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A few weeks ago I made a post in here regarding a T-shirt with my home telephone number printed on it that is being sold around stores within the UK.
I'll recap what happened back then and update you on what the situation is to date.
It all started when we were getting phone calls from people (mainly in Scotland at first) asking for "Britain’s Sexist Builder". We thought it was a joke and a crank call at first... but after about half a dozen of these calls and all different mobile numbers we thought something was up. Maybe somebody was just having a laugh and posted my telephone number in a toilet or something. You never know. Each time we got a phone call, i done 1471 and logged the telephone number. In the end I decided to try and get some sense out of one of these drunken teenagers, so I asked where they got our telephone number from. He replied "my mate has it on a T-shirt that he bought from Burtons". I had a lengthy chat to him and was quite abrupt with him as I thought it was all a big joke. The next day I decided to nip through to Burtons and see if this T-shirt existed. I searched High and Low within my local Burtons store but couldn't find the T-shirt. I put it down to a wind up until my Mam phoned Burtons, Glasgow branch. She asked if they sold a T-shirt of this description. The guy on the phone said "yeh.. What size are you after?" Of course we didn't want to buy one and certainly didn't want to buy one all the way from Glasgow. My mam asked "what is the telephone number wrote across the front of the T-shirt". The guy began to read out the Telephone number. Amazingly enough... it was our telephone number apart from it was missing the end digit. (Telephone numbers are 7 digits long... and 4 digits for the area code, i.e. "0123 123 4567") If we use that number as an example... the number 7 was missing. Even though the number wasn't exactly the same as our telephone number we were still getting people phoning late at night and they were guessing the last digit.
So we had confirmation that this T-shirt existed and it wasn't a cock and bull story that this drunken scottish guy had made up and told me the night before.
The next morning came and we got straight on the phone to our legal representatives to gain some advice on what to do with the matter. Obviously the first step was to get the T-shirts withdrawn from sale. We kept wondering what would happen if the T-shirts ended up in our local Burtons store. The phone calls could only get worse as people would notice its a local telephone number and call it. We phoned the head office, Arcadia group and had a lengthy chat regarding the situation. they agreed to withdraw the T-shirts from sale until they investigate the matter further. After we informed them via the telephone we put our complaint in writing and made it official. I'd much prefer to complain via a letter instead of just leaving it with 1 person to log and take further.
The next day my Brother was shopping in Newcastle. He came home with a T-shirt. We were shocked that the T-shirts were still on sale and also in the North East!!! The phone calls were still happening although most of the time it was late at night on weekends. This would make sense as most people would wear a casual T-shirt like this at weekends while having a few pints at the pub.
We called Burtons again and they assured us that they were withdrawn from Sale as of today, which we were happy to believe.
After numerous letters and phone calls to our Legal Representative and Burtons/Arcadia Group we managed to start getting somewhere. They started talking compensation, which always brings a smile to your face.
They sent us £100 in gift vouchers as a good will gesture. I was shocked as you should never compensate anyone with gift vouchers for your own store. As usual we discussed this with the legal advice and they agreed it was way out of order and any sort of compensation should be a cash settlement and in excess of £250+. We contacted Burtons again.... and they agreed that the vouchers were only a good will gesture and were willing to forward on a further £150 cash settlement.
So in the end.... if Burtons/Arcadia Group or Dennis Publishing who designed the T-shirt had bothered to phone BT to gain a none existing telephone number instead of using a personal number with a digit missing they would have saved themselves a lot of hassle and ourselves from a lot of nuisance phone calls.
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