Here at calamity villas, today, our washing machine died – and yes it’s just out of guarantee !
When it fills with water the electricity trips out. Fortunately, my wife spotted that the freezer had stopped working – so that was a clue ! The washing machine was also silent and sitting in a pool of water. I have always been frugal and hate spending money on seemingly unecessary things but Mrs. Chris, persuaded me not only to buy the afore mentioned washing machine but a 5 year extended warranty – HURRAH !! You would think that to get it up and running agian would just involve one simple phone call, to get an engineer to come and wave a magic wand – sadly not !
I phoned a call centre and waited patiently and waited patiently and eventually a recorded message told me that the call was costing me 10 pence a minute and that I was number six in a queue and that the average wait was 6 minutes – so I hung on and waited and listened to the looped computerised muzac and after another couple of minutes I was told I was number four on the list and so on and after 22 minutes I got though to another recorded message that asked me to respond to a series of questions, which I dutifully did, then I joined another queue !! After debating whether to hang up or not I finally got through to a human being after 25 minutes and they politely asked for the make of the washing machine and asked me to phone the manufacturer, which I did and fortunately, for my blood pressure, another human answered within 4-5 minutes. I was aked for details of model and serial number, authorisation number from the warranty company and further details and was then asked for a policy number which wasn’t on the policy – so I had to phone the warranty company again. Needless to say I was getting a little hot under my collar by then and mentioned the 25 minutes previously spent waiting on the phoneline. The lady I spoke to said she would put me through their computer to the first company but I rejoined the infamous queue and was told it was going to be a 22 minute wait – and I hung up !
Next I decided, that the only course of action was, to see a human face to face – so I drove to the store that I purchased the machine from and asked to see the manager. Sadly the manager was unavailable but I spoke to a lovely lady who, after a phone call to the manufacturer, sorted out my problem, there and then and an engineer will be with me next Tuesday – RESULT !
The moral of the story is : be patient and to get the result you need you sometimes have to circumvent the system !
I have also discovered that I really like intelligent Scottish ladies !
chriswoodartist 
We have just had the same problem…our washing machine has also died (it was old) but we have no warranty. Not sure what we can do now – I’m recovering from cancer and the government have kindly knocked my money down to £10 a week (so much for all the years of tax and NI I have paid since the 70’s eh?).
They do not make it easy to make a claim on extended warranty’s do they? I have had the same problems in the past. I think they hope you will just give up.
Stew.