READERS' FORUM:Have your say

While we’re always moaning on this page, we are very pleased when readers get in touch with a good-news story and we have one this week.

“The next best thing to excellent service is excellent staff with cop-on and initiative when confronted with a problem,” writes Petra Kindler.

Last week, she and her partner went to see The King's Speech in Storm Cinemas in Waterford. "The cinema was rather empty. After a while, we noticed an increasing chilliness in the room. Both of us usually prefer a cooler environment but this was turning into quite an uncomfortable experience," she writes. "Luckily, as cyclists, we had plenty of warm gear to keep the cold at bay; nevertheless, my feet felt frozen."

On their way out, she politely asked the manager if a ticket price of nearly €10 did not stretch to the provision of proper heating.

“The young man looked positively stricken and asked to see our tickets. He briefly vanished, then returned with sincere apologies and handed us back the price of our tickets along with two complimentary tickets each,” she writes.

She points out that this is how a potentially damaging situation can end up working to your advantage.

“We left happy instead of disgruntled. We will tell everybody how civilly we were treated and we will be back soon, probably with friends and probably more often than we might have been otherwise.”

And it gets into a newspaper, too!

When a thermometer isn’t a hot buy at Tesco

Now, normal service resumes. Joachim Pietsch had to purchase a Braun Thermoscan 4520 thermometer in Tesco. It cost him €69.20.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t shop around because my daughter was running a temperature,” he writes. Later, he checked on amazon.co.uk and found it was charging £27 (€31.65) for the same model. “Rip-off-Ireland is alive and well in your friendly local ‘every little helps’ Tesco?”

Double fee at the pharmacy

A reader, who is a medical-card holder, has a monthly prescription for 15mg of a well-known product that she does not name.

“Because this item comes in tablets of 5mg and 10mg, my pharmacist charges a double fee of €1 to dispense this item. The amount is little, but is this procedure in order?

“It might be a small amount for one person, but if such policies were adopted across the whole medical sector, the extra sums would quickly add up.”

AXA charging for information

A reader who has been a named driver on his wife’s car since 2005 had an odd and costly experience with his insurance company last week.

“We have just bought a second car and so need to insure that,” he writes. “As my wife is working and I am unemployed, we were hoping to keep costs down and insure it in her name with me as a named driver as before. The costs for insuring unemployed people are extremely punitive despite them driving much less often than workers,” he continues.

His wife was told she could not be insured on two cars at the same time and Allianz, their current insurer, quoted a price for transferring her to the new (used) car with our reader as a named driver. They would continue insuring him on the old car, with his wife as the named driver.

“They offered me three years no claims bonus if I could prove ‘named driver experience’ for the years before we were with Allianz.

“No problem, we thought. So my wife phoned our previous two insurers. FBD said no problem, we’ve got your details, we’ll send you the letter proving ‘named-driver experience’. Easy peasy.

“On contacting AXA they said, yes we can send you a letter proving ‘named-driver experience’ but there’s a charge of €25. We have turned them down currently. I was surprised by this as surely that information about me is owned by me – or maybe I’m deluding myself?”