TWO former Comet employees who lost their jobs at Christmas have bounced back by creating their own company helping the retailer’s customers left in the lurch by its demise.

Anthony Lingham and Darren Tucker, both from Clevedon, began operating their technical support business, ALDT, on January 14 and have already had hundreds of former Comet customers contact them.

Darren, a 40-year-old father-of-two, had worked for the electrical giant for three years when he was made redundant on December 21 and Anthony had been with the company for four years when he lost his job on New Year’s Eve.

In November, the company was put into administration and by December 18 all of its stores had closed.

Anthony, aged 28, said: “It was difficult to say the least.

“With any company going into administration, there is only so much they are allowed to tell you.

“None of us knew what was going on and then we had customers asking and we didn’t have any answers for them.”

Both Anthony and Darren worked at the call centre at Windmill Business Park in Kenn, giving technical support to Comet customers.

Now, they are offering such a service through ALDT, which enables them to remotely access customers’ multimedia devices to carry out maintenance or fix faults.

Anthony said: “There was about 3-4,00 customers who we dealt with for computers who have been left in the lurch.

“We have already had about 300 people contact us and they have all said it is brilliant we are offering this support.

“Primarily we want to give back to the customers who have supported us.”

While they are currently working from home, Darren and Anthony hope to soon move into an office and also employ three or four of their former Comet colleagues in the near future.

* For more details about ALDT’s services visit www.aldt.co.uk or call 0843 289 0506.