Somebody please restrain me.....

How did you persuade the police that that WASN'T what had happened, Aka?

Aka yes that's the scam I meant.

Yes the bit where one was pushing it through the too narrow back door and the other was screaming in pain from bruised knuckles was very funny. I think the depot was in Brittany somewhere so each of the three visits involved a round trip of a couple of hundred kilometres.
On the subject of which, we needed something in a hurry before Christmas and the post here was dire, so OH signed up for free trial of Amazon Prime. We then found that for forty something euros a year, we get a next day delivery service from a man with a van from 10km away. As he now knows how to find us (see thread about daft French postcodes that cover large areas) we think it is well worth the money, given that some delivery drivers find it too scary to come out this far into the back of beyond and make us drive into the nearest town to meet them.
Not very green, I know.

GrannyK I rang Warwickshire Police and the letter was from them, genuinely. Apparently it's now becoming more common. You hit a parked car, note the registration number, inform the police and then claim to your insurers you were hit and the other driver just drove off.

Gally I think they were in a grumpy mood because they were working on Xmas day and looked through the backlog and thought "who else's xmas shall we spoil then". Also - maybe they were having fun keeping an attractive woman talking? Call me sceptical if you like...

Aka that sounds like a scam to me.

Mamie LOL.

Here is my fridge tale which I hesitated to tell at first: Some years ago, we bought a fridge and persuaded the store to let us take the one on the shop floor home (we wanted a fridge that day and we had a van). About 3 weeks later, a card in the letterbox informing us that "we tried to deliver your fridge today, but no one home etc. Please call..." So I phoned, main menu, press this press that and never get to speak to a human being. Eventually got to someone and explained that we already had the fridge. This happened THREE MORE TIMES and eventually we came home to a fridge left outside the front door. We carried it inside, put it in the garage and tried again to call to get someone to come and fetch Fridge No 2. Before we gave up, the first fridge that we had brought home did (after about 6 months), it got carted off to the dump and the rest as they say, is history . Fridge No 2 is alive and well in my kitchen. And there is some justice in the world.

DD had a visit from the police on Christmas night accusing her of damaging a car and driving off in a suburb of Sydney, to which she had never been, on Friday 13 December at 11.30 am. The owner of the car gave DD's registration, her description, her eye colour (wrong) and said she was wearing a skirt (wrong - she was sitting down in a large people carrier and the windows are darkened so how on earth they could have seen what she was wearing or her eye colour....). She had proof of where she was at that time (the Airport, picking up her sister) so her toll tag had beeped at 11am and she had made a traceable phone call at 11.45 which put her in a completely different area. That the police found it necessary to spend nearly 2 hours quizzing her on the doorstep and examining her car for scratches while the rest of us were eating our Christmas meal, beggars belief! If she had not had proof of her whereabouts, what would have been the result? And, why wait 13 days to investigate a very minor incident and choose to do it on Christmas Day? hrrmph.

Mamie - ! Charleygirl, I couldn't possibly say. But yes. Could only be them, really, couldn't it? Aka, how on earth did you sort it out?

Mamie sounds like the script for a comedy sketch

Beggars belief doesn't it Dragon. The first I knew was when I got a letter from Warwickshire Constabulary.

Dragonfly1 did the name of the company start with a capital C?

When we moved here to France we ordered a side by side fridge freezer (huge). It arrived with two men in plimsolls with a sack trolley. They heaved and pushed it up the slope; it rolled off and turned head over heels down the bank. They took it away. The next one was a different model and we knew the doors had to come off. The delivery men didn't do doors so they tried to push it through. After they had grazed their knuckles a few times they took it away again. The third time it came with different men who knew they had to take the doors off, but didn't know how. I read them the instructions from the book while they took the doors off and put them on again and eventually all was well.

I bet they had noticed that it was only ten minutes to the end of the delivery slot - was it ten minutes from the end of their shift too?

Aka they did what?????

That's what annoyed me so much Elegran - I'd happily do it myself if I had a bit more strength and wasn't frightened of damaging it. I might yet do that and let the qualified door-reversal-operatives have a wasted journey tomorrow.....

oldgreymare I can go one better than that. Someone drove into my car in a supermarket car park. They then contacted the police to say I had hit them and driven off without reporting the accident. It took ages to sort out.

All it takes to reverse the door is a screwdriver and a small amount of commonsense. If I still had an ounce of strength in my arthriticky fingers, I could do it myself. How can anyone not be qualified to do it?

Grannyknot - my daughter had the nerve to laugh. She went home still chuckling. More at my language than anything, I suspect.

Phoenix - yep, on a Sunday. Cheaper than a weekday for some reason - probably because they don't employ qualified freezer-door-changers on Sundays..... And I can't repeat what I said to him, either then or when he arrived with the freezer, or to the twerp I spoke to in their customer services call centre. Way too rude. Oldgreymare - I am so sorry to hear about your car! Hope you had a good swear too? Not that it helps much.

dragonfly if that wasn't so irritating, it could be a comedy sketch.

I'll join you in a mega fizz Dragonfly1 I've already had a bleat! Someone drove into my car in a carpark and drove off without letting me know they had done it, I know it will cost several hundred £s to repair

Delivering on a Sunday????

By the way, what did you say?