Academy Funeral Services

PART 1. We had our awful experience with Academy Funerals. I had been in touch with Michelle prior to my father's passing many times over email. We knew it was coming, and we were preparing ourselves. He was in palliative care at home and we knew he was near the end of life. When he passed, I called Michelle and received voicemail. I left a message then called Paul, I also received voicemail. When Michelle called me back she sounded flustered and asked what hospital dad was in, and said she would call back. She called back and asked what retirement home he was in, after I had already told her numerous times he was at home and we needed to have him transferred. We had an appointment with Michelle the following day and we arrived at their "office". Michelle greeted us with "the meeting room is booked so we'll have to use the staff kitchen". No introduction or condolences. She sat the four of us in the staff kitchen around a small table and proceeded to show us photos of flowers on her phone. We were speechless. She was so casual and unprofessional for such a somber and important moment in our lives. She said she had some photos in an album of the flowers, which we requested to see. She retrieved them from the meeting room and we moved into the meeting room which had just been vacated. Throughout the meeting she was very blasé and unprofessional - at one point, pointing out how much our doctor charged THEM for the death certificate, and complaining that it was high

PART 2 The Memorial Slideshow. I designed the slideshow for my dad but needed help with putting the music to it. I gave it to Michelle on a USB and she changed it to MP4 format for me and put the music to it. She also told me that she changed the background colour from black to green, without asking me because she said it looked better green. She changed our slideshow!!! We chose the black background and how dare she change it (looked terrible) so we asked her to change it back to black, to which she was quite annoyed about having to do. We had to meet her in the carpark of Academy Funerals in the dark, the night before the funeral to get a copy of the USB to make sure it was as we had wanted it. She didn't even get out of the car to give it to me. The night before the funeral!!!! The day of the funeral. The Memorial booklets looked cheap - they were much smaller than any other ones we'd seen and the black and white photo on the front looked almost blue and white. I could have printed it better myself. The Celebrant, David Reardon was outstanding. He was so professional and compassionate and delivered the service extremely well. When it came to the slideshow it started fine, then about ten slides in it froze. The images weren't moving but the music was still playing. We sat and waited for it to be fixed and nothing was happening. Michelle's response was "it was working fine last night, ,wasn't it?" Not putting in any effort to help or fix the problem, as she li