coming (this has been arranged for a while now). Tuesday of this week I received the final email from them setting out what we owe. Note: not an invoice. Remembering from the last payment we made that they don’t take bank transfers, I emailed asking if they would be OK to receive a cheque by post (which is how we did it last time). As there wasn’t an earthly way my mother could get the email, write a cheque, post it, allow a day for delivery and then a couple of months for the cheque to clear into their account, and seeing as they’d agreed to us picking up the goods on Tuesday evening, I assumed that they had realised the problem and were somehow waiving the condition. When I emailed to confirm this (suspecting that they weren’t going to let us disappear with the goods), I was told a cheque wouldn’t do, they needed cash on Tuesday. If that’s the case, then please present your figures more than five working days before the goods are to be collected, you dumb asses – especially when you can’t take bank transfers and are aware that (from the last time we had this discussion) my mother will be posting a cheque).
Then take the flowers – I changed the proposal back at the start of October and emailed it off, promptly receiving a response saying they’d amend and re-circulate shortly. On Tuesday when I hadn’t heard from them, I called the lady and asked when exactly I would receive the document and final invoice (I had changed the number of tables and this made a difference to the final total, obviously). She said they’d sent it out ages ago, and were getting concerned they hadn’t heard from me – they need cleared funds SIX DAYS before the event. Which meant I somehow had to clear the money to them by today, Friday. Excellent, excellent. I pointed out (again), that I hadn’t received the proposal. In the past they had emailed me letters with my old employers address (because I sometimes emailed them from work) and each time this had happened I had said “that’s the wrong address”. The proposal before this one had been mailed to me at my old employers address, and when I found that out (happily I received it by email as well) I had assumed they would amend their records. Apparently not. Anyway, later on Tuesday I got an email with the document attached, and track changed from the previous proposal. When you’re reviewing someone’s changes, you can see when the changes were made – and these weren’t done until the Tuesday morning – the day I called up. Hmmmm. So the long and the short of it is that my mother has had to take a trip into town to the florist with a bit less than a couple large (did I get the street slang right?).
Bloody people.
A significant percentage of both the florist’s and the stationer’s work is related to weddings. In the case of the stationers, they also deal with bat/ bar mizvahs, bat chayils, and simchas in general. The florist has contracts to provide hotels and conference facilities with flowers, but also has a large amount of wedding customers. Why then, seeing as they are clearly experienced in dealing with people whose brains are functioning on double-time and no sleep, people who are multi-tasking with the best of them, and people who still have issues unresolved (is there a separate table for the civil register, for example, is one of my outstanding queries) which, to the person organising the whole carnival, are more important at the time than dealing with stationers or florists who have essentially been given the all-clear a couple of weeks before. So WHY THE HELL do the florist and the stationer assume I’m going to be chasing them? Why do they not chase me? In the case of the florist, they were aware I only had three days left to pay them, and they STILL didn’t bother contacting me and waited for me to make contact.
I think they should have sent a letter out, or put a call in, ten working days before they require cleared funds. I don’t think anyone planning a wedding by themselves would object. If I had received a call earlier it would have flushed out the fact I’d not received the bloody document, we could have sorted it all out and my mother could have posted a cheque; job done. It is, to my mind, not reasonable also to raise invoices the day before you require cleared funds – the florist’s invoice arrived yesterday! Not everyone has a mother who is willing to hop on trains with substantial amounts of cash, and people whose parents live too far away for this to be feasible would have, in my situation, been looking at bankers’ drafts, cash withdrawals (and maybe entering into overdraft, or unauthorised overdraft) while the cash cleared from the daddybank, and taking a day or a morning off work to go and visit some person who couldn’t be bothered to tell you the amount you owed until it was too late to pay any other way than cash.
I have expressed my surprise that they decide to add such a needless amount of stress at such a time when I really, really, could have lived happily without calls to my parents at ten at night. It’s even more of a shame that this came after their having been mines of information and sources of inspiration on the whole wedding front. The stationer and the florist have until now been extremely accommodating and pleasant, putting themselves out to meet me when my erratic timetable permitted. So why go and spoil it by insisting on cleared funds and not finalising the details themselves with more than three days to go before those cleared funds are needed? They should bloody also accept bank transfers.
After all that, I’m really looking forward to seeing the flowers and stationery in place because, if it all goes to plan, it will look fantastic. And I’d willingly recommend both the florist and the stationers but chase them three weeks before you need the goods.
End of.
Take the stationery. We’re picking it up Tuesday evening this week coming (this has been arranged for a while now). Tuesday of this week I received the final email from them setting out what we owe. Note: not an invoice. Remembering from the last payment we made that they don’t take bank transfers, I emailed asking if they would be OK to receive a cheque by post (which is how we did it last time). As there wasn’t an earthly way my mother could get the email, write a cheque, post it, allow a day for delivery and then a couple of months for the cheque to clear into their account, and seeing as they’d agreed to us picking up the goods on Tuesday evening, I assumed that they had realised the problem and were somehow waiving the condition. When I emailed to confirm this (suspecting that they weren’t going to let us disappear with the goods), I was told a cheque wouldn’t do, they needed cash on Tuesday. If that’s the case, then please present your figures more than five working days before the goods are to be collected, you dumb asses – especially when you can’t take bank transfers and are aware that (from the last time we had this discussion) my mother will be posting a cheque).
Then take the flowers – I changed the proposal back at the start of October and emailed it off, promptly receiving a response saying they’d amend and re-circulate shortly. On Tuesday when I hadn’t heard from them, I called the lady and asked when exactly I would receive the document and final invoice (I had changed the number of tables and this made a difference to the final total, obviously). She said they’d sent it out ages ago, and were getting concerned they hadn’t heard from me – they need cleared funds SIX DAYS before the event. Which meant I somehow had to clear the money to them by today, Friday. Excellent, excellent. I pointed out (again), that I hadn’t received the proposal. In the past they had emailed me letters with my old employers address (because I sometimes emailed them from work) and each time this had happened I had said “that’s the wrong address”. The proposal before this one had been mailed to me at my old employers address, and when I found that out (happily I received it by email as well) I had assumed they would amend their records. Apparently not. Anyway, later on Tuesday I got an email with the document attached, and track changed from the previous proposal. When you’re reviewing someone’s changes, you can see when the changes were made – and these weren’t done until the Tuesday morning – the day I called up. Hmmmm. So the long and the short of it is that my mother has had to take a trip into town to the florist with a bit less than a couple large (did I get the street slang right?).
Bloody people.
A significant percentage of both the florist’s and the stationer’s work is related to weddings. In the case of the stationers, they also deal with bat/ bar mizvahs, bat chayils, and simchas in general. The florist has contracts to provide hotels and conference facilities with flowers, but also has a large amount of wedding customers. Why then, seeing as they are clearly experienced in dealing with people whose brains are functioning on double-time and no sleep, people who are multi-tasking with the best of them, and people who still have issues unresolved (is there a separate table for the civil register, for example, is one of my outstanding queries) which, to the person organising the whole carnival, are more important at the time than dealing with stationers or florists who have essentially been given the all-clear a couple of weeks before. So WHY THE HELL do the florist and the stationer assume I’m going to be chasing them? Why do they not chase me? In the case of the florist, they were aware I only had three days left to pay them, and they STILL didn’t bother contacting me and waited for me to make contact.
I think they should have sent a letter out, or put a call in, ten working days before they require cleared funds. I don’t think anyone planning a wedding by themselves would object. If I had received a call earlier it would have flushed out the fact I’d not received the bloody document, we could have sorted it all out and my mother could have posted a cheque; job done. It is, to my mind, not reasonable also to raise invoices the day before you require cleared funds – the florist’s invoice arrived yesterday! Not everyone has a mother who is willing to hop on trains with substantial amounts of cash, and people whose parents live too far away for this to be feasible would have, in my situation, been looking at bankers’ drafts, cash withdrawals (and maybe entering into overdraft, or unauthorised overdraft) while the cash cleared from the daddybank, and taking a day or a morning off work to go and visit some person who couldn’t be bothered to tell you the amount you owed until it was too late to pay any other way than cash.
I have expressed my surprise that they decide to add such a needless amount of stress at such a time when I really, really, could have lived happily without calls to my parents at ten at night. It’s even more of a shame that this came after their having been mines of information and sources of inspiration on the whole wedding front. The stationer and the florist have until now been extremely accommodating and pleasant, putting themselves out to meet me when my erratic timetable permitted. So why go and spoil it by insisting on cleared funds and not finalising the details themselves with more than three days to go before those cleared funds are needed? They should bloody also accept bank transfers.
After all that, I’m really looking forward to seeing the flowers and stationery in place because, if it all goes to plan, it will look fantastic. And I’d willingly recommend both the florist and the stationers but chase them three weeks before you need the goods.
End of.
posted by Chaya at 12:47 pm
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