Why you should ask the question
Apart from picking up the new car on Friday (I named it Siegfried because the numberplate is SGF - if we buy a second car we’ll have to name it Roy) our week was quiet, but one thing is worth mentioning - some good V-Line customer service.
Travelling to Melbourne each weekday really isn’t an effort for us, despite what most (Melbourne) people would assume. We leave home at 7.05am, drive for 9 minutes to South Geelong station and get the 7.16am train. It stops at Geelong and North Geelong, then goes straight through to North Melbourne and Southern Cross (Spencer St). If we get the tram up Collins St instead of walking we’re at work by 8.20. Not bad for an 80km+ journey.
Sometimes (though not very often) the train is delayed. Presumably some of the other daily Geelong/Melbourne trains are delayed too. In fact, it turns out that V-Line didn’t meet its punctuality targets for September, October, November and December. To be honest we didn’t really notice (perhaps we simply don’t care) , but you can’t argue with statistics.
Anyway, Jayne knew that if the targets aren’t met then monthly ticket customers can apply for compensation, so she wrote them a letter last week enclosing copies of our tickets for those months. I wouldn’t have bothered, particularly after she’d tried ringing them, going to the counter, then finding out that you have to write them a letter.
So, when Thursday’s mail included a letter to Jayne from V-Line enclosing 10 single Geelong/Melbourne ticket vouchers (two for each month, and two for the day when we were stuck near Newport station for 2.5 hours because the pesky suburban trains were stuffed - we got home at 8.30 that night), we thought that was pretty good.
Then in Friday’s mail there was a letter addressed to me enclosing another 8 single vouchers. Not sure why there wasn’t 10, and why it came on Friday, but who cares. We now have almost a week’s free travel each (worth almost $150 to us) thanks to Jayne’s pursuit of justice and V-Line’s customer service policies.
Nice.