Bharat S. M. Karavadra

Thank You To Fiaz at The Fort Management Centre, Birmingham

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

I would like to personally thank Fiaz for the level of customer service he gave to me today at the Fort Shopping Center, after my car was clamped. We had gone to the Fort to do some shopping and parked in a disabled bay. As I was putting my daughter in her pushchair from the car I noticed a man looking at the windscreens of nearby cars. He also came to my car and looked at the windscreen. Although he was not in any uniform I just thought that he was checking that disabled badges were displayed, I even had a feeling to ask him if everything was ok but I didn’t as I assumed we had displayed our badge. He even made eye contact with me when I was next to the car. For the purpose of this article I will call him the tall shaky man…..because that’s what he was very tall, and shaky like he had done something wrong.

On returning to the car we discovered that our front wheel had a big yellow clamp on it and some paperwork was left on the windscreen. My husband called up the number on the paperwork saying that we had been clamped even though we had a disabled badge and was told someone would be around in 15 minutes. In around 2 minutes a white van turned up…with the tall shaky man and a lady who I will, for the purpose of this article, call  ‘Tough Woman’. We showed the Tall Shaky Man and the Tough Woman my husband’s disabled badge. The Tall Shaky Man even asked to have a look at it and so I showed him (he even had a feel of it). I noticed him wearing white latex gloves and so was Tough Woman…..still don’t know why. We asked if they could remove the clamp without charging us because we had a badge and the ‘Tough Woman’ said that they couldn’t do anything. I even said to the Tall Shaky Man ‘you saw me walking away from the car why couldn’t you just tell me that there isn’t a badge being displayed?’  To which they both replied “our job is to look at cars not the people”. My question to this would be why then did the ‘Tall Shaky Man’ (name too long I’ll abbreviate to TSM) look at me as I was walking away from our car when we had parked it?

Anyway, it was getting late and the ‘Tough Woman’ (TW) was saying that we would have to pay and then appeal and that there was no way to remove the clamp unless we paid the release fee because if she did a refund the money would come out of her salary. We felt under a lot of pressure particularly as we had our 10 month baby with us who was getting restless. So we gave in and I paid £95 with my debit card. It felt really unfair especially as the TSM had seen me leave the car and secondly as we had shown our badge.

We drove off then something just told me to go back and see if there was a Fort management team who could help. So that’s what we did. We parked right back  in the same spot and I saw a security man, I ran out of the car towards him to discover the Fort Management Office. When I went in a young gentleman by the name of Fiaz helped me. He acted immediately in order to sort this out. He showed a level of commitment and compassion to sorting the matter out that you rarely get to see, especially as it was coming to closing time.

I, in the mean time, ran back to the car to make sure my daughter was fed. This is going to sound really weird but whilst I was shopping I had a feeling to buy a jar of food even though my daughter isn’t on jars anymore. My husband fed her while I went back to the management office.

Back at the office, Fiaz had clearly been “on the case” full on, because within a few minutes my husband heard a knock on the car window. It was… the ‘Tall Shaky Man’. He said can I have your card. Clearly my husband was oblivious to what was going on upstairs in the Management office as he was busy feeding our baby. His thoughts were ‘ what do you want I’m feeding my baby?’ So he called me and I said that they wanted my card. They were really trying not to go up to the office for some reason. Anyway I’ve babbled on a bit so to cut a long story short they came up and gave me a refund. The Tough Woman was still trying to be tough by saying she hadn’t seen the badge..to which I replied “your partner felt it. Are you not a team?” By the way this team told me that they worked for an independant company: Parking Control Management (UK) Ltd. PO Box 1161, Slough, Berkshire, SL2 5PJ.

So why have I decided to write this article? Well for four reasons:

1. To thank Fiaz for his compassion towards me and his prompt response. He really is a diamond amongst tarnished wealth. Thank you again.

2. To share with people that if you are clamped and you can show you have a disable badge in your car which you have forgotten to display then the clamping company should show compassion.

3. To share with people the power of going with one’s intuition.

4. So that the many ‘Tall Shaky Men’ and ‘Tough Women’ of this world become compassionate and honest.

God Bless all involved in this incident.

by Shilpa Karavadra