We lost our holiday, but the travel agents lost their temper!

Oh dear, oh dear, it's all gone horribly wrong.
Early on in my present grieving process I discovered that, at the moment, I am not able to deal well with upsetting people. Sadly, even armed with this knowledge, I have not been able to curtail my natural talent for doing just that.
For the last few years the Snapper and I have made up our fly-drive holidays as we went along, but this year, completely and utterly exhausted after the funeral and the wedding, we decided that for our September honeymoon we wanted something simpler: something that required no brain power whatsoever.
We hadn't taken a package holiday since 2001, and the idea of being flown to and dropped into a nice room by a pool under a blue sky felt perfect.
So off I went into a Galway city centre travel agent, where the helpful woman listened carefully to what I said I wanted, and came up with a self-catering complex in a quiet town in Crete, with flights from Knock.
We booked it, paid in full and felt mightily relieved that we could now forget all about it. A few weeks later we received a letter from the tour company, forwarded to us by our Galway travel agency, saying that our holiday had been cancelled. They had decided that it wasn't financially viable to operate a flight back from Crete in the second week of September. We could go earlier, or go for just one week, or get a full refund.
We definitely wanted two weeks, (this is a honeymoon, folks!) and didn't want to go earlier, as the Snapper had already booked time off work, and anyway, I figured they'd have to squeeze us into an already busy hotel.
So I called the tour company and asked for a refund. They told me that I should call the travel agency in Galway. This made sense to me, because it was the travel agency's name that had appeared on my credit card bill, and at the simplest of levels, it was the travel agency with whom I had dealt.
The Snapper and I were deeply upset about the loss of our Cretan adventure, and suddenly fearful of having no holiday at all. The travel agency said that they would chase our refund, but nobody offered to find us alternative arrangements for the weeks booked, so eager to find an instant and magical replacement holiday that might return the smile missing from my Snapper's face, I found myself going bleary-eyed at the computer, doing just what I had hoped to avoid.
We heard unconfirmed reports that in the UK, there is a statutory compensation payment of something like £20 per person, if your holiday has been cancelled within 28 days of the departure date. I'm still not sure if that's right, but it set me thinking.
I had gone into a shop and bought something that cost me over ¤1,600, and now, I didn't have anything to show for it except a credit card charge that has cost us a decent chunk of interest over the last two months.
I was only out of pocket because the tour company had made a decision to save some money, and I now had to find a holiday fast, and take whatever prices were on offer, so I emailed the travel agency, asking if they might consider some kind of goodwill compensation payment.
To be honest, a 20 quid gesture would have done the trick. Suddenly stressed and poorer than when I started, all I wanted was something to make us both feel a little less let down, a tad more human.
Wish I hadn't! There ensued a bizarre and frankly ridiculous email correspondence that stretched over an entire week. after which I was more than aware that I was not going to get any kind of compensation.
As a person who grew up in the retail industry, I found their attitude truly bizarre. The owner of the travel agency immediately wrote me off as a potential customer, told me to pursue the tour company, and ended up sending me a long list of all the other tour companies who had cancelled holidays in September, leaving holidaymakers stranded, along with the following:
"Not one of these customers has looked for compensation from us ... not a single one."
I have to admit, when I read that, I saw red. Why in god's name were they upset with me? And what was the nasty inference within that '...not a single one'?
That line annoyed me all night long. Clearly this person was upset with me, even though on the phone the next day, they said that they were not.
I didn't want to upset them, any more than I wanted to upset the person at the ITAA (Irish Travel Agents Association), but somehow I managed to do that too. The owner of the travel agent told me that after I had called the ITAA to ask for advice, I had subsequently misquoted and misrepresented the ITAA person in my communication. When I called the ITAA person back, to find out why and what they were upset about, I encountered a voice now both stormy and suspicious.
Blimey! Even though I thought the Snapper and I were the injured parties, I had now managed to upset both the travel agent and the person at the ITAA.
As I said, I'm not good at dealing with upsetting people at the moment. One never wants to do it anyway, but quite how I managed to upset two different people whilst trying to seek recompense for our own stress and monetary loss, I will never fully understand.
There's a lot I don't know, but travel I do know. I've hitchhiked over 200,000 miles; been around the planet twice, lived and worked in six countries on three continents and yet never have I come across such strange reactions to a customer's loss.
Next Tuesday we are flying to Mallorca, where we're staying in a tiny village on the quiet west coast. The owner of our 3 Star hotel sent me an email, saying that my booking was confirmed; that he didn't need my credit card number as a deposit, because my word was good enough for him; and what time would we like dinner?
I wish the travel agencies of Ireland well, but cannot see why I might ever go into one again.

I've gone from curious to furious,and now have to find a new Butcher!

Oh poopers! Relations with my Butcher's shop just went down the drain, and none of the badness needed to happen at all.
For over 25 years, as often as possible, it has been my absolute pleasure to cook a roast dinner on a Sunday.
Sunday roast was always a central occasion in my childhood week. We all love food like mama made it, so even when I lived on my own, I found nothing easier than to shove a chicken leg into the oven with a couple of spuds. Steam up some fresh crunchy veg, and Bob's your uncle. A veritable feast.
Now that I make my own Yorkshire pudding too, there are few mysteries left for me in the process.
A couple of months ago I popped into my Butcher's, an award-winning establishment on the western side of the city, and bought a rolled beef rib roast. This a cut I'd never buy in the supermarket, but on the day that was in it, I found myself pointing out a lump of meat to the young man behind the counter. He assured me that it was a lovely tender piece of meat.
At that time I wasn't even sure if we had guests coming, so thinking it would be relatively inexpensive, I told him I'd have it.
When I found out that the meat cost 20 quid, I wished I'd invested in a bit of Silverside, or even better, rib on the bone. But I trusted my Butcher. They had never let me down .
Come Sunday, there were five hungry mouths at my table, and although we all feasted on crunchy roasties, yummy Yorkshire pudding, roasted parsnip, braised onions, and a plethora of veggies in wine gravy, none of us were able to enjoy the meat. There was so much sinew and gristle that I had to plead with my guests not to be too polite, but spit it out and leave it.
How disappointing!
Aware of all the good years' service I have enjoyed at said Butcher's, the next time I was passing I popped in and told one of the blokes behind the counter what had happened.
To be honest, I felt a bit embarrassed, and I told him so. Clearly there was nothing much he could do. Nevertheless, he was very sympathetic, and told me that the next time I came in to buy something, I should tell another member of staff, and they'd see what they could do.
Can't say fairer than that. As it happens, what with trips to England, at least a month passed before I was back in the Butcher's, to buy a free range chicken.
Clutching my intended purchase, I explained to the bloke behind the counter how his colleague had asked me to tell my tale of woe when I next made a purchase.
'Oh well, that's the way it goes. Sorry about that."
"Yes, I know. But why do you think your colleague asked me to tell somebody the story again?"
He gave me a big warm smile and told me that maybe he'd said that because they were always interested in feedback.
Up to that moment, I hadn't really been bothered how this all turned out. Certainly, I hadn't gone in there to get a refund.
I had gone in there to get a chicken, and follow the advice I was given the last time, if the mood took me.
But now my mood was overtaking me. As I approached the woman at the till, she asked me how I was.
"Not the best!" said I, relating the whole story again.
She then proceeded to tell me, at great length, what I already knew. Maybe it was because I have a penis. I do find that women in Irish shops seem to assume that if you have a dangly thing between your legs you cannot possibly understand food and the cooking thereof.
She told me how it wasn't a good cut. I told her I knew that.
She told me that it was just the fat that was the problem. I told her that this was not fat, which would have rendered down in the cooking. It was sinew and gristle and inedible.
She told me that if I had only brought it in so that himself the Butcher could have seen it, then she might have been able to do something about it.
I asked if that meant she didn't believe what I was saying.
Oh no, she said, of course she believed me, but there was nothing she could do if she hadn't seen the meat.
By now, I really couldn't be arsed to inform her how incredibly unlikely it was that I would have either the time or inclination to wrap up the shitty leftovers of a very disappointing dinner and bring them back to her shop.
Yet she persisted, and in the process her inability to help and generally patronising attitude managed to turn my mildly disappointed ambivalence into a raging fury.
Once again she told me that it wasn't a good cut of meat to buy. She told me that she would never buy that cut. And once again, trying to be a better human being, I declined to point out that her own employee had told me what a good piece of meat it was, how tender it would be.
Neither did I mention that it cost 20 quid, which is a juicy chunk out of this household's grocery budget.
It just wasn't worth it.
Finally, I'd had enough. I paid for my chicken and made for the door. She called out.
"You do understand, don't you? There's nothing I can do!"
"I do I do I do. Oh, and you'll understand that I won't be back."
A few minutes earlier, I'd walked into that Butcher's shop, feeling there was no real reason why they should refund me any money.
But in an astonishing inversion of customer service, by simply following the advice of their own employee, I had been dragged into an argument I didn't want to have. I had been treated like a moron, and ended up furious, wondering why she hadn't just given me a couple of quid off the chicken I was buying, for no other reason than to save a little goodwill and customer loyalty.
Now I have to find another Butcher's . What a bloomin' shame!

Double Vision
Caricatures Ireland