Making the most of a wet weekend

We run a retail website – sending gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who can’t visit the patient in person – and we despatch the gifts by recorded delivery.  This is a good service: our experience is that the overwhelming majority of goods are delivered on the next working day after we post them.  Over bank holidays there is of course a slight delay, and we explain on the website that, if you order a gift just before or during a bank holiday weekend, you need to allow an extra day’s delivery time.

 

We have of course just enjoyed the late May bank holiday.  If you live in the southern part of the country, it was very clearly a bank holiday – it poured with rain all day!  So, with little else to do with our time, we decided to deliver by hand one of the recently ordered gifts.  It was for someone in a hospital reasonably close to us.

 

 

It was a rewarding experience.  Dodging the showers, we made our way to the hospital, handed the parcel over at reception and were assured it would be delivered to the patient immediately.  If only we had more time, we might do that more often!

A new stock of Get Well cards

Every so often we receive a new stock of greeting cards from our suppliers for use with the aFriendinNeed.co.uk website.   This is because we send gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who can’t visit the patient in person, but the card that goes with the gift is important too.  The friend or family member ordering the gift chooses the card design and tells us the message they would like to appear on the card.  We then write the message on the card and enclose it with the gift.     

 

 When our stock of cards runs down, we try to order in a supply of different cards.  Often we have to, because the supplier may no longer be able to provide the old cards.  But it’s interesting anyway to choose a new range of cards, and we’ve just had the pleasure of loading them on to the website where customers can choose which card they want to send.

 

Getting a good variety of cards is important.  Ideally there should be words to suit every circumstance.  And the picture on the card matters too.  Flowers and cuddly toys are always popular, but so too are pictures of animals and plants and other miscellaneous designs.

 

I suppose it’s the combination of a thoughtfully chosen present, a card that reflects the emotion the friend or relative wants to convey, and the personal hand-written message that – we hope! – makes receiving aFriendinNeed gift such a special event for someone in hospital.

Back to reality

We have just returned from a short break in Italy.  We stayed in Amalfi, which as you may know is a small town perched on steep cliffs tumbling down to the sea.  It is a beautiful, idyllic spot.

 

The roads in and out of town are another matter, however.  Narrow and twisting, they wind round the cliffs hugging the coastline.  Only a low wall separates the traffic from a sharp plunge down into the sea.  And needless to say, the locals, who obviously know the road well, are not the most patient of drivers.

 

We began to wonder how many accidents occur and wondered how far away the nearest hospital was.  We weren’t just being morbid – we have a kind of interest in these things because at AFriendinNeed.co.uk we send gifts to people in hospital on behalf of friends and family who cannot to visit them in person.  We wondered how our business might fare in Amalfi.

 

To our relief, although a lot of vehicles have long scratches down the side, there was little evidence of frequent accidents. We think we’ll carry on limiting the website to the UK!