…my cuppa iced coffee…

I had lunch today at Secret Recipe KL Sentral. Not in the mood for rice, I ordered the Tom Yum Kung with noodle.

It tasted off right from the beginning.

I mean, if you’ve eaten the dish several times already, you’d know something is not right. I ate several spoons of noodle and vegetable before touching the prawns. They looked sickly, soft to the touch and smelled bad. I was rather disappointed that there weren’t any maggot when I peeled the skin.

Needless to say, I totally lost my appetite.

I showed the waitress the smelly prawns and she took them back to the kitchen. I was kind of expecting that she would come back and apologise and maybe give me a discount or something as compensation. Nothing happened. When I got the bill, I asked her whether any action will be taken regarding the matter. She only said no and that the kitchen staff apologised for the bad prawns. I told her, since they were not taking any action on this, I will take action.

So… what I did or going to do..

1. The moment I got back to the office, I complained to Secret Recipe via their website.
2. I wrote about it in my blog and other community boards.
3. Write to the newspapers.

Why did I not complain to the manager, you asked. Simply because I am not the type who likes to make scenes in public. If I did complain and they give me a new bowl of Tom Yum Kung noodle, I’d probably get slightly fresher but still bad prawns as before. Just so that you know, a colleague of mine sitting several tables away also had the same dish, and she also had same bad prawns.

So, my motive is more to teaching them a lesson. The more people know about this, the better they’ll learn that serving bad food is totally unacceptable.

It’s very disappointing that something like this is happening at an established food outlet like Secret Recipe.

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Updates (05/01/2008)

I sent this message to Secret Recipe via their website on 30/12/2008:

“I had tom yum kung for lunch today at your outlet at KL Sentral. Did you know that they served prawns that already went bad? The smell was awful and I was surprised that they didn’t have maggots on them. I did not call the manager to complain mainly because I had already lost my appetite. I asked the waitress whether any action will be taken on the matter but she said it was the kitchen staff’s responsibility and not hers. So because of that, I will take action. A lot of people will know about this. Highly likely the newspapers as well.“

Their Customer Services responded a couple of hours later:

“Dear Mr Awangku,
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Thank you for your email.
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On behalf of the team we apologize for your unpleasant experience. We will forward your comments to our higher management for further investigation.
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Our outlet manager should be contacting you soon about this.“

I responded by informing them that similar incident happened to my colleague around the same time and left them my phone number.

Today, around noon, the Secret Recipe franchisee manager (if I’m not mistaken) called me. We had a little chat, which you can easily guess what we talked about, and around 20 minutes ago, I received this email from her:

“Dear En Awang,

As spoken this morning, first and foremost our humble apology for the unpleasant experience at our KL Sentral outlet. We are investigating the matter and our outlet Manager, Ms Farah will get to you shortly. Your friend’s incident will also be investigated and we will revert to her shortly. Yes, as agreed, we are prepared to offer you and your friend, Cik Mahani a complimentary meal at our outlet.

We assure you that this unfortunate incident is unusual and it does not represent the overall standard and quality of Secret Recipe ie it could be due to some mistake at our outlet only.  In any case, we thank you for patronising our outlet and hope to see you again. Thanks for the feedback, you will be contacted shortly for the detail explanation and complimentary meal.“

To be honest, I’m not really pining for the complimentary meal and it doesn’t bother me at all whether they gave me one or not. I’m just disappointed that something like this can happen in a respectable food outlet. They should be more strict with the food quality control.

I signed up with Internet-Webhosting.com when I decided to have my own .com blog and do away sith the free hosting at Wordpress. The main reason for the choice was the package they offer: RM 80 per year for 2 GB disk space and 20 GB monthly bandwidth. A good choice for a new blogger like me.

Throughout the months I was with them, I encountered a few hiccups – setting up errors, server hard disks went kaput, my posts disappeared… but their support staff were extremely helpful and the problems were fixed moderately fast.

Along the way, however, I started to look for other web hosting options and stumbled across Senihost.

Hosting packages

Senihost offers 2 hosting packages: Valusite and Prosite.

Unfortunately, the Valusite package is already sold out, or so they say. I think it’s just a tactic for people to sign up for the Prosite packages.   But don’t get me wrong. The Prosite package is still a bargain.

I chose Prosite Standard to test things out: 20 GB disk space, 60 GB monthly bandwidth etc etc all for only RM 100 per year. Not bad. They have Prosite Expert, but at this point.. maybe not. That was in October 2008 and so far, everything is running smoothly. No downtime, no database error, no nothing. Excellent! 

Affiliate program

If you are interested in earning some extra income, you can look into their affiliate program. It’s activated automatically when you sign up for any hosting package. They even give you RM 50 to start you off. And for every client you referred, as long as they maintain their subscription, you will get 12% recurrent income. Nice, huh? 

So… if you want to try hosting your own blog, why not try Senihost? You can even register your own domain name through them at only RM 40 for one year.

If your laptop or PC is running on Windows XP Pro, did you know that the OS actually limits your broadband connection bandwidth by 20%? I was Stumbling around when I landed on freepctech.com’s Windows XP Tips and Tricks page (an excellent place to find ways to improve the performance of your Windows XP) and discovered this.

So, the culprit is the QoS Packet Scheduler. Simply put, it reserves 20% of your bandwidth, regardless whether it’s activated or not. Yes, it’s one of those “by default” thingy.

Some would say changing or disabling this would not make any difference but I did find my surfing experience has improved. If you want to give it a try, just do the following. You can either change the QoS default 20% to 0% or disable it totally.

To change the value, run gpedit.msc (be careful) and look for QoS Packet Scheduler under Administrative Templates, Network.

Double-click Limit reservable bandwidth, choose Enabled and change the Bandwidth limit (%) to 0. Click OK.

To disable the QoS Packet Scheduler, access your connection Properties and untick the checkbox.

Good luck.