#SoCS - 17/10/26 - Pitch

Linda provides the prompts for this and today's link up is here.

Your prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “pitch.” Use it as a noun, use it as a verb, use it way you’d like. Have fun!

Back in September our community held a "Picnic in the Park".  This is an annual event and will include a variety of attractions plus various local organisations, charities etc will have a space to pitch their stall in our local park.

The food bank that I volunteer at has a stall each year.  I volunteered to help transport tables, gazebo, goods etc to the pitch in the morning and help set up and then to do the packing up at the end of the day.  Consequently I was there for most of the day.  

I did take a break around lunch time to go home, have something to eat and a sit down before heading back.

However, at just after 3 pm Transport for London seemed to think I had taken my car through one of the tunnels under the river Thames.  I haven't yet mastered the ability to be in two places at once, a skill that would be very useful at times.

Anyway, I have an account set up with them to automatically pay the fee should I use either tunnel and as the fee is quite small, and I rarely use the tunnels, I don't always check the monthly statement I get.  This month I did check it and realised their error.  Naturally I emailed them to advise them of this.

A week later I got a reply saying that "having reviewed the evidence" they agreed it was a mistake and I would be refunded.  Of course the sensible thing to do would be to refund my account.  But apparently they can't do that.  Oh no.  They said they would send me a cheque!

Who uses cheques these days? I certainly don't.  Can't remember the last time I wrote one.  Anyway the cheque duly arrived in the grand sum of £1.50.  I'd love to know how much it actually cost to carry out this procedure, not to mention the postage.  A costly error on their part and they didn't answer my question of whether they had misread another car's registration plate or if my registration plate was actually on a different car, i.e. it had been cloned.  Hopefully not but I will be checking these statements more carefully in future just in case.

Thankfully I can pay the cheque into my bank via the banking app which I've already done.  It's a bit fiddly but I don't even know where my nearest bank branch is anymore to deposit it in person.  So many of them have been closed.  I know I could probably also do it at an ATM machine but that would require remembering my PIN.  

Does anyone else have trouble remembering PIN numbers now that we make so many payments using contactless?  On my credit card app I can view my pin if I need to but not the banking app.  Maybe I'll pitch that as an idea for them to develop.  The staff no longer working in branches need something to do!

Enjoy the rest of the weekend all.