now i'm not one to complain BUT

once a family friend found a piece of rubber in an entenmen's pound cake. it was about 3 inches long, apparently astrip of conveyor belt! he sent a polite but irritated letter to the company. they sent him about 50 unexpiring coupons for free cakes!

I found a wee bit of plastic in my Honey Nut Loops and all I got was a Kellogs voucher for £5 - I wiz robbed!

we found a grasshopper in our pineapple chunks at school but the teacher wd not let us take it further

If I have a New Year's Resolution for 2004 it will be to reduce the amount of my waking life I spend being furious with bus controllers, rail companies, financial institutions, retailers and my neighbours to less than 5%.

The moment when the fury finally settles into something one could articulate in a stern letter (something with a really caustic opening sentence before the chronological litany of incompetencies) is all too brief.

Which is why I never gave Comet the what-for they truly deserved for failing to deliver a fridge six times (just the impotent misery of having some Scouse salesgit in their Greenwich store HANG UP ON ME when I lost my rag after being shuttled between half a dozen useless employees) and why I'll be simmering until 2008 over the inconvenience of making manual sodding payments on a secured loan because Halifax and Lloyds couldn't get their collective freakin' act together to communicate with each other on my behalf (14 phone calls on that one).

The way major companies have encircled themselves with call centre cannon-fodder is very smart. How can you vent at some 19-year-old in a Cardiff industrial park on minimum wage who is counting the hours to her next authorised loo break?

I remember finding a plastic nozzle in a burger king [or someplace] sprite. I took it to the serving bit and said "eh, this was in my drink." the guy looked at me and sort of went "umm, thanks." and snatched it out of my hand. the end.

C*m*t are the scum on the top of the devil's spunk.

I bought a fridge freezer from them at their clearance warehouse in Glasgow. 'Can you deliver to Yorkshire?', 'yes, sir, anywhere in the UK for £11.95'. True to their word they did deliver it, 5 month's later and after numerous phone calls, emails, letters and missed appointments.

I complained once about opening a pack of biscuits and finding scores of maggots in there. Got sent a big box of quite classy biscuits and an apology.

When I was 11 I deliberately sabotaged a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk by alternately heating it and then putting it in the fridge. It eventually developed white spots all over it and I then sent it back to Cadbury's with a complaint letter. They sent me a massive selection of all their chocs and a lovely letter of apology. My friend Amanda made me do this.

I wrote a detailed and angry letter to the pub in Holborn where me and Madchen used to meet up - argh, what was it called! - ah, Penderel's Oak - to complain about their serious mosue problem. I never heard back from the fuckers, so can I ask any of you who might frequent it (and there can't be many, it's a crappy Wetherspoons joint) to boycott it and take your custom elsewhere? Thanks!

Well, that's what you get for going to a Wetherspoons pub. If there are vermin, complain to the council, not the pub (unless you CC it to the council).

I've never complained to a company, but I remember I did write a letter to a journalist once telling her that she was too hard on that one gymnist who did the vault thingie and landed on one twisted ankle. Oh, Carrie Shrug, that's the one. I was 12 I think.

ParcelForce are a bunch of gits. i still haven't got my Two Towers DVD.

awww! there there stevem.

so i got the one extra day i needed to finish my animation - in fact, i got two. but, y'know, projects have that way of expanding to fill the time allocated. so here i still am in this forsaken computer room 6, still stick, still tired, still got a headache from staring at the screen, still nauseous, still have seen about 8 minutes of home in the last 3 days, still an one twelfth of an icy cold cappuccino sitting next to me, still all alone, still got plenty to do, still procrastinating.

i suppose this thread was really about complaining about poor service, but it was the first thing to come up when i searched "complain".