Un-fucking-Believable (Part 5)

Posted: Tue 8 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, National Express East Anglia, Travel, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Just so people know I’m not just pissing in the wind when it comes to the way National Express East Anglia (NEEA) have doubled their prices overnight on the Norfolk->Cambridge line, I have also contacted NEEA’s Customer Services department via email. (I did this over the weekend, but haven’t yet had any response – hardly a surprise, I know)

The email read as follows…

How do NEEA justify doubling the cost of a ticket from Attleborough to London overnight with no warnings?

Upon arriving at the station, there is a piece of A4 paper wrapped in plastic on one noticeboard explaining that suddenly NEEA have decided that Attleborough -> Cambridge is a peak-time line until 10am “to bring it in line with other services leaving London”

It may have escaped NEEA’s notice that the line from Attleborough -> Cambridge neither leaves London nor comes from London. It is the line between Cambridge and Norwich. One has to change services (and in fact train operator) to get to London from Attleborough. And considering that I took the 7.55 train from Attleborough, and don’t get in to London ’til 10.15, that journey in no way constitutes a peak-time train, according to NEEA’s own Terms and Conditions.

So – how do NEEA justify this?

Also, how do they justify doing so overnight, with no advance warning. My £40 ticket – properly paid for on TheTrainLine.com – was invalid, so I’ve also had to pay £74 extra. The price rise isn’t mentioned on NEEA’s “News” page, nor is the arbitrary change of line to a peak-time line. In fact, even the guard and ticket inspector weren’t aware of it ’til Friday.

Are NEEA trying to get rid of customers? It’s now cheaper to drive to Cambridge and/or London than it is to take the train. (It’s also likely more convenient, as it means not having to hang around on stations while changing trains etc.)

I have no expectations that it will ever be responded to, because NEEA are (on current appearances) a bunch of profiteering scumbags with no regard for their paying customers at all. The only thing they appear to be interested in is their profit margin – although that, I suppose, is privatisation for you.

I’m also going to be putting the same complaint in ‘proper’ writing, and sending it in to NEEA

However, I’ve also contacted a couple of the local papers – who seem far more interested in the whole ‘ripping off customers’ thing. In fact I’m due to speak to one of their reporters today…

Un-fucking-Believable (Part 4)

Posted: Mon 7 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Charm School, Customer Services, National Express East Anglia, Sweary, Travel | Leave a comment »

Following on from the rest of the story, today was the day that NEEA put the prices way up for my ticket from Attleborough to London.

The sole explanation of this anywhere on the station platform was one sheet of A4 paper wrapped in plastic sticky-taped to one noticeboard, which explained (and I may be paraphrasing slightly here…)

Because we’re profiteering fuckwit bastards, the line between Norwich and Cambridge has now been deemed a ‘peak-line’ train, which means we’ll rip you the fuck off for a full-price ticket until 10am.

This is to bring this service in line with other services leaving London. In other words, live with it, and we’ll take your money. Suckers.

The excuse of ‘bringing this service in line with others leaving London’ would be almost fine, if it weren’t for one or two very fucking significant points.

Point the First

The line between Cambridge and Norwich doesn’t go anywhere near London. At all. To travel to/from London, you’ve got to change first at Cambridge or Norwich. There is NO direct service.

Point the Second

Off-Peak tickets for leaving london only apply (according to NEEA’s own T&Cs) for trains arriving in London before 10am. The 7.55am service gets in to London Kings Cross at – um – 10.15am. Leaving at 7.55, in fact, there is no fucking way I can get to London before 10am.

In most cases the off peak day travelcard is not available for travel on trains arriving in London* before 1000 or departing from London before 0930. Travel is also not permitted on services departing from London* between 1629 and 1834 Monday to Friday, except for travel to stations between Hatfield Peverel and Braintree inclusive on the 1636 departure from London.

So all told, it just looks like a massive profiteering move on NEEA‘s part to double the prices and grab as much profit as humanly possible.

In the meantime, I’ve complained to NEEA direct, although I’m willing to bet that they don’t even bother responding.  I’ll add the complaint letter as a post on D4D™ sometime this week, just for fun. I’m also going to be writing properly, rather than just in email – and I suspect a copy might make it’s way to the local papers etc. too…

Un-Fucking-Believable (Part 3)

Posted: Sat 29 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, National Express East Anglia, Travel, Work-related | 1 Comment »

I’ve been doing some more research into the enormous price-rise by National Express East Anglia from the 5/6th September (as written about previously here and here) whereby the ticket that used to cost £39.50 has gone up to £74.

What it looks like is that National Express East Anglia have added a “peak time” definition to travel between Norwich and Cambridge – although they don’t say as much on their website. As written about in Part Two, the T&Cs for Off-Peak tickets still say…

For National Express East Anglia journeys it is valid for any train scheduled to arrive at London Liverpool Street or London Kings Cross at or after 1000, Stratford (London) after 0950, Tottenham Hale/ Seven Sisters after 0940. Not valid on any train departing London Liverpool Street or Kings Cross before 0930 or between 1629 or 1834 inclusive (1900 from Kings Cross) although travel is permitted on the 1636 from London Liverpool Street to Braintree, for destinations Hatfield Peverel to Braintree inclusive.

Which makes no mention of peak-travel times for non-London trains.

But if you look on National Express East Anglia’s own Journey Planner (That link only goes to the front page, you can’t easily link to inside the Journey Planner) and look at travel between Attleborough and Cambridge, the off-peak ticket is only valid for travelling after 10am.

I think I’m going to have to do some experimenting with this while actually travelling on the train – that should be fun!

Un-Fucking-Believable (Part 2)

Posted: Thu 27 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, National Express East Anglia, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Following on from yesterday’s mini-rant about National Express East Anglia‘s huge price-rise coming in on the 5th/6th Sept, I’ve kept on looking for more information.

Unsurprisingly, National Express East Anglia’s website doesn’t really mention fares at all (although there’s plenty of references to penalty fares) and the upcoming fare-rise doesn’t appear to feature in their news section either.  They still talk about off-peak fares, but it’s nigh-on impossible to get one. I’ve gone through ’til November using The Train Line’s website, and any time you ask about off-peak tickets you just get a “Not Available” (if you can even find the access to the off-peak tickets.

As the National Express East Anglia website itself says in the terms and conditions for off-peak tickets,

In most cases off peak day tickets are not available for travel on trains arriving in London before 1000 or departing from London before 0930. Travel is also not permitted on services departing from London between 1629 and 1834 Monday to Friday, except for travel to stations between Hatfield Peverel and Braintree inclusive on the 1636 departure from London.

None of the trains I’m using fall into these categories – I get in to London at around 1015 on the Monday , and was leaving at 1615  on the Friday – but still, the off-peak tickets appear to be completely unavailable after 6th September.

And for the pedantic and picky among you, yes, there is a cheaper off-peak ticket via Norwich – but that journey takes at least an hour longer, takes me to a less-useful London station, and is one of the more renownedly unreliable lines in the country…

Un-Fucking-Believable

Posted: Wed 26 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, National Express East Anglia, Travel, Work-related | 7 Comments »

In the spirit of being organised, I’ve just been booking accommodation and train tickets for the rest of the contract, which takes me through to the end of September.

I’d already booked stuff for next week, and that was all sorted.

However, it looks like 5th September is National Price-Rise Day – and in the case of the train tickets in particular, it’s abso-fucking-lutely extortionate.

This week and next, the return ticket from Attleborough to London (including Tube to get me to the office) is £39.50. Which, in fairness, is pretty good value.

For travelling on the 7th September, that self-same return ticket is – are you ready for this? – £74.

Yes, for reasons known only to themselves, National Express East Anglia think it’s acceptable to pretty much double the price. How the fuck can that be justified?

No Frills

Posted: Wed 26 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Thoughts, Work-related | Leave a comment »

During the new contract, my accommodation in London is courtesy of Travelodge, also known as “The RyanAir of hotels” – well, in my book anyway. They’re definitely “No Frills”, but as a room/bed for the night they’re serviceable.

In this case, they’re also at least £25 cheaper per night – so yes, £100 per week – than their closest competition. And in this contract, where the day-rate is being squeezed so hard it’s almost screaming, that £25 per day/night is a significant difference.

It’s interesting to see over the years (He said, sounding like a right old fart) how the Travelodge rooms and facilities have changed.

Back in October 2006, for example, I had a big rant about Travelodges based on the one in Cambridge which was (and probably still is) a total piss-take. (And yes, if you look around on that month you’ll also see I swore never to stay in one long-term again. Ah well.)  At that time, the Travelodge was charging obscene rates for phone calls and dial-up internet connections.

Now, there’s no phone at all in the rooms. I assume they realised there was no real money any more in having landline phones when ‘everyone’ has a mobile, and ‘all’ laptops have a wireless network capability. There’s wireless internet (in this case through Spectrum Wifi) for a fee which is fucking extortionate if you’re there for one or two nights, but works out pretty well if you know you’re there for a month. (Something like £10 for 24 hours, but £30 for a month).

And of course you still pay for breakfast – although if you book online it’s got something like a 20% discount on that too.

I still think that to some degree Travelodge and the like are extortionate – if you think there’s 150 rooms (give or take) in just this one Travelodge, and people are paying at least £60 per night, that’s a pretty good figure per week. Assuming 75% occupancy, that’s at least £47,000 per week, excluding extras for food, drink and internet access.  But at the same time there’s obviously the demand there, so why not charge for it?

Cutting Down on Waste

Posted: Thu 6 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Green, Stupidity, Thoughts | 3 Comments »

In the news today, there’s a piece about a Plymouth dairy that’s encouraging its customers to use “Milk Bags” – recyclable bags of milk, and a reusable ‘jug’ holding the bags.

According to the story,

Dairy spokesman Richard Pryor said customer research showed people wanted inexpensive and convenient ways to reduce the amount of rubbish they put in their dustbins.

“This development is another important step in reducing the environmental burden of the 130,000 tonnes of plastic used in milk packaging every year,” he said.

Obviously, Dairy Crest in Devon are using plastic bottles for delivering milk.

But it occurs to me, surely the single best way of reducing that tonnage of plastic used in milk packaging is to go back to using glass bottles instead of plastic ones?

Our milk gets delivered every other day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) to the door in glass bottles. At the same time, the driver collects our used (and washed) bottles, and takes them to be reused. No ‘rubbish’ relating to the milk – the foil bottle tops go in the recycling bin.

On the (exceptionally rare) occasions when a bottle breaks, it gets put into the glass box, to go to the local bottle bank next time we’re in that direction. Again, no landfill, no waste – it’ll get recycled into a glass ‘something else’.

So, who is it who does our milk deliveries? Yep, it’s Dairy Crest – the same ones who deliver in plastic in Plymouth.

iPhone Hassles

Posted: Sat 1 August, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, iPhone, Reviews(ish) | 1 Comment »

Yesterday, Herself went out and got an Apple iPhone from Carphone Warehouse.

Initially I was fairly impressed with it, there’s some nice interactions and stuff going on.

However, today we (OK, I) updated it to the latest version of the operating system, version 3.0.1. And since then the new iPhone has been a nightmare.

Firstly, Herself always has a lockcode set on the phone, so when you turn it on, you enter a four-digit PIN. Normally, no problem. However, as part of the upgrade to 3.0.1, the iPhone needs to connect back to iTunes, and iTunes can’t do that with a lock code set. Oh, and the iPhone wouldn’t do anything except say “connect me to iTunes”. Nothing else, no way to enter the lock code.

Cue a call to O2 to find out what needs doing, and then one to Apple. Which resulted in…

Factory Reset Number One. Yep, roll it all the way back to how we got it, loss of any settings we’d sorted. Square One.  And an OS upgraded to 3.0.1.

And all was well. Um, except for not having any access to wi-fi settings (as in “Not installed” rather than  “Not available”) or Bluetooth®. Totally greyed out, nothing there at all.

So a few resets, and another call to Apple.

Half an hour later, Factory Reset Number Two – and still no improvement.

So tomorrow we’re off to Carphone Warehouse, armed with an Issue Number from Apple, to get a replacement iPhone.

Let’s hope that one works better.

I’m not slagging off the iPhone per se – however, my experience with it so far has emphatically not been the most positive one. We’ll see how things go with the second one before I write up a valid review of it…

Shoplifters

Posted: Thu 30 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

As usual, I haven’t quite got round to figuring the logic relating to this sign in our local Sainsbury’s…

How is this related to my safety and security?

How is this related to my safety and security?

I don’t know how prosecuting thieves is for my safety/security.

In fact, I’d suggest that a rather more honest sign would read

For our profits, we always prosecute thieves

Delivery Weirdness

Posted: Tue 28 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

One of the more major changes (well, the major non-structural changes) when we re-did the kitchen this year was to get a new a gas cooker installed to replace the old electric piece of shit that came with the house.  It was a significant change because we’re not on mains gas here, so it also involves using gas cylinders.

Our first cylinder has finally run out, which means it’s time to get a replacement from Calor. There’s no urgency, due to having two cylinders, but equally it’s better to have the replacement sorted well before we actually need the sodding thing.

As a result, yesterday I called Calor’s local depot in Norwich (from which the cylinders were obtained by the people who installed the cooker) to order the replacement one. Except, based on our postcode, it turns out we don’t deal with the Norwich supplier/depot, but instead we deal with the – um – Bury St Edmunds depot.

According to the people at Calor Direct, getting our gas delivered from Bury St Edmunds is “more efficient”. But having checked on my faithful Route Planner, from the Norwich depot to this house is 19 miles.  From the Bury St Edmunds depot, it’s 36 miles – nearly double the distance.

So how is that more efficient?

Savings?

Posted: Mon 27 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

In the shops today, I came across something that I still can’t quite get my head around. It’s one of those things where you’re just not sure if you’ve missed something relevant, or if it really is that weird.

Let me explain.

At the moment, both Sainsburys and Tescos have a promotion where you can buy 2 two-litre bottles of Coke (or Diet Coke) for £2.  That’s fine.

However, right next to the individual bottles, they have a “Big Value” pack of 4 two-litre bottles. For £5.18 .

So the “Big Value” pack costs £1.18 more than 2 lots of the 2×2-litre deal.

What’ve I missed?

How not to do it

Posted: Sat 25 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Security, Stupidity, Technology, Toyota IE | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

This post has been deleted, on the request of Ian Corbett, Marketing Manager of Toyota Ireland, and his legal advisers.

For more explanation, see here.

NIN/JA Tour, O2 Arena

Posted: Thu 16 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Music, Reviews(ish), Wembley Stadium Parking | 1 Comment »

Way back in the day, I was a big fan of Janes Addiction, but never got to see them live. Then they reformed and created a new album (Strays), and I still didn’t get to see them live.

And I’ve been a fan of Nine Inch Nails all the way back to the first album, some twenty years ago now.

So it was a complete no-brainer that when the NIN/JA (Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction) tour was announced with UK dates, I was going to be going.

And lo, last night was the night – and amazingly, I got there in plenty of time. (Considering that last time I was going to see them, Ticketmaster never sent the tickets) Hell, I even got to see the support act – a band called Mew, who I wasn’t overly impressed with. Sorry, Lori, they just didn’t do it for me – but bear in mind I said the same thing way back when Muse supported Skunk Anansie, so don’t count on my opinions for much…

Jane’s Addiction, on the other hand, absolutely rocked the place. It was very much a case of “playing the known stuff” – although that’s not a massive challenge when you’ve only released three albums anyway. My only disappointment was that they didn’t play “Hypersonic” from the “Strays” album – but them’s the breaks. They played pretty much everything else they’ve done that was popular and/or well known.

As for NIN themselves, they did even more. Even though Jane’s had been fantastic (and loud!), with a storming lighting set-up, NIN just did the same only more so.  Brighter, louder, harder. It was awe-inspiring. Even better, it seemed like almost a retrospective – again, lots of stuff from the first couple of albums, the real crowd-pleasers, with not much from the latest album at all.

Of course, we knew it was going to be something special for the NIN section when they started bringing out extra lights and speaker stacks as well as what had already been on the stage.  What we didn’t expect, though, was a guest appearance by Gary Numan for two tracks – he’s been an inspiration to Trent Reznor (the lead of NIN) for years, but it was still pretty stunning to see him live as well.

All told, my enjoyment of the gig was only slightly damaged at the end, when some fuckwit girl called Lisa decided to keel over next to me – she’d been leaning on me for the previous track, and when it came to an end she just fell forwards, not even an attempt to stop herself.  Luckily, I was standing right next to the sound-desk enclosure, so was able to yell and get a security guy’s attention, and while he sorted out getting her medical help (and, as it turned out, a wheelchair) I ended up being the main prop for her, with her holding on to the railings of the enclosure. I’ve no idea what she’d taken (it certainly wasn’t a fit, she wasn’t pissed, but her eyeballs were floating off in different directions) but she was like a sack of shit – and roughly as good as one at standing up.  All due respect to the O2’s medical and security crews though, they were absolutely fantastic.

It meant I didn’t get to pay the full attention to the final track (an awesome version of “Hurt”) but well, priorities and all that.

Still, it was an absolutely stunning gig – as well as eye-fuckingly bright and brain-throbbingly loud too- and if it is to be (as rumoured) their last tour for a significant time, well it was certainly one hell of a way to go out on a high note…

(Oh, and just to rub it in, it took me less than two hours from leaving the O2 to get back home – I got in at 1am. So suck that Wembley, and your bullshit carparking farce)

Wembley Stadium Parking Revisited

Posted: Thu 9 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, D4D™, Music, Reviews(ish), Wembley Stadium Parking | 1 Comment »

Ten days ago (roughly) I was at Wembley Stadium, and at the end of the evening had a total farce of a time getting out of the car parks.  The following morning, I sent off a complaint email to both CS Parking and Wembley Stadium’s “customer services” people.

In fairness to CS Parking, I got a response back pretty quickly from the MD of the company – impressive in itself – after which there was a fairly long email ‘conversation’ about what had happened. That all got closed off by last Friday (i.e. a week after the even) and was all fine. I still think the parking situation is

  1. Shit
  2. Unmanaged for people leaving Wembley Stadium
  3. Farcical

but I can at least now understand why it’s shit, unmanaged, and a total Grade One ClusterFuck.

Wembley Stadium’s customer services, on the other hand, have only just come back to me today, and their email is rather more of a “Not our problem, mate. Go complain to someone else” effort…

All event day parking is managed by a contracted 3rd party; City & Suburban Parking in partnership with the local authority Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police.

The official car parks were full, accommodating in excess of 3,000 cars and in addition there were approx 3,000 cars parked in unauthorised car parks and a further 1,000 vehicles collecting from the area after the concert. As a result of the high volume of traffic, there were delays clearing the car parks the main car parks were not clear until 1½ hours after the end of the concert. We do not believe that these delays are acceptable however the local roads are under the control of Brent Council, not Wembley Stadium. We will be reviewing the exit plans with Brent Council and the Metropolitan Police for future concert events.

Thank you once again for contacting us. We hope you will be able to visit Wembley Stadium again in the future.

Considering that I’ve since had comments here on D4D from people who had the same problem with Wembley Stadium’s Parking after the Take That concerts, I think it’s fair to say that you’re actually far better off if you can avoid using the car parking at Wembley Stadium.  Well, either that or make use of the “pirate” car parks around the stadium, rather than the Stadium’s piece-of-shit “official” car parking.

Think 25

Posted: Mon 6 July, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Security, Stupidity | 2 Comments »

Over the weekend, I noticed that Sainsbury’s (and, I assume, the other supermarkets) are now operating a “Think 25” policy, where if you’re buying items that are prohibited under a certain age, you’ll get asked for ID first.

What items are we talking about? Well, to my knowledge – and this isn’t a comprehensive list, although I could probably find one if I tried – it consists of :

  • Cigarettes  (18 or over – it used to be 16, but changed in October 2007)
  • Alcohol (18 or over)
  • Blades – knives, razor-blades etc. (18 or over)

It used to be that if you looked under eighteen, you’d be asked for ID. Fair enough – 18 was the limit for most of the age-limited items.

Then the stores started getting paranoid about customers who just “looked” 18 getting through the system, so they invoked the “Check 21” policy, where even though you were legally allowed to buy said products, if you looked up to three years older than that, you would still get asked for ID – and not allowed to purchase the products if you didn’t have ID.

Now they appear to be even twitchier about it, and the “ask for ID” limit is 25 – and that’s if you look 25, not whether you are or not. So a whole seven years more of being asked for ID.

And the really stupid bit? The entire thing is voluntary – which means it’s perfectly legal for the only-just 18 till-person to sell the (for example) beer, but ask ID of someone who looks up to seven years older before they can sell it.

Totally barmy.

Organised Parking Procedures

Posted: Mon 29 June, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel, Wembley Stadium Parking | Leave a comment »

In a direct contrast to Wembley, the O2 have recently made their parking even easier.

The last couple of times we’ve been organising to go to the O2, the parking booking has had to be done via Ticketmaster – and most of the time, it couldn’t be done online for some fuckforsaken reason, so you ended up having to call the tosspots.

Now, though, the O2 deals with booking parking on their own site through a simple two-page form. (There may be more pages if you’re doing multiple bookings, or your address is different to the cardholders, but it took me two pages) And that’s it. Confirmation comes through to the email address, and it’s all done. No fucking about with Ticketmaster’s horrific system, no “you’ve got two minutes to fill in this form”, no godawful captchas to try and interpret, just a simple form.

So my parking’s booked for seeing Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction in just over two week’s time.

Again, I’ll be knackered by the time I get home – but it’ll be worth it.

AC/DC, Wembley Stadium

Posted: Sun 28 June, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Music, Reviews(ish), Wembley Stadium Parking | Leave a comment »

Other than the aforementioned parking nightmare at Wembley Stadium, the rest of the AC/DC gig on Friday was utterly fantastic.  Bearing in mind we were about as far as it’s possible to get from the stage…

The view from our seats

The view from our seats

So AC/DC themselves were about 1cm high. There were videoscreens either side, which made the viewing experience something akin to watching on a small TV from across the room, but that’s still OK. After all, it’s the sound you’re going for, not the vision – and the sound was storming.  Mind you, some people were obviously expected to be just there for the beer…

Carlsberg trailer behind beer tent at floor level

Carlsberg trailer behind beer tent at floor level

The two-and-a-quarter hours of AC/DC just rocked the place. Interestingly, they only played about five tracks from the latest album, Black Ice, and the rest came from all over the last thirty-odd years. And all of it was ace. Several firm favourites got played, including Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Back in Black, Hells Bells and (of course) For Those About To Rock as a finale, along with cannon blasts.

It wasn’t a show in the same way as the one Pink did recently, but it was still a show – the lighting was spectacular (and improved through the night, as the sun went down) and everyone seemed to have a fantastic time. Personally I felt the ten-plus minutes of Angus’ guitar soloing was a move too far, and could’ve had a couple more tracks instead. But that’s just me.

The AC/DC lightshow

The AC/DC lightshow

All told, a seriously good gig – I’d go and see them again no worries.

Complaint to Wembley Stadium’s Parking people

Posted: Sat 27 June, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Driving, Wembley Stadium Parking | 7 Comments »

Ah, I do love writing letters of complaint.  In this case, it’s about the car parking at Wembley Stadium, and the exit nightmare…

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you to complain in the strongest possible terms about the farcical car-parking situation at Wembley Stadium.  I understand that it is primarily a “public transport” venue – however, National Express don’t do coaches to anywhere within 40 miles of my location, so driving was the only way to come to Wembley Stadium.

Last night, after the AC/DC concert, we left the Stadium by 11pm, and didn’t get to leave the car-park ’til 12.15am.  75 minutes to get out of a car-park (we were in Green Car Park, on Level 4, so there was only one ramp to go down in order to exit the venue) is simply not an acceptable time.  The O2 manages to get people out within ten minutes, mainly because they have parking attendants guiding and managing the traffic.

In a venue like Wembley Stadium, where so much thought has been given to managing the flow of people out of the stadium, it’s deeply bizarre to then have absolutely no thought or management of the car parking.  Getting away from the Stadium is, by necessity, the last thing one remembers: it is the freshest memory, and colours the judgement of the entire event. In this case, while the concert itself was fantastic, the parking and exit strategy is going to be enough to make me severely reluctant to visit Wembley Stadium again. I would rather go to a venue like the O2 where the exit policy is smooth, organised and rapid than go to Wembley Stadium where it is nothing short of farcical and shambolic. Paying £25 for the privilege of being stuck for an hour and a quarter is just adding insult to injury, I’m afraid.

I look forward to hearing your response to this complaint.

Sincerely

Lyle

See, and not a swearword in place!  I wonder what the response will be?

Knackered

Posted: Sat 27 June, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Driving, Reviews(ish), Travel, Wembley Stadium Parking | Leave a comment »

So, yesterday was the AC/DC “Black Ice Tour” concert at Wembley Stadium – and right now I’m utterly knackered.

I left the house at 2.15 to go and collect the other person (the almost-brother-in-law) I was going with from Dereham before starting off for London at about 3.30 to go thrashing down to Wembley. We got there about 6pm – not too bad, although we could’ve done better if the satnav hadn’t decided to mis-direct us on the North Circular. Still, got there in plenty of time.

Wembley is bloody impressive – and effing huge. We were right up at the top, which meant that the band were about a centimetre high – although the big video screens either side of the stage meant they were much bigger – ooh, almost like watching a video of them live.

Anyway, two hours of standing, watching the gig – which was ace, and for which another post is due to be written (along with manky cameraphone pictures) – before heading home.

And that was where it all went a bit tits-up. You see, Wembley Stadium may be dead easy to get out of, but the car-parks really aren’t. Considering you’ve paid £25 – yes, twenty-fucking-five quid – to CS Parking (also known as City and Suburban parking) in order to park, I’d expect at least a couple of people out there guiding drivers and managing the traffic flow. But no. The parking situation when you’re coming out of Wembley Stadium is a total, complete and utter fuck-up. So we waited for half an hour, then decided to move, and all told it took an hour and a quarter to get out of Wembley Stadium’s car parking.

Once we’d done that, it was plain sailing – straight round the M40, M25, M11 and A11. Easy. I was back in Dereham at 2:45 and home at about 3:15.

But dear God I’m tired today –  and my feet fucking hurt, too. There’s a learning experience in that – possibly “lose some weight you fat bastard”. We’ll see.

Audio-Visual

Posted: Wed 3 June, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Not content with the bed breaking last week, it looks like our DVD player is also on the way out.  For some reason the discs aren’t playing at all, and we’re getting told “No Disc” when there patently bloody well is one.

Normally, a replacement DVD player wouldn’t be an issue. Thirty quid (at most) and job done.

However, we’re in a similar situation to when my DVD player died years ago – it’s not just a stand-alone DVD player, it’s a multiple disc thing that also deals with all the surround sound, Dolby® etc., so it’s pretty much DVD plus the full stereo etc. Which means that ideally I’m looking for a DVD player with the Dolby 5.1 outputs, so I can plug the speakers into it and job done.

Only of course, they’re hard to find – if they exist at all. The players are rarely sold on their own, instead coming with all the speakers as a completely new bit of kit.

All told, it all becomes a bit of a pain. I’d rather just get the player, so we don’t have to get new speakers etc. too – but that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.

Wayfarer Software – Refund

Posted: Tue 19 May, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Driving, Travel | Leave a comment »

Following on from the farce at the start of the month where I needed to use the Wayfarer navigation software on my phone, I’ve been working on getting a refund out of Wayfarer for it, as I’ve no plans on ever using the poxy thing again.

Initially I’d emailed telling them why the Wayfarer Navigator software was so bad in the case of my phone (the consistent 400′ out in position being a pretty significant issue) and got a response telling me to check the GPS on the phone was on, and had located the satellites. (I managed to not send a rude response to that one, patronising thought it was) They also tried telling me to update the software – regardless of the fact I was already on the latest version. (and had said so in the initial emails)

They’ve tried getting out of it by claiming I should’ve asked for a refund within 14 days of buying the full version of the software. Considering I hadn’t used it at all ’til after the 14-day “deadline” had passed, I wasn’t going to stand for that one, and brought up the wonderful phrase “selling goods that are unfit for purpose”.

Another refusal to refund followed, which resulted in the invocation of the Great Old Ones: “Trading Standards” and (my favourite) “Goods of Unmerchantable Quality”

And Lo, today they’ve confirmed a full refund.  Charitable of them, n’est ce pas?

Unshattered

Posted: Wed 13 May, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving | Leave a comment »

So, that’s the rear window on the car now fixed, and I can drive again. Happy Day. So now all I need to do is go down to the place where it got broked, and sort out repayment of the excess with them.

And if anyone cares, I used AutoGlass, who are the recommended people when using Tesco Car Insurance. We’ve used them before (when Herself had her back window stolen while we lived in Bracknell, and for one other broken window incident) and they’ve always been impressively efficient.

In this case it took longer than expected (i.e. fixed today instead of yesterday) because the window that broke had to be ordered- it’s not a common one to break, apparently. So it got ordered from their central depot thingy when I called yesterday at about 3pm, was delivered to Norwich first thing this morning, and fitted here by half twelve.

I’d say that’s going to be pretty impressive by anyone’s standards, to be honest.

Wayfarer Software

Posted: Mon 4 May, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Sweary, Technology | Leave a comment »

The (far nicer than I could have been) email I’ve just sent to Wayfarer Software’s customer services/support team…

I would like a refund on my Navigator software – purchase no [whatever] . I had to use it properly for the first time on Friday while driving in London, and it’s the most abysmal heap of junk known to man.

The calibration is consistently 400 ft out, which leads to regularly being told to turn onto the road you’ve just passed – particularly in London. In addition, the navigator was trying to send me in completely the wrong direction (northbound round the M25 to get to Greenwich in south London).

I plan to buy a TomTom instead of ever using the Wayfarer software again.

Please let me know what I need to do in order to get a refund on my Wayfarer license, as in my experience it is utterly unfit for purpose.

Sincerely

Lyle

What I should have written would’ve been something like…

Dear Fuckbricks,

Refund my licence for the Wayfarer software now, because it sucks the bollocks of dead porcupines. The fucking thing couldn’t find it’s own arse, let alone find it’s way round London.

Your developers have wasted years of their lives writing this piece of shit. It’s not worth the fucking memory card it’s stored on.

Lyle.

Mileage (Part Two)

Posted: Sat 2 May, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving, Reviews(ish), Sweary, Travel | Leave a comment »

So, yesterday – all told it involved 310 miles, 8 hours of driving, and one exceptionally knackered Lyle.

The drive down to Wokingham from home was OK, not too painful (even on the M25, which was slow but not abysmal) and I did it in 2.5 hours all told. Drop off Hound at her place of residence for the next week, have some lunch, and it’s half three. So I decide I’ll head over to Greenwich and the O2.

It’s at that point that I realise I haven’t got the normal sat-nav in the car. I had it the day before for the drive to Welwyn Garden City, then Herself used it in the evening, and I’d forgotten to make sure I got it back. Oh bollocks.

So instead I had to trust the POS sat-nav thing on my phone – a heap of crap called Wayfinder. And Jesus H Christ on a warped pine crutch, it really is a piece of shit. First of all it took no less than fifteen minutes to find where the fuck it was – although that may be a fault of the phone’s GPS rather than Wayfinder. However, the fact that it was consistently 400 ft out was entirely the fault of Wayfinder, and meant that it had a nasty habit of saying “Oh, you wanted to turn left back there“. Now I’m sure that’s fine out in the arse of beyond where 400 ft doesn’t mean a thing – but in central London, 400 ft is the equivalent of about six roads.

Wayfinder also wanted me to go some deeply surreal routes.  My original idea had been to go southbound (anticlockwise) round the M25 from the M4, get to the junction for (probably) the A2, and belt straight up to Greenwich – probably the longer and (in theory) quicker route. Only (as usual for the M25 on a Friday) it was jammed solid for about six junctions. Fuck that, thinketh I. (And bear in mind here, Wayfinder was trying to tell me to go northbound on the M25 instead)

So – straight along the M4, into the city, through. Only that was buggered too. (And Wayfinder kept planning on taking me back north of the river for some fuckforsaken reason)

So – round the infamous South Circular Road. I know a bit of it, but not all of it, so I might have to rely on satnav a bit. And there laid my biggest mistake of all. Because Wayfinder didn’t want me to take the simple South Circular (A205) route round to the A2. It wanted to take me the tourist way (and also possibly to get up to the M40 and go through from there). Every fucking time. And be 400 ft out in its estimations. All the fucking way round.

Eventually I gave up on it, once it tried taking me through Elephant and Castle.

From there, and pretty epically lost – I knew very roughly where I was, where I needed to be, and roughly the roads I needed to take – I finally found myself, got back on the road I wanted, and once I’d done that it was a 30 minute run through to the O2 itself. I should have been able to do the route in 90 minutes, give or take – maybe 2 hours in shitty rush-hour traffic.

Instead, because of the cuntbrick piece of shit satnav software, it took me three and a half bollocking hours to do fifty miles. Yeah, go on and laugh, fuckers.

By contrast, the drive home was two hours door-to-door, and belted past. We got home at 1:15.

I’ll write more about the Pink concert itself later or tomorrow – but for now let’s just say it was fan-bloody-tastic. Well impressed all round.

Collection Chaos

Posted: Tue 14 April, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic | 7 Comments »

Ah, you’ve got to love our fuckwitted local authority. When it comes to bank holidays and religous festivals, this year they’ve decided to fuck about with how the rubbish collections are done – only they’ve pretty much forgotten to let their customers (i.e. the residents of the area) know what they’re doing. And they’re not even consistent on what they’re doing.

In the normal world, collections just become later by one day – so if your collection’s on a Monday, it gets collected on a Tuesday, so on and so forth. I can’t recall quite what happened for the Friday collections – I think they just did them on the Saturday instead, so everything was back in sync for the following week. Simple, easy to remember, no messing about.

But now of course, we’re in the world of alternate collections – so the council decides to fuck about with things.

In our case, (a Monday collection) it meant that our normal 6th April collection was supposed to happen two days earlier, on the preceding Saturday 4th April. Only, um, the council forgot to inform people. Oh, they put it in the local press – except that a lot of people don’t get a local paper (we haven’t received the supposedly local free paper since we moved to the village) and don’t bother with the regional EDP. The booklet with all the Bank Holiday timetable revisions came out to us on – um – 6th April.

This Monday’s (recycling) collection was supposed to happen yesterday – but being Easter Monday, they moved that forwards to today. Well, according to the booklet anyway. Only, because so many people didn’t know about last week’s collections being made at least one day earlier than usual, the council only collected from 30% of homes last week.

So they’ve changed things around again – as you can see on Breckland’s revised collection schedule here – and moved the collections two days forward. So our Monday collection now won’t be collected ’til tomorrow.  And how have they let people know about these changes? Um – they haven’t. Supposedly it’s been in the local press – except again, there’s lot of people who don’t bother. It’s not even on the front page of the council’s site – you’ve got to hunt for the bloody thing.

And even better – there’s now a knock-on effect into next week as well. So next Monday’s collection is also delayed, but this time only by one day, so it’ll get collected on Tuesday instead of Monday. Finally, the Friday collection is on a Saturday, and the world returns to normal for the end of the month.

So the supposedly “better” jiggering about that Breckland Council have done with the waste collections for Easter 2009 is actually far more invasive and confusing than the old method.

Ain’t “progress” grand?

Even be

Promotional

Posted: Sat 4 April, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

Going by the number of promotional emails they’ve sent me this week, I guess MalMaison hotels are crying out for more business.

I’m a bit surprised, to be honest – I’ve been a fan of the Malmaison range of hotels for a number of years now, although (and I guess this proves the point of why they’re doing the promotions) I don’t use them often. Mind you, some of that is due to the fact we don’t do a mass of travelling at the moment, and I’ve been working in Norfolk rather than all over the place.

Then again, if I do work away from home, I’d have a tough job of justifying a MalMaison stay at £140+ per night to the taxman/accountant/auditor, rather than using (for example) a Premier Inn or Travelodge for half that…

So I suppose that yes, they are crying out for the business. But all the same, just this week I’ve received from them :

  • A promotion for spring stays at a discounted rate
  • A promotion for discounted Sunday nights
  • A promotion for discounted Monday nights

So, Malmaison (and their marketing department) – There is such a thing as looking desperate, you know.

Outages

Posted: Fri 3 April, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

You know, in the six months I’ve been in the current workplace, there hasn’t been one day where the internet connection and/or network have stayed up all day without needing to be re-started by the IT department.

Every bloody sodding day, at some random point, the connections die. Most of the time it’s the proxy server they’re using, so it “just” needs a service restarting.  But not once has anybody said “You know, this is effing ridiculous – let’s look at the logs and see what’s breaking, so we can fix it or upgrade it”

In fact, no-one seems to care at all. It’s just another of those things that always happens, always has happened, and always will happen.

Updating Company Details

Posted: Tue 17 March, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Following on from the fun last week where my accountant got himself declared bankrupt (fucker) I had to get the registered office for my company moved and re-registered with Companies House as soon as possible.

In light of that, I downloaded the necessary form from their website, printed it out, filled it in, and posted it off.

Checking today, the registered office change has been processed, and is part of their online record for my company.

I have to say, I’m impressed with the efficiency. I’ve said about it before, but Companies House really do tend to be disturbingly efficient – particularly when you realise they’re a branch of Government. It’s most unnatural – yet strangely reassuring.

Dark/Black Blood

Posted: Fri 20 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

Over the last few years I’ve become a fan of two books by John Meaney, Bone Song and Dark Blood – so I was pretty eager to get what Amazon described as the new book by John Meaney, Black Blood.

I received it yesterday from Amazon, and it turns out that actually Black Blood is the US title for Dark Blood. (Yes, perhaps I should’ve looked on the author’s site – but I didn’t. Mea culpa on that point at least)

I’ve sorted out returning it to Amazon, and they haven’t objected – but all the same, you’d think that there could be some mention of it on the Amazon site, wouldn’t you?

This is the second time I’ve been bitten by this in the last couple of years – the first instance was Richard Morgan’s “Black Man”, which is titled “Thirteen” in the US. Again, no mention of this is made (still) on the Amazon site either.

Personally, I don’t understand the need for re-titling the book, either. I can (kind of) see it for “Black Man”, but that understanding goes out the window when “Dark Blood” is renamed to “Black Blood”.

Kitchen Doors

Posted: Thu 19 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: B&Q, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, House Work | 2 Comments »

You’d think we’d have learned after the last farce with B&Q about kitchen doors, but no – Herself found the ones we liked, and ordered them from Ballsup and Quit. And the delivery was due today…

Oh dear, oh lord, oh what a to-do. I don’t know quite how to break it to you, gentle reader – so brace yourself.

B&Q delivered everything. On time. And it all appears to be correct – even the kitchen worktops. My gob has never been so smacked.

It looks like (in fairness to them) B&Q have sorted themselves out in the intervening time, and now everything is bar-coded, and checked in a hand-held terminal before it comes off the truck. If there’s stuff missing, the terminal won’t let them make the delivery.

It makes the delivery a lot slower – they were sodding about on the truck for a good twenty minutes before anything came off it at all – but it means we’ve got everything, and it’s all ready to go.

So fair’s fair. In this case, B&Q has definitely improved, and upped it’s game. Despite myself, I’m impressed.

New Tyre – How Much?

Posted: Tue 27 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Driving | 2 Comments »

Well, much to Gordon‘s amazement, I’m not going to whinge or complain at all about the cost of the new tyre for the car.

When I replaced both front tyres back in May ’08, I paid out an extra £18 for something that ATS call “MasterService“. That (very roughly) 10% extra on my bill at the time of replacing the tyres just saved me £80odd.

You see, the tyre itself (well, from the remnants of it that were still anywhere near the wheel) still had very little wear at all- as you’d expect on a tyre that’s less than 9 months old- so I got the full 100% discount on a new tyre.

To me, that’s £18 well spent…

Slack Selling

Posted: Sun 25 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Two weeks ago now, one of our neighbours put his house on the market – or at least that’s when we knew about it, when the sale board went up outside. However, one assumes that it’s been with them for a few days before that, while they get the board organised etc.

Now, I’m a bit of a nosy bugger, so I’ve been wondering how much the place is going for. After all, we know what we paid for this place, so it’s interesting to see what the place next door is up for, and all that.

But in that two weeks since the board went up, there’s been no mention of the place on either RightMove or the estate agent’s own site.

It does make you wonder how they expect to sell the damn place, particularly in these times of credit crunch, recession and so on, if they can’t even be bothered to advertise the fucker, doesn’t it?

Reducing DRM

Posted: Wed 7 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Music | 2 Comments »

While I’m nowhere even close to being an Apple® fanboy, I do use iTunes for a significant portion of downloading. (particularly when I also use eMusic, which I believe is now owned by iTunes) As such, I’m pleased to see that they’ve announced that iTunes is going to be DRM-free, with 8 million of its 10 million tracks now available without any DRM, and the rest over the next few months.

DRM is (basically) copy protection – it’s the media industry’s way of saying “You can buy our stuff, but we’ll still tell you how you can – and can’t – use it”. It’s horrifically flawed, and something I’m fairly passionately anti at the best of times.

As a perfect example of this, we’ve both recently bought new Sony MP3 players and wanted to put music bought on iTunes onto them. Only because of DRM, you can’t. Well, you can if you burn an audio CD of the downloaded files, re-import them into [Music player of choice] as MP3s, and then put them on the player, but that’s circumvention of the DRM, and thus naughty. You’re using a file you’ve bought and paid for, but in a way that the music industry doesn’t like. They want you to buy it on iTunes and use it through that, but if you want it to go on another MP3 player, you should buy another copy of the same file that’s authorised for use on your MP3 player. Oh, and you shouldn’t be buying the album on CD and then ripping it to MP3 so you can listen to it on your player either.

It’s the same with other download services (and things like BBC iPlayer etc. too) which have historically been only available through Internet Explorer, so that they can use the Windows Media Player DRM – which is also why so many MP3 players etc. insist on using WMP 11, which has the latest/’greatest’ DRM modules on it.

So to me it’s a sign that perhaps the music studios and media producers are finally beginning to see some sense if they’ll allow iTunes to finally sell music without DRM on it.

Mobile Data Use

Posted: Wed 7 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky | Leave a comment »

It being a month (give or take) since I got the new phone and unlimited mobile data, I got the bill today from O2.

Just in that first month, I’ve used something like 8Mb of online data all told, which would’ve cost me some £3 per Mb or so. (It’s hard to tell for sure, as they’ve changed the tariff to be ‘Up to £1 per day’ instead of ‘£x per Mb’, but I remember it being about £3 per Mb last time I looked)

Either way though, the ‘unlimited’ browsing bolt-on looks like it will be a good plan all round.

Missing the Point

Posted: Tue 6 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Stupidity | 1 Comment »

An email from Canon today :

We are sending you this email because we take our customers’ data seriously and only want to hold your data if you want us to.

You have joined CANON iMAGE GATEWAY and registered ownership of a EOS 20D, but decided not to receive communications from us. We are giving you the opportunity to opt in, which means you will receive regular communications, or to delete your details permanently from our database.

So :

  1. You’re contacting me even though I opted out of being contacted
  2. It now looks like the choice is
    1. Opt in
    2. Get completely deleted

As I’ve never used the Image (Sorry, iMage) Gateway, I think I know which option I’ll be going for…

Clueless

Posted: Tue 6 January, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Agency Idiocy, Customer Services | 1 Comment »

Another in an irregular series of posts about the incompetence of agencies. (And I’ve added a new category for it, so I’ll have a trawl through the archives at some point in order to add a few more to the category)

We’ve been in Norfolk now for more than two years.

So it’s a bit of a surprise (although not entirely unexpected, due to the agency in question being a bunch of twunts) to get an email today detailing a contract in a very junior role doing HTML and CSS. For £10 per hour. In Kent.

In short, no fucking chance. And all it really shows is that this particular agency – I haven’t yet decided whether to name-and-shame, although God knows, it’s tempting – really know fuck-all about the people on their books. (Oh, and don’t update their records at all, despite repeated requests to do so)

Twunts.

Festering Review – The Good

Posted: Tue 30 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Festering Season | Leave a comment »

So yes, the Festering Season.

All told, it actually went OK – the meal we’d booked at Weston Park (one of the local golf clubs) went smoothly and was as good as last year, so they’re still highly recommended. It wasn’t perfect for the children involved – more food than expected, and some of it filed under “What’s that?” – but we’ve spoken to the place, and they’ve said that next time, just let them know what things would actually be eaten/preferred by the children, and they’ll do that with no hassle or worries at all. (And I have to say, I’m impressed with them on that score too – they seem to be pretty unfazed by anything we can throw at them)

The evening at the outlaws went OK too – and amazingly no-one went to sleep – with games and more food, most of which didn’t get eaten (but the majority went on to be used over the next couple of days, rather than just being binned) although it did mean that Hound got a load of the cooked cocktail sausages on the 26th, which she thought was fantastic – all told, she pigged about 30 of the damn things. Still, she doesn’t get treats like that often, so it’s no bad thing.

So as things go, it went. With the bonus of a quiet Boxing Day, not bad at all.

There’s some more thoughts for another time, but that’s the basics of Christmas Day.

Chargeable

Posted: Tue 30 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

How come people who call 999 for stupid reasons like these don’t get charged with wasting police time?

One would hope that having the threat of actually being charged and getting a criminal record for excessive fuckwittery might actually be some kind of incentive to these bell-ends to think before dialling.

Over recent times, I have actually called the police (or emergency services) three times

  1. One was for an accident that we’d just driven past, and that was obviously extremely recent. For that, I used 999
  2. One was to check whether I needed to report an accident involving a deer – I know some car accidents involving animals need reporting, I didn’t know whether deer were one of those. (They’re not). For that, I used the non-emergency number.
  3. The final one was to report the overnight theft of a neighbour’s stone horse-head wall statue things. Neighbour was away, we’d seen/heard nothing ’til the morning. Guess which number I used? Yep – non-emergency again.

I simply can’t imagine calling 999 because a pizza company has put the wrong toppings on my pizza, or to ask about shop opening times. I assume that some people are so self-centred that anything they need to do is “an emergency” so they use an emergency number. Bell-ends, the lot of ’em.

Next Up Against The Wall

Posted: Tue 23 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Thoughts | 4 Comments »

It’s interesting to see today that supposedly Whittards of Chelsea is apparently also close to going into administration. Following on as it does from yesterday’s news where Woolworths announced the full schedule for the closing of all their shops (come Jan 8th, they’ll all be closed) it’s interesting to see which other chains are apparently due up against the wall.

Personally, I’m not really surprised by Woolworth’s demise – I’m more surprised that they’ve hung on as long as they have, to be honest. They’ve tried for a long time the “stock a bit of everything” approach, and in face of competition from other stores (and particularly online stores for CDs, DVDs and games) well, it just really wasn’t a surprise.

For myself, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WHSmiths go the same route as Woolworths during 2009 – again, they’ve got a huge amount of competition from the online stores for the great majority of their business. In fact, the only thing that you can get in WHSmiths that you can’t get online (for the most part) is magazines – and maybe greetings cards. Even most of the newspapers now carry an online version, which takes away yet more “core business”, although I guess there’ll be people who want to read papers “properly” for a while yet.

I wonder which other retailers will go to the wall in the current economic climate?

Out-of-date CV

Posted: Mon 22 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

On Friday, I got an email from an agency I must’ve signed up with once, and who I’d then never heard anything from.

Basically, the email said that “My CV was more than twelve months old on their records, so I really should update it”

It doesn’t appear to have occurred to the agency that actually, if I haven’t been in touch with them for 12 months – and they haven’t contacted me about any positions at all – that maybe that means they’re either

  1. not getting in the types of role that would be suitable for me
  2. not really getting in much business at all
    or
  3. not really all that good at all

I think I might have to send a reply letting them know those things…

Fraudulent

Posted: Sun 7 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Driving, Travel | 1 Comment »

It’s going to be one of those months, obviously.

On coming out of the hotel we stayed in on Friday, one of my car tyres was nearly flat. (7psi , to be exact) I’d only checked and inflated the tyres on Thursday – the same one had been a bit flatter than the others, but not so significantly – so we knew it was a slow puncture.

Reinflated the tyre at the conveniently nearby garage, and went to get a replacement.

In the end, both rear tyres needed replacing – yes, it could be a dodgy upselling trick by the tyre place, but I simply don’t know enough about tyres and wear to make an educated judgement, although I did know they were due for replacing in spring anyway, according to the normal servicing garage.

So I went to pay by credit card. And ended up going through to manual authorisation where the people were asked if I was present, and for loads of details which made it obvious that both a) I was there and b) the card was there. Then they got put on hold, and the twat on the other end never came back.

I’ve just tried calling them about it, and apparently the fraud department shuts at 5pm on a Saturday, and won’t be open again ’til Monday. Now yes, I could have called earlier, but I didn’t – we’ve had other things to do, for one thing. But why can’t they be bothered to call and say “we think this card’s being used fraudulently” ? They did last time something like this happened.

I’ll write more when I know what the fuck is going on with the card. That should be another fun task for Monday…

More Memory

Posted: Wed 3 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Photography, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

The other day, I noticed that Amazon had a 4Gb Compact Flash card for the price of £15.

I’ve been using 2Gb cards for a while, and that’s fine – but sometimes it’s nice to have the extra storage, and at that kind of price I just thought “Ah hell, might as well”.

Of course, for twice the price, I could’ve got a 16Gb card, but I don’t really need that much storage.

In fact, the 4Gb will do me fine, particularly with the two 2Gb cards I’ve also got now.

All the same, I do find it amazing the way the prices for digital storage just keeps on dropping.

Ethical Gifts

Posted: Tue 2 December, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, Customer Services, Festering Season, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Bah, HumbugIn general, if I am going to be buying people gifts come the Festering Season, I’d rather get them something they actually want. Yes, it means it’s not such a surprise, but personally I don’t see the point of buying something that the recipient will find to be utterly useless.

For that, wishlists are bloody great – they keep the surprise, but at least you can list a number of things that you actually want, rather than “Oh, just buy me anything. You know me, you’ll find something“.

Anyway, for those times where people don’t have a wishlist, and do stick to the “Buy me any old thing” ethos, I now tend to buy an ethical gift (Water supply, chickens, etc. to some remote third-world area) rather than buying something useless. And so I thought I’d bung up a quick list of places with ideas I think are great…

  1. World Vision‘s “Must Have Gifts” for projects around the world.
  2. Sponsor A Tree do a number of Trees for Individuals in packs of 5,10, 20 or 30 trees
  3. Slightly more expensive is WaterAid’s shop where you can buy water supplies etc. for projects around the world
  4. In the UK, Garden Organic have the ability to Adopt a Vegetable, where £20 pays for the seed handling, propagation and storage in the Heritage Seed Library. There’s a list of the veg varieties available here.
  5. Still in the UK, you can also support the Cats Protection League or sponsor a dog through Dogs Trust (something Herself does already)

I’m sure there are plenty of others, but these are the ones I tend to support/use. If you know of any other good ones, add them to the comments!

BugHunt

Posted: Thu 27 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been bug-hunting on some code that needs to go live on Monday. It’s a whole new development, and has been done from scratch in less than three weeks, including ecommerce, credit-card payments, the lot.

In short, things here have been fucking frantic.

But the BugHunt was primarily around the credit-card payments, where we decided to test the newly-sent-live payment portal. The test system worked fine, the live system didn’t.

Of course, the first phase is the paranoid “What’ve I fucked up?”.
The second phase is checking everything that I’ve written that deal with the transactions.

And when that’s all been checked both by myself and by someone else who hasn’t seen this project before, and it’s all come back fine, then you start on Phase Three : “It’s some other fucker’s fault”.

And lo, Phase Three was right.

The people providing the payment portal services had – um – not typed in the Merchant Number correctly.

Sometimes I despair. Two days of wasted effort, when I could be doing something much more interesting…

Still, at least it’s all working now.

I’m a Twat

Posted: Wed 26 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Related to the previous post, today firmly established my “I’m a Twat” credentials.

At work we’ve just gone live with a new credit-card payment system, and it’s got problems. So I took screenshots of the complete card authorisation process, to show the payment system developers where it was going wrong.

Yeah, you can see where this is going already, can’t you?

Included in the screenshots was the credit card number, expiry date, security code, the lot.

I’m such a Twat.

Of course, the card’s been cancelled – it’s always fun to make a call-centre operative laugh by saying “My card’s not been lost or stolen, but I’m a complete twat and gave out the details of it, so can I cancel it now please?”

The only good point about it is that at least it wasn’t the bank card I’ve just had replaced, but instead was a card coming to the end of it’s validity period anyway.

Potential Fraud

Posted: Wed 26 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 3 Comments »

While we were in Cambridge over the weekend, we went out for a meal at La Tasca.

When it came time to pay, I handed over my Switch (Sorry, Maestro) card for the transaction. Having keyed in my PIN, the waitress waited by our table for a couple of minutes, then wandered off with the card still in the machine. She came back a couple of minutes later with another card machine, showed me the “transaction cancelled” slip, and asked me to put the transaction through again on the other card reader.

Needless to say, alarm bells went “Rinnnnggggg!” in my brain.

We went through the transaction again, and all went well. And then we left the restaurant.

At which point, I called the bank and cancelled the card completely. I explained why, that I felt it was a dodgy transaction, and while I had no problem with the transaction for the meal bill going through, I didn’t want anything else going through on that card. The lady from the bank agreed that it sounded dodgy, cancelled the card immediately, ordered a new one, and said they’d raise a flag against La Tasca in Cambridge, just in case there were other issues in the future for their other customers. (Whether they will or not, I’ve no idea)

I’m sure that it was just me being extra-paranoid, but at the same time I’d rather be slightly inconvenienced by a few days without a Switch card than by being complacent, thinking I’m just being paranoid and then having to deal with discovering that money had been taken from my bank account by fraudulent transactions.

Demographics and Commercial Radio

Posted: Thu 20 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Interesting piece in the Guardian today about Commercial Radio, and why they should stop whining about Chris Moyles.

I listen to Radio 1 when I’m driving – if I’m not listening to the radio, I’ve got a CD going instead – because I find Radio 2 to be ineffably dull, I’m not into Radio 3, and when driving I find Radio 4 just doesn’t do it for me. So Radio 1 it is. There are certain presenters on there that make me turn it off (as the article says) but for the 45 minutes on the way to and from work, Radio 1 is my station of choice.

As for commercial radio, I just can’t stand it – and again, for exactly the reasons listed in the article. The (station-defined) limited playlists mean there’s no variety, and the constant repetition of banal ads is just awful. In fact, while driving I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything worse than having to listen to commercial radio…

Phone Upgrade – Speedy Delivery

Posted: Wed 19 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic | Leave a comment »

Herself has just phoned me to let me know that the new phone has arrived at home.

That’s 36 hours from being ordered.

I can’t deny it, that impresses me.

NIN Photos

Posted: Wed 19 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Music, Photography | Leave a comment »

One band who have always seemed to grasp the power of t’internet is Nine Inch Nails. I’ve been a fan of theirs right back to the first album (Which I originally had on cassette, to give an example of timescale) so it’s been great to see that they’ve now launched an official photostream on Flickr.

Among the photos are hi-res images of the photos taken for the cover-art of Downward Spiral, which will make an excellent desktop image as well.

In addition, there’s photos from their concerts, and a bundle of other goodies.

Fantastic!

Phone Upgrade

Posted: Tue 18 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic | 3 Comments »

Ye Gods, it’s time already for a phone upgrade.

Personally, I’m happy to stick with O2, so that makes life easier. I was torn between two phones, the Nokia N95 8Gb, and the new Sony-Ericsson C905. The iPhone just doesn’t appeal to me at all, I don’t actually need all the functions that the new HTC Touch Diamond has (plus I don’t want to go back to Windows Mobile) and I can’t stand Blackberry phones. Come to that, I’m no great fan of Nokia either – although as it’s about eight or nine years since I last had one, I suppose that at some point I should give them another go.

The main extra I wanted on a new phone was GPS – and yes, fanboys, I know that the iPhone has GPS too, but I just don’t like it, OK? – as I’ve had a few occasions now where GPS would have come in useful (road diversions, etc.) so it became something that would be useful to have.

Other than that, I really just wanted the “normal” phone functions – decent memory capacity, messaging, phone calls, that kind of thing. I use the camera function on occasion, but it’s not usually a defining factor – although I’ve used the camera more on the current phone, where it’s a 3.2Mp job that is actually pretty good.

So in the end I went with the C905. While I don’t use the camera-phone all that often, I can’t deny that I’m intrigued by an 8Mp camera on a phone. It’s got the GPS I wanted, and the memory card is compatible with the current phone, so that’s extra storage I’ve got already. (it’ll also make it even easier to copy stuff over from Old Phone to New Phone)

It should arrive at home in the next few days, so once that’s happened, I’m sure I’ll write more about it. Now, let’s see what kind of money I can get from Envirofone for the old K800i…

Done Tiling

Posted: Mon 17 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work | Leave a comment »

I forgot to mention it over the weekend, but Herself completed all the tiling and grouting on Friday morning, and we moved our stuff back into the bedroom on Friday evening.

It all looks fantastic, and it’s great to have another job off the list of things to do. Of course, I’m sure it’ll soon be replaced with other stuff.

Next on the list is to sand down and re-varnish/seal the teak parquet flooring in the hallway. When that’s done (probably before the Festering Season is upon us – or at worst, done in early January) then that’ll be pretty much all the major inside jobs completed – with the exception of the kitchen, which we’re currently thinking about, and debating options.

Oh, and we managed to get the tile-cutter for half-price in the end, because of the blunt cutting wheel. In fairness to HSS, when we do have a complaint, they fix it as soon as possible.

Disabled

Posted: Wed 12 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

Travelling to work this morning, I found myself sitting behind a van for a company called GarTec who supply platform lifts for disabled people. (You know, the little boxes you see in offices, so people in wheelchairs – sorry, people with mobility issues – can go between levels)

Only the slogan on the van was

Gartec – Disabled Platform Lifts

And the first thing I wondered was “Why would anyone sell platform lifts that don’t work?“

Washing Machine minus £90

Posted: Mon 3 November, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised | Leave a comment »

When we ordered the washing machine, we paid £440. (OK, that’s rounded up – we paid about 5p under that)

However, when we got home, we did some checking around and found that another place had it for £370, which is a fairly significant difference.

Thankfully, the place we ordered from has a price-match guarantee, so I went in there yesterday with the printouts, and they’ve paid back that difference. Even better, their price promise is that they’ll then undercut the price by £20 – so all told, we’ve managed to get £90 back, and thus will be getting our new washing machine for the princely sum of £350 instead of £440.

Not bad, for an hour’s “work” on t’internet, I think you’ll agree.

Guesstimation

Posted: Mon 27 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related | 1 Comment »

One of my biggest bug-bears in development is having to come up with arbitrary methods of scoring.

For instance, I’ve got to work on an assessment system where there are three levels of skills based on roles, and three skill levels for the relevant tasks. For example, a question such as “I can touch-type” would have three levels, such as “Can’t at all”, “can but not properly” and “Fully qualified touch-typist”, but touch-typing itself would be a skill level of 2 (don’t ask me, I don’t know where the levels came from). Once the tests have been done, I’ve got to come up with some completely arbitrary method of taking the scores from those role-based skill levels, and from the skill level in each role of the user, and saying “User [x] is at skill level [y] and thus needs/doesn’t need extra training”.

But the actual formula for working out the points is being left to me – no-one else can get their head round it, so it’s been left to the techie. And I think I’ve got something that works, and weights things properly in favour of the higher skills, but I don’t really know. Even worse, I suspect we won’t really know whether I’ve got it right until the entire system has been fully tested and used – by which time it will (in theory at least) be far too late to do anything about it.

It’s enough to drive me crackers.

GMT

Posted: Mon 27 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky | Leave a comment »

So – did you remember to put your clocks back?

As always, we’ve changed pretty much all ours now. The heating system only got changed this morning, because I forgot it last night, but other than that I think we’re pretty much sorted.

Mind you, I still think that the best thing when it comes to the time changes are the radio-controlled clocks that tune in to the Time Signal, and just change themselves. That, so far as I’m concerned, is just grand – and it makes me wonder why more things don’t do it. Even “just” the essential services (heating system, for example) would be nice, but having one’s cooker (another prime example) being auto-updated would make life a lot easier…

Service Outcome

Posted: Sun 26 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Driving | 1 Comment »

Good and Bad news from the car’s servicing yesterday…

For the most part, it was absolutely fine. Didn’t even need topping up with oil.

However…
The bad news is that the power-steering pump is well on it’s way to dying – apparently it’s cracked, and is not in a good state. In fairness, I’ve known it’s on the way out, as it’s been getting noisier. Last time it went in for a service (about six/seven months ago) they commented that it was noisy, but couldn’t find the problem. So it’s no surprise that over that time (and some 10-12,000 miles more) it’s got worse, and they can now see what the problem is.

Price for repair? £400 .

So it’s booked in for a couple of week’s time, seeing as the power-steering is pretty important, but I need at least a week for a new insurance certificate to come through for the courtesy car.

But that’s it – and I class the power-steering as wear-and-tear once it’s coming close to the 100,000 miles. These things happen. I’m just pleased that the car and engine all seem to be fit and well, which is no bad thing at all.

Stuart Rose

Posted: Fri 24 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

I know I’ve written about Stuart Rose before, but he’s one of my business heroes, so sod it, I’ll write again.

Don’t know who he is? He’s the Chief Executive (and Chairman) of Marks and Spencer, and has been since about 2004. Any time I’ve seen him interviewed on TV, he’s always come across really well, and most definitely not your standard Chief Exec. He’s someone who believes in the company he works for, and to me that’s fantastic.

This time, he’s in a feature by the Guardian about their clothes, taking the Guardian’s columnist round the shop and showing her clothes, following her comments that M&S didn’t have clothes for women in their 20s.

Now first of all, when did you ever hear about a shop’s Chief Exec acting as a sales assistant to take someone round the store? And particularly one who actually knows his own stock lines and themes? Let alone actually wears clothes from the store?

He insists that he doesn’t expect even loyal customers to dress entirely in M&S, but to select key pieces to team with other clothes and accessories. The suit he is wearing is from M&S – he opens his jacket to prove it – but his shoes are not.

© Guardian newspapers 2008

To me, that’s what a Chief Exec should do. I just think it’s a pity that it’s something Stuart Rose stands out for doing, rather than it being the standard.

Unique IDs

Posted: Fri 24 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Bloody fucking Barclays Bank, their internet banking service, and their unique ‘Membership Number’.

I don’t mind unique reference numbers – I really don’t. But I do wish companies – and today, particularly banks – would make them easier to remember. After all, it’s not rocket-science really.

My main bank, Royal Bank of Scotland use your date-of-birth, followed by a small, memorable unique number. I’ve never yet forgotten it, or had an issue with recalling it. It’s useful to both RBS and the customer. That’s how it should be done. It’s u

Barclays, on the other hand, have a 12 or 16 digit number, which starts off with either 2010 or 2020, and it has no fucking relevance to anything. In short, it’s an ID that is useful to Barclays, but not to the customer. And that’s just frustrating every time you come to need to use it.

In an absolutely ideal world, you let the customer choose their memorable number – it could be date of birth (although that’s easy to find) or something surreal like ‘Numberplate of first car owned’. Check that chosen ID, and if it’s in the system already for whatever reason, add a small number to it. No more than three digits. Simple, and memorable. It’s still unique in your own system (i.e. the bank’s database) so there’s no issues with replication or non-unique-ness, but it’s memorable for the customer too.

Except of course that banks in general still don’t operate on the principle that they should be a convenience for their customers (Note : not a public convenience, although God knows I’d like to piss all over them sometimes), rather than that their customers are there as a convenience to the bank. And I can’t see that concept changing any time soon, unfortunately.

Staying in Business

Posted: Mon 13 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary | 1 Comment »

Sometimes I wonder how some companies stay in business at all. I’ve recently had two perfect examples of this.

1. Three months ago, I ordered something from a bunch of shysters called Urban Junkie. When it hadn’t turned up after a month, I chased them up, and on the third chase-up, finally got a response.

“I have checked your order, unfortunately the item has gone out of stock and is not due back in for a few more weeks. No payment has ben taken and we fully understand if you wish to cancel due to the delay.
Sorry for the inconvenience.”

And that’s been it. Two more months and no word at all.

So I’ve cancelled the order.

2. Back when I was using the bunch of shyster twunts known as Parasol IT (I’ve now had £1800 of tax refunds for two consecutive tax years because of Parasol’s inefficiency – that’s £150 per month for two years that they were fucking up) I also got a stakeholder pension through one of their related companies.

Since leaving Parasol, I’ve told Parasol Financials on no less than four occasions that I’ve left Parasol, and need the details of the pension so I can keep on paying in to it. Last week they called, denied having ever heard from me about leaving Parasol (although that soon changed once I forwarded them copies of the emails, and replies to them) and getting quite snotty.

The snottiness changed when I then asked them to send me details, and asked what address they held for me. And (again despite repeated updates from me to them) the address was still the one in fucking Bracknell. From two years ago. Useless twats.

So yes, needless to say, I think I’ll be pulling the pension out from Parasol Financial’s control ASAP.

Really, you just have to wonder how organisations like these stay in business, don’t you?

Slip of the Tongue

Posted: Sun 12 October, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Work-related | 2 Comments »

I felt by turns amused and sympathetic towards someone I dealt with on the phone this week.

I’d called the phone-banking service (which is usually very good, in contrast to their utterly shit branches) for my bank, RBS, to find out the benefits (or lack thereof) in downgrading my account from their ‘premier’ current account (where I use very few of the services) to their more run-of-the-mill current account that has most of the benefits I actually use, and costs half as much.

I called phone banking because their website doesn’t actually have a ‘compare accounts’ function, and so I figured that the people in phone banking might have more information to hand about this kind of thing.

Only, as it turned out, they don’t. So the poor guy was printing out various screenshots, and trying to compare them. (I only realised this afterwards, or I’d have told him not to worry) However, he’d forgotten to put me on hold, so the amusement came when I heard a bunch of papers go flying, followed by (in a Scottish accent

Och, fer fucks sake, this is crap. Fuckin’ thing

At which I laughed out loud, and he was quite shocked that he hadn’t put me properly on hold. Poor guy – I had no problem with the swearing, but I know that if the call was recorded, he’s going to be deep in the shit. I did make a point of saying in the call that I had absolutely no problem with it, but I know that won’t fix anything with his superiors.

Shortcuts

Posted: Tue 30 September, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

When Firefox 3 came out, one of the things they trumpeted about was the ‘intelligent address bar’. In short, when you typed in a web address, it also checked through your history and bookmarks in order to save time typing – if you’d been there before (in the duration of the history) then the site name would come up.

Until recently, I found this quite annoying – if I wanted a site called (for example) the admin section of one of my sites, and started typing the first two characters of admin, I didn’t want to know that I could also go to D4D’s Add a post page, or Norfolk council’s Adult education page.

But I’m slowly coming round to the function, and seeing where it can be useful – well, so long as you set up the bookmarks correctly in the first place. For example, if I want to look at the news from one of our local papers, I don’t need to remember that it’s at the (fucking stupid) http://new.edp24.co.uk URL, I type in EDP and lo, Firefox has got it there, ready and waiting.

It’s not perfect – but I’m starting to see the use of it. Now if the bookmarks have been titled properly/usefully, I can type in a shortcode that actually works. (And of course I have to remember that, for example, my internet banking is done at RBS, not just by typing in banking, or internet banking – well, until I edit the bookmark, anyway)

Pharmcist vs. GP

Posted: Thu 25 September, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 3 Comments »

Another survey, another news story filed under “No shit, sherlock”.

Today’s gem is that apparently staff in a pharmacy don’t give advice as good as a GP, and gave ‘unsatisfactory’ advice in one-third of the cases. (Which might sound impressive, but let’s not forget that’s only in a sample of 101 pharmacies)

But it’s hardly surprising, is it? At the end of the day, the people selling the drugs in a pharmacy are shop-assistants. That’s it. They’re not health professionals – in fairness, they’re not even health amateurs – and anyone with any common sense wouldn’t treat them as if they were. Asking a pharmacist/ (Edited, as I was wrong to say pharmacists) pharmacy assistant for medical advice (one scenario in this test involved a customer saying they’d had diarrhoea for two weeks since being abroad) is the equivalent of asking a member of staff in Tescos what the best diet is.

As always, if you ask advice from amateurs you should expect to be misinformed. Simple as.

At Long Last

Posted: Sat 20 September, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Domestic | Leave a comment »

We’ve finally received confirmation from Anglian Water that we are now allowed to use our water again.

This farce has only been going on since mid-April.

About fucking time.

Vindication

Posted: Fri 19 September, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic | 1 Comment »

Sometimes (as I’ve said before) you get a customer services call, and you just know that it’s going to be fun. (You may also want to hover over the links to see the full URLs for them. Up to you, of course.)

Today’s example:
“Hello, is that [Lyle]”
“Yes”
“A couple of weeks ago, you called Anglian Water. Do you mind answering a few questions about that?”
[rubs hands in glee]
“Not at all.”
“Ok. Now, what did you call Anglian Water about?”
“I called because Anglian Water had sent me the half-yearly bill for water rates. Considering Anglian Water has insisted that we can’t use their water now for six months, I thought that was taking the piss. So I called the customer services people.”
“Ah. And did the call go through immediately?”
“No. Once we’d gone through the AVR system, the phone rang for a good ten minutes before getting answered.”
“Oh. And was the customer services person helpful?”
“No. In fact, he was so sarcastic, I lodged a complaint about him with his supervisor. Who, in fairness, has been very very good.”
“Ooookkkkkk. So would you say that Anglian Water‘s customer services handled the call well?”
“Well, that depends. If it were any other company, I’d say that their handling of the call was abysmal. But with my experience with Anglian Water, I’d say that this call was about normal.”
“[laughs]. So you’re not a fan, then?”
“Put it this way. I currently think Anglian Water‘s sole purpose on this planet is to give estate agents someone to look down on.”
“OK, thanks”
“You’re not going to put that on the sheet of paper, are you?”
“Oh, I have done. Thanks, you’ve been very entertaining.”

Organisation of the Festering Season

Posted: Wed 3 September, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Festering Season, Getting Organised | 3 Comments »

Bah, Bloody HumbugToday, I’m deeply deeply traumatised. We’re already organised for what’s happening on Christmas Day – and that’s a truly depressing thing to have happened by September 3rd…

It had actually started being discussed on Sunday, and then on Monday we got a brochure from the place we went to last year. A quick email of the menu to other interested parties, and it was agreed that we really should go back – everything had been really good last year, and everyone had come away deciding that it was a really good way to do the Festering Season.

So I called them yesterday, and it’s all booked. Of course, we still have to pay for the bugger, but this way we don’t have any of the late-November “Who’s doing what, where, and when?” discussions and last-minute plan changes as well as all the stress of anyone having to be up at 6am to start off cooking etc.

All the same, it’s pretty depressing to have got this all in place in September. I swear I’m never this organised usually…

Pants

Posted: Thu 28 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

On the BBC today, this story of a man who found his phone banking password had been changed made me laugh.

Pissed off with the twunts at Lloyds TSB, the man changed his password to (a remarkably tame) “Lloyds are pants”. And someone within Lloyds changed it to “no, they’re not”. Even better, he then wasn’t allowed to change it back, and wasn’t allowed to have “Barclays is better”.

“The rules seemed to change, and they told me it had to be one word, so I tried ‘censorship’, but they didn’t like that, and then said it had to be no more than six letters long.”

Now if it were me, at that point I’d have chosen “Fkwitz” and insisted that it was my great-grandmother’s maiden name. But then, I’m malevolent like that.

Also, no-one has yet raised the issue that actually, it looks like Lloyds TSB staff can see your entire password. Which isn’t particularly secure, is it?

Faked Tickets

Posted: Thu 21 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

The BBC today has a piece about how to avoid being stung/scammed when it comes to buying concert tickets, following on from the hassles with non-existent tickets from SOS Masters Ltd over the last couple of weekends.

Really though, the entire thing could be summed up with “Only buy tickets from known sources” – even if that means using fuckwit scumbags like Ticketmaster who’ll charge an extra £5 or so per ticket for posting them to you. (not even in separate envelopes) But at least you get the tickets from them (99% of the time – I’ve had one fuckup with them which never got resolved, but that is a rarity) And yes, my opinion is still that it’s better to be ripped off for £5 per ticket than for the full £150 (or whatever) price of a ticket to Reading or Leeds festival, for example. And at least Ticketmaster et al only sell you the tickets they’ve got.

All the same, stories like this won’t stop people from trying to get tickets to sold-out events through resellers or what amounts to online ticket touts, and some people getting ripped off as a result.

Mind you, if times are hard next spring/summer, I can suddenly see a business opportunity – or at least a way to make some cash…

Gym Thoughts

Posted: Thu 21 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Health | Leave a comment »

All told, the gym we visited last night looks pretty good. Even better, it’s very local.

Even the membership rates seem sensible/affordable – well, so long as you use the place, of course. If you don’t, then it’s money up the wall, same as any other gym.

But on current evidence, yes, it looks like I’ll be joining up.

AVG Updates

Posted: Tue 19 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky | 8 Comments »

For the first time since I installed it, AVG Antivirus is beginning to annoy me.

In general, it’s a fantastic product, and the updates run quickly and easily.

However, for some reason this week every single fucking update is requiring that I restart the laptop. And it’s insisting on it in the middle of a piece of work, which makes it even more fucking annoying.

Hopefully it’ll stop this shit soon, or I’m going to be looking at replacing it.

Visitors and Tracking

Posted: Sun 3 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, D4D™ | Leave a comment »

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t actually looked at the mybloglog stats in ages. Strange really – hits and visitors used to be something that really interested me, but over the last year or so I just haven’t been looking.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I looked on MyBlogLog to see that

  1. It had been bought up by Ya-bleedin’-Hoo
  2. It no longer appeared to be tracking site visitors at all

As a result, I’ve sacked off the MyBlogLog stuff – why not, as it wasn’t doing what I wanted it to anyway – and installed Google Analytics again instead.

It means you might see me blathering a bit about site visitors etc. again before long – but don’t hold your breath.

How not to promote your company

Posted: Fri 1 August, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

Sales email received this morning:

To celibrate 5 years of being on the internet we have decided to offer every regisered customer 10% discount off there next order!

Impressive, three spelling errors in 23 words. That’s a 9% error rate!

Changing Broadband – Part Two

Posted: Thu 24 July, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky | 1 Comment »

According to an email I’ve just received, the broadband at home is now running on Tiscali rather than BT.

Of course, I’m working in Essex today, so won’t know if it’s actually worked until I get home tonight and get it all set up. All the same, fingers crossed that it’s all worked smoothly, so I don’t have to spend time tonight swearing at connections etc.

I’m vaguely optimistic – but at the same time, I’m fully expecting to get home and have no broadband at all. I’m cynical like that.

So we’ll just have to see what works, and whether everything’s set up or not. You may (or, of course, may not) hear more about this tonight, depending on ye olde connectivity.

Something Wrong…

Posted: Thu 10 July, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Driving | 4 Comments »

There’s got to be something wrong with the picture, when you see a BSM Driving School Instructor (In his BSM-logoed car) making a total mess of a roundabout, being in the wrong lane, and then cutting up another driver (to whit, me) in order to get to the correct place.

It does make you wonder how many of that instructor’s pupils fail though…

Mail Down

Posted: Wed 2 July, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Geeky | 2 Comments »

Currently, it’s looking like the mail server for 34sp.com is totally down. [UPDATED : The service was broken on my reseller server, rather than 34sp as a whole. It’s also now fixed.]

I can’t send or receive email at all when using their services/servers, and haven’t been able to since last night.

Calling their support line, it does amuse me that the musical hold I ended up with was the Muppets theme song. Somehow you’ve just got to love a company with that kind of humour.

BT’s Wonderful Anti-Spam Measures

Posted: Tue 1 July, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky | 2 Comments »

I got an email from BT this morning…

Urgent- BT is making some changes to its email service. Emails you send from alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses may be blocked. (Additional comment from me: It’s not just from alternate Yahoo! Mail addresses – it’s anything except your default BT Yahoo email name)

Dear Customer,
We’re upgrading the security of your BT Yahoo! Mail account to help prevent identity fraud and spam.
These enhancements will help protect you from ‘spoofing’ – when people use alternate addresses to disguise an email’s real sender, possibly to commit fraud.

Making the improvements work
For the security improvements to work, we need you to take a few minutes now to verify each of the alternate email addresses you use in BT Yahoo! Mail. This will confirm that these email addresses are genuine. If you don’t verify your alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses, you may get an Error 553 message and have difficulty sending emails.

Please verify addresses now to avoid blocking of your outgoing emails.

Simply follow the step-by-step instructions at www.btyahoo.com/verify. You won’t be asked for any personal information, but you’ll need to log in to your account to make the changes.

We’re committed to helping you get the most from your award-winning BT Yahoo! Mail. The changes we’ve made will help reduce spam on the network and improve your enjoyment of the service. We hope this doesn’t cause any inconvenience and appreciate your co-operation.

Kind regards,

BT Total Broadband team

Please note that this is an automatically generated email for your information only. Unfortunately we cannot respond to ‘replies’ to this address.

Of course, this would have been much more useful if they’d sent it back in March, when they actually did the work, and fucked up my email so badly I had to set up my own SMTP server instead. As it stands, we’re two-plus months down the line, and all this does is make BT look like the bunch of contemptuous customer-hostile fuckwit bastards they truly are.

Even better, I can’t even reply to that email and tell them what tossers they are.

Customer Service as it should never ever be done…

Anti-Spam

Posted: Mon 2 June, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Over the last couple of weeks, I’d started receiving a significant (well, more than previously) amount of spam through the contact form on one of my sites. (the photography one, not that anyone cares)

As a result, I added in a small dollop of anti-spam input on the form – I’ve done this on several forms over the years, and it’s never caused me any problems. It’s probably now only about ten to twenty minutes work (including testing the entire thing) so it’s no hassle – and every time I wonder why I didn’t just put the damn thing in place when I created the original, rather than slamming it in as an afterthought.

In short, I just never remember. And in some cases that’s fine – some forms just never seem to get hit in the first place, whereas others pop up fairly quickly and get hit by spammers. It’s all very odd.

I know I should just put it in with anti-spam by default. It’s just I never remember.

Then again, on one particular form I did for a client, I added in a whole bundle of anti-spam features including the ability to ‘blacklist’ the IP and poster-name/email automatically by clicking on a link in the forwarded message – and that client never makes use of the features. I know for a fact that they get a whole bundle of spam through it – and I do on occasion run through and block a whole load of the IPs for them myself – but it seems equally bizarre for people to not even make use of the tools they’ve been given.

Faster Payments

Posted: Tue 27 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | 3 Comments »

At long last, the banks are introducing a faster payment system for phone and internet banking. I’ve often wondered how they can continue to get away with claiming it takes three days for money to transfer between banks/accounts – and the truth is, they really couldn’t continue to get away with it.

So they’re now gradually phasing in this new Faster Payments Service – which will (eventually) mean that you can do transfers on the same day, rather than waiting three days. Money leaves your account immediately, and is in the recipient bank account later that day.

Initially it’s just being trialled on smaller amounts – I think the average ceiling is about £20 at first – before it ends up going up to the maximum transaction value of £10,000 in a few months time. If you want to check whether your payment recipient can handle faster payments, you can check the sort-code on this site.

I wonder how this will affect the entire BACS and CHAPS system over time? It’ll be nice to be able to have same-day transfers without paying the extra £30+ for a CHAPS payment, that’s for sure.

Ongoing

Posted: Fri 23 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Driving | 3 Comments »

Well, yesterday’s trip to the body shop didn’t go so well.

In fact, from what I could tell, they did fuck all. The Ford garage had to go over and collect the car, in order to get it serviced – and that went fine. They then took it back to the bodyshop (next door) for the work to finish and for me to collect it at half five.

Only when I got there at half five, suddenly it had become a two-day job. I’m not sure how – the guy who gave us the estimate definitely said it would be able to be done in one day, and when I booked it in nothing was said about it being two day’s work – but there it was. Two days, not one.

Oh, I could take it home, and they’d book it in for the work to be finished another day. Only when they got the car out for me to collect, the old bumper and wheel arch were still there, and it certainly looked (to my admittedly non-bodyshop eyes) like absolutely fuck-all had been done. At which point I went slightly orbital. The reason it was in yesterday was so that everything happened before we go off next Friday to Ireland. Also, it meant that the bodyshop hadn’t had to find me a courtesy car for the day, as I’d organised one from the Ford place. They’d done fuck all, and it was now a two-day job instead of one. In short, they were taking the piss.

So the car’s still in the bodyshop, and they’re supposed to be doing the work today. And I’ve been lumbered with a shitty Toyota Yaris as a courtesy car. It’s an utter heap of crap – I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole usually – but there we go, at least it means I’m OK for getting to and from work today. (and, of course, getting home last night)

I’ll be in there again at half five tonight, seeing what they try to over-charge me for this now. Should be fun.

Another Extension

Posted: Thu 8 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

I’ve just had it confirmed that I’ll be staying on with my current contract until the end of the month.

That’s two extensions now – and this three week one is for a completely new project, which is even better. The agency’s ecstatically happy, and I’m pretty pleased too. Considering the initial contract was for 2 weeks and 2 days (i.e. 12 days all told) it’s now been extended for a further seven weeks – and that’s all because they keep finding more stuff for me to do, rather than because of anything negative.

I must be doing something right…

Mains Restored?

Posted: Tue 6 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Health, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

It’s possible that today we will be finally re-allowed to use mains water for drinking and cooking. It’s not certain yet, because they’re doing ‘final’ tests today to decide. (Of course, if we still can’t, it won’t be final tests, but there we go)

We’ve been on bottled water since 17th April.

In that time, we’ve had a dropped off leaflet about why we couldn’t drink the water, and one letter – addressed to the previous occupants, who moved out at least eighteen months ago. And that’s it. It really hasn’t been Anglian Water‘s finest hour (three-and-a-half weeks. Whatever) in terms of customer service.

Any information that’s been acquired has been gained by us calling them. In fact, we wouldn’t know about today’s tests if I hadn’t spoken to Anglian Water‘s customer services people on Friday. And because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us, it would’ve meant that all the access to the back of the house (where there’s an outside tap they could use to test the water) would have been locked, so they couldn’t test our place.

We also took the opportunity to get them to deliver more bottled water to everyone on the road, as on Friday there were two six-packs of bottled water left on the pallet dumped on the roadside a couple of weeks ago. For a bank holiday weekend. As it is, I’ve been dropping off some of those six-packs of water to the older people on the road (and bear in mind that a good 50% of the people on our road are at least sixty) rather than them having to try lugging bloody heavy loads of water back to the house.

All told, it’s been a total farce from start to finish. And once we’re actually back on the mains service I’m going to be having a serious conversation with Anglian Water about why the hell it’s been such a fuckup. That’ll be a fun conversation, for sure.

Parasol and P60s

Posted: Fri 2 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Regular readers may remember that last year I had issues with my P60 disappearing when it was sent out by the incomparable twunts at Parasol, the umbrella company I’ve been using. (And thank God that period is coming to a close)

It’s P60 time again, and at least this year I’ve received it. Which is more miraculous than one would suppose, considering it was posted to:

Lyle
[My House_Name]
[The Street_Name]
[Postcode]

(Obviously I’m not going to give out the address details on here, but you get the idea)

Yep, no town, no county, nothing. Just house name, street name, and postcode. Luckily, that’s all the address data that is really needed – but it’s hardly the best way of getting essential (and non-repeatable) documents to a person, is it? And particularly when I’d gone through all the hoops for making sure my address data was accurate on Parasol’s records. As insisted upon by bloody Parasol!

I called them up to find out why.

“Oh, well, we’ve found out that actually payroll use a different system for the addresses to what’s on our own records, so there have been some problems with people who’ve changed their details. The IT department are looking into it.”
But I reported this problem last year, when Parasol screwed up sending out my P60.
“Well it’s been reported by a lot of people this year now, so we’re looking into it.”

The day I leave them just can’t come soon enough. (9th May, I’m looking at you here)

Spell Cheque

Posted: Fri 2 May, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

I’ve just had an email from an agency (that will remain nameless) describing…

This highly sort-after role

Of course, you know what they mean is sought-after , but that’s the joy of spell-checkers.

Maybe when someone writes a spell-checker that can work semantically from the words around it, and understands phonemes and the like, we might get somewhere closer. Thing is, that’d involve lots of AI, fuzzy logic, and nightmarish rule structures.

Or just, you know, education.

Offensive

Posted: Wed 30 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

The BBC has a piece today about 2007’s most offensive adverts (in this case ‘most offensive’ equals ‘most complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority’).

What I find interesting is that out of the ten cases, in only three and a half (one ad had ‘some complaints upheld’) cases did the complaints actually come to anything. Which is only something like a 37.5% of complaints are upheld.

Mind you, I didn’t think most of the adverts were offensive, so I can understand that, too.

Ah well.

Recruitment

Posted: Tue 29 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | 2 Comments »

Hello, is that Lyle?
Yes.
Hi, It’s [x] from [y] Recruitment. I’ve got this position that I thought you might like, it’s a six month contract that needs a lot of knowledge about PHP development in a LAMP environment, paying around £35 per hour. Would you be interested?
Yes.
OK, I’ll send you forward for it.
OK, no worries.
By the way, is Glasgow an OK location for you?
Um, no, not really. I’m based in Norfolk. It could be done, but it would be difficult…

You’d think that by now agencies would know enough to at least look at locations (and/or discuss them) first, wouldn’t you.

*sigh*

Braille

Posted: Fri 25 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness | 1 Comment »

The other day, I was in a local Sainsbury’s and noticed that the door to the toilets had braille for the toilet signs as well as the normal signography. (I know that’s not the right word, but I just can’t think of what the right word is)

However, the signs were screen-printed onto the door, and thus the braille wasn’t actually raised off the surface of the door at all.

Seen the problem yet? Yeah, me too.

When I pointed it out to the store manager (Yes, I asked to see him) his reaction was

“Oh, well no-one else has complained…”

Water Shortage

Posted: Tue 22 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Health | 7 Comments »

Since last Thursday, we’ve been unable to use our mains water.

About a year ago (apparently) one of the people on our road had an oil delivery, and some amount of oil spilled/leaked into the ground. Since then, Anglian Water have occasionally been testing the water supply there, and the diesel has now leaked into the pipes. (Apparently, in a fit of genius, the blue plastic pipes used for the supply of clean mains water are permeable to diesel oil. Which fucking Mensa member came up with that one, particularly for an area where every house has oil central heating?) Therefore, it’s now contaminated for everyone on our road – which admittedly only runs to about eight houses. We can use it for washing and so on, but we can’t use it for drinking, cooking, giving to animals, etc. etc. In short, it’s unfit for consumption.

So since Thursday, Anglian Water have been keeping on checking the contamination levels, and supplying all the houses on our road with bottled water.

Yesterday (Monday) they confirmed that the entire of the water main for our road is going to need to be replaced, which might happen next week. And even then we can’t go back to using the mains water until it’s been repeatedly tested. And I bet they replace the pipe with another blue-plastic one that the diesel oil will eventually seep into as well.

So with luck, we’ll be back on mains water in a couple of weeks time. And until then, Anglian Water will keep on supplying us with bottled water.

Surely it would’ve made far more sense (financially, practically, and from the perspective of customer services) to replace the pipe with a non-permeable version a year ago when the leak/spillage originally occurred, spend a day or two doing it, and have no further issues, rather than the farce of sending someone out to check it every so often for a year, then have to supply eight houses with bottled water for a fortnight while they finally get round to repairing/replacing it?

AutoGlass

Posted: Tue 15 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving | Leave a comment »

A couple of weeks ago, the windscreen on Herself’s car developed a fairly serious crack. Not in the field of view, thankfully – but still serious enough that she could hear it continuing to crack as she drove. So out came the insurance, and out came AutoGlass to replace the entire screen.

Only when they did it, the replacement screen had a poxy great scratch acrosss the field of view. So it needed another replacement.

That’s been done today. I’ve driven Herself’s car to my workplace, and Autoglass have come here to fix it, under warranty, and thus at no extra charge.

It’s all done – they came an hour ago, and it’s all sorted. And much as the first replacement was a bit of a bodge, I can’t help but be slightly impressed at how smoothly the entire thing’s gone – it could’ve been so much worse.

Parasolisms

Posted: Fri 11 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Yet again, my impression of Parasol has taken a downturn. Which in itself is pretty impressive, because my impression of them wasn’t all that good to start with.

First of all (and this is going back a bit) I’ve always felt that I was getting over-charged, and not coming out each month with as much money as I should’ve been. Parasol have always strenuously denied this, telling me I was getting all the benefits of a professional umbrella company. (Stop laughing, you at the back) However, I recently received a notification from HMCE that in the 2006/7 tax year, I’d overpaid £1800 of tax – in other words, Parasol had screwed things up to the tune of £150 per month. I’m about 95% certain that they’ve done the same thing this year, too.

Wednesday, though, topped it off.

At 3.30, I got an email from them.

With effect from Monday 21st April 2008, your Parasol admin deduction will be revised to £87.95 (from £79.95) per month. This small increase has been introduced to allow us to continue to provide our unrivalled and market leading services along with improvements to insurance cover.

At 3.45 I got another email from them.

With effect from Monday 21st April 2008, your Parasol admin deduction will be revised to £95.50 per month. This small increase has been introduced to allow us to continue to provide our unrivalled and market leading services along with improvements to insurance cover.

Not bad – a 20% price increase in less than 30 minutes.

There was another communique at about 5pm effectively saying “Ooops, the first one was the correct price” – but all the same, it’s not exactly the most impressive way of doing things, is it?

Thank Christ I’ll be leaving them in a couple of weeks, once the business bank account is set up. Simply changing to letting the accountant do my payroll instead of Parasol is going to save me something like £50 per month. That’s proper money, that is.

Ferndale Lodge

Posted: Tue 8 April, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

Just under a month ago, I ordered a couple of things from Ferndale Lodge for Herself’s birthday, which should’ve arrived in plenty of time.

Except, of course, one thing didn’t. One delivery came nice and quickly, all sorted – and on the delivery note it said that the other item had been “despatched seperately”. OK, still two weeks before Herself’s birthday, so it should still get here.

Except, of course, it didn’t. Two weeks passed, and nothing arrived.

I emailed Ferndale Lodge on Friday, expecting some kind of response so I could know what was going on. Nothing.

Having given them a fair crack of the whip at answering, I called them today and (eventually) got through. Turns out they were out of stock of this particular item, and just couldn’t be arsed to tell their customers. Their systems don’t integrate with the website, so if it’s out of stock, you can still order it, and they’ll just send it out when they get more stock.

Now it’s fair enough to put things on back-order, I don’t mind that. But all the same, it would also still be nice if Ferndale Lodge at least considered letting their customers know that, rather than just annoying them by ignoring the problem and hoping it’ll go away.

Supposedly, everything will now be delivered by the weekend.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

Not Yet

Posted: Tue 25 March, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky | 1 Comment »

Well, having done some major fucking about this evening (And Yes, that is the technical term) we can now send emails from home again.

In the end I’ve set up an SMTP server on one of my hosted sites, and we’re using that rather than screwing around with BT. So we can send email – in addition to the absolute fuck-up BT have made with blocking the emails themselves (and not telling anyone about it) they’ve also changed their perspective on using an external SMTP server. (Up ’til the 12th, I had to send all email via BT’s own mail server – now they’ve fucked about with everything, I can send mail with an external mail server – and of course they didn’t tell anyone that either!)

So for now I’m not going to swap suppliers just yet – probably. The contract is up in June (The anniversary of when we moved in – although they initially told me it was a three-month contract and then I could leave any time, so I detect the possibility/probability of another call to their customer ‘services’ – and of course they’ve broken the contract anyway, with their failure to sort out emails at all) so we’ll be moving supplier in June without a doubt.

At least this way I get to do some more research on which supplier is the best one to replace the smeghead shyster twatbags at BT.

Changing Broadband

Posted: Tue 25 March, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky | 9 Comments »

Since March 12th, I haven’t been able to send email from home. BT Broadband have an issue with SMTP servers, and still can’t actually tell me when it’s going to be fixed. (Supposedly it ‘might’ be in the next 24-48 hours, but they can’t guarantee it, and can’t really say what the problem is either.)

So I’m going to be looking at changing my broadband provider. Currently we’re considering either Tiscali or Sky (as we use them for TV service anyway) as the best options for the area. Of course, first I need to get an MAC code from BT Broadband so I can move easily, and tell them where to shove their ‘service’.

Mind you, it does mean it’s likely to cost me less, which is a bonus.

Dental Plans

Posted: Sat 15 March, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Getting Organised, Health | Leave a comment »

Once we come back from our week away, there are a couple of things I need to get sorted. Nothing urgent, but still, needs to be done I think.

First among those is a visit to the dentist. It’s been a fair while since I last went (Probably coming up for two years ago now, if not three – UPDATED : Ah, a quick check tells me it was May 2005.) so I know that the odds are I’ll need some work doing again.

Which makes me think that it’s probably worth organising getting some dental insurance first, so I’m not massively out of pocket when it comes to getting the work done. I wonder what the insurers think if you buy the insurance, then a couple of months later get a load of work done…

MOT – All Passed

Posted: Fri 7 March, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Driving, Travel | Leave a comment »

So yes, the car passed it’s MOT with flying colours – it didn’t need a thing doing to it.

Needless to say, after a year of being thrashed around motorways and dual carriageways, covering about 20,000 miles, and with the prospect of a long drive up to the Lake District in a weeks time, I’m really rather pleased about that.

I know I’ll need some new tyres for it before long, but for now at least they’ve passed the MOT, so *shrug*. We’ll see. Still, now I know it’s not an urgent requirement (bearing in mind that long drive in a week’s time) which is another relief – I wasn’t sure quite when I was going to get time to do it…

Waiting

Posted: Wed 27 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work | Leave a comment »

One of the things most guaranteed to drive me crackers (other than the animals in the house, obviously) is when people say they’ll arrive at a certain time, and then not doing so. Particularly when we’re bloody well paying them to be here.

The current plumber is a case in point.

While the work he does is actually bloody good, saying “I’ll be there by 9am” and still not being here (currently) an hour later really fucking annoys me. And fair enough, he’ll probably stay later than 5pm too, but still – I’ve got stuff that I need to go out and do today, and if I’d know he wasn’t going to be here ’til 10am, I’d have gone and done that before he got here.

I suppose I should know all this by now – it was the same last week as well – but all the same, it’s bloody annoying, to say the least.

MOT

Posted: Wed 27 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Driving, Getting Organised | 1 Comment »

Ah, another milestone. It’s coming up for a year now since I bought the car – and that means it’s time for the first MOT test. OK, it’s the car’s second MOT, but it’s the first one I’ve had to arrange, as the place I bought the car from organised the previous one.

I’m really not sure what it’ll entail – I’m pretty sure that the car will be fine, and it’ll hopefully pass the test with flying colours.

Still, it’s all booked now for Monday, so we’ll just have to wait and see how it does.

0844

Posted: Sat 23 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

While most people are familiar with the 0845 “local call” numbers, there’s now a new number in the same range, and this one is 0844, which (if you didn’t know already) is charged at 5p per minute .

For me the 0844 number is kind of weird, as it’s also the phone code for the area I grew up in. So at the moment I still think “Oh, they’re close to where I grew up” when I see a company advertising an 0844 number.

And yes, I know, it hasn’t been 0844 for a long time now – but I wonder whether the residents of that area will start complaining when idiots dial 01844 instead of 0844 , and get a number that already exists…

Diversions

Posted: Wed 20 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, Customer Services, Domestic | Leave a comment »

When we moved in here, we had a BT line installed, along with (another) new number. Really the BT line is only for broadband access, as we never really use the landline for calls or anything. As such, the phone itself has kind of disappeared, hidden away in a corner and rarely looked at at all. In addition, Hound turns into a stresshead when that phone beeps – which it does whenever you put it back on the base station – and the ring-tone volume is set to bare-minimum for a similar reason.

Over the last couple of weeks though, we’ve had builders and plumbers (and a couple of other nameless companies) trying to use that number. No idea why, as we always tell people that we don’t use the home number for anything, but there we go. It’s meant a couple of missed important calls, and it’s been a pain in the tits, to be honest.

So I’ve just sorted out with BT for Call Diversion to be put on the landline phone. It’s taken four calls, including two where the menu system just became unintelligible, and one where I spoke to someone who said that it’d been done, and didn’t do it. Still, I finally got it sorted. Now, any calls that come through to the house phone will just come over to my mobile, which should be useful. The only downside is that I’ll be paying for the call between landline and mobile, but thankfully it’s used so infrequently that I’m really not going to worry too much. It does mean that I/we shouldn’t miss those calls any more though. (In fact it means I’m probably going to take that phone out completely, which will also negate the entire “Hound being a pain in the tits” scenario for this device too)

Valentine’s

Posted: Thu 14 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

Another year, another February 14th. Another dollop of crap overpriced cards, flowers, and blah blah.

And another year with the title bar image of Al Capone’s Valentine’s Day Massacre. My kind of Feb 14 celebration.

VD

Posted: Fri 8 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

So, Valentine’s Day is next week. Great. As regular readers will know, I couldn’t give a tin dog’s dick about Valentine’s Day, and I turn into a right grumpy old bastard. (Yes, even more of one than usual)

However, it’s good to know that I’m not the only cynic on the block, and as usual Meg has released her fantastic Anti-Valentine’s Cards on the world.

Bollocks to Valentines Day

Fantastic, as ever.

Tax System

Posted: Fri 1 February, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Getting Organised, Own Business, Work-related | 4 Comments »

When I said a few weeks back that I’d submitted by tax return by post, recorded delivery so that I knew it’d got there, a ouple of people wondered why I didn’t use the online sstem for submitting it.

There’s a number of reasons for it, although this story on the BBC about it having crashed wasn’t in that list ’til today.

Mainly, I like cast-iron proof that it’s been received by HMCE. I’ve been bitten before by “Well, just because you submitted it online doesn’t mean we received it”, and also by “If we send something out to you, we assume you’ve received it – but that doesn’t work the same way when you send something to us”. In my experience, the cunts at HMCE will lose tax returns just for fun. I don’t know what systems they’ve got there, but it’s all too easy for them to lose information. I prefer to make sure they at least have to lose hard-copy, rather than something that can be killed by just the click of a mouse. Yeah, I’m cynical – but then, I’ve been on the receiving end of some seriously shit service at the hands of HMCE, so it’s understandable.

Secondly, I just don’t trust a system that’s a) been written by shyster motherfuckers like Capita and EDS (and that is renowned for being a sack of shit) and b) that’s not secure enough for royalty, MPs or celebrities. Oh, it’s secure enough for Joe Public of course – just not for special people. So no, I don’t trust the system at all.

Hell, the system isn’t even stable enough to handle the load when lots of people submit their forms just in time for the deadline.

So I’ll stick with submitting my forms by post, thanks. I might let the accountant do it online – so lng as I get a full hard-copy of it as well, for my records and verificatiion.

Overtaxed

Posted: Thu 31 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Own Business, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Having filled in my Tax Return a few weeks back, I got a letter from HMCE this morning. Happily, it’s initial proof that I was right in a couple of assumptions/beliefs.

I bloody knew that Parasol were costing me too much money, and that I wasn’t getting paid the correct amount. I’d asked them about it several times, but they insisted I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that of course they were correct in what they were doing.

The initial letter from the taxman confirms I was right – I’ve overpaid nearly £2,000 in the 2006/7 tax year. I don’t know yet how they’re going to plan on paying it back, but I’m looking forward to the day it happens.

Mind you, I’d rather have received that missing £150 per month, rather than paying it to the fucking Inland Revenue for them to pay it back to me without any interest accruing on it…

Luck of the Devil

Posted: Fri 25 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Weirdness, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Today, I’ve had to park on the road outside the office, there being no available parking spaces on their forecourt. Not an uncommon occurrence- but the road is all parking-meter type things, where the maximum duration is two hours. A bit of a pain in the tits, but I just set the alarm on my mobile for five minutes before the ticket is due to expire, go down, renew the ticket, job done.

Only of course today I haven’t got the phone with me.

The parking charges start at 9am (which is another good reason for coming in early – if I get in at 7.30 or so, I get 3½hours parking in the morning for my £1.20, rather than the standard 2 hours for the same amount) so the first reminder is at 11am.

With no reminder, I just looked at the clock on my PC and thought “Oooohh, tits” , as it was 11.35. Yep, I’m so going to have a parking ticket. Bugger. Working two days a week it’s actually more economical to drive in, even including the petrol and parking costs, than getting the train. Except when I get a parking ticket. Then all economy goes out the window.

But I get down to the car and lo, no parking ticket. More than half-an-hour over my limit, and nothing. I really don’t know how I’ve managed that, but I’m not going to complain!

Of course, now I’ll go down at 13.40 (the ticket expiring at 13.35) and I’ll have a ticket…

Missing Tech – Again

Posted: Fri 25 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Work-related | Leave a comment »

This morning, due to being even more of a twonk than usual (Fridays at the moment are a total killer for me – I’ve spent three days waking up at normal times and working from home, followed by a 5.30am wakeup on a Friday. Blech.) I’ve left my phone at home.

Work being work, they’ve also blocked my ability to send a text message to my phone from the O2 site, which is even more annoying. Grrrr.

Still, I’m sure I’ll find some service or other that can do what I want…

Turkey Out

Posted: Wed 16 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, Customer Services, Cynicism, Health | Leave a comment »

OK, so it doesn’t have quite the same ring as Chicken Out!, but apparently Bernard Matthews has decided to make more of their turkeys free-range, mainly in light of the public reaction to documentaries (talked about before on here) by Hugh Fearnley-Bellend et al.

Of course, if the birds had been free-range he might not have been hit quite so hard by the bird flu scare at one of the Bernard Matthews farms back in February 2007. But that’d just be me being cynical, of course.

Second Opinions

Posted: Tue 15 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

So, today I’m off to see a second (and hopefully final) accountant. This one’s come with a recommendation, so it’ll be interesting to see what they’re like.

By lunchtime today I should have costs for both of them, and can balance that against the cost of continuing to use Parasol. So far, I have to say, Parasol is a poor second out of two options – and I suspect is going to come in a very poor last in the great scheme of things.

There’s a lot I could say about Parasol , but none of it would be in any way nice – and it’d make for deathly dull reading on here, so I doubt I’ll bother. Maybe one day I will, but for the moment I’m just going to leave it at “Shysters”, and “More hassle than benefits”. I think that’s fair comment.

So yes, I think it’s likely I’ll end up going back to having my own company and using an accountant to manage the bills, payroll, and paperwork. Now I’ve just got to decide which one I’m going to use, and/or whether I need to see another one.

Troubleshooter

Posted: Fri 11 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, News, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

So, RIP Sir John Harvey-Jones.

Troubleshooter was, for me, one of those formative “Oh, I like that idea” programmes, and I still (quietly) harbour ambitions of being able at some point in my life to be able to go in to failing businesses and tell them how to fix the problems. (Ideally without just saying “Sack all your directors and managers, and get in people who’re vaguely competent”) Whether it will ever happen or not I don’t know, but well, it’s a quiet dream/ambition. Maybe one day.

Business, Accountants, and 2008

Posted: Tue 8 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

This morning I went off to see an accountant. I’m considering going back to having my own limited company again (in the name of the business, for obvious reasons) and being far more in control of things. There’ve been a few negative experiences in 2007 with the umbrella company I’ve been using, and it seems to be time to take the next step and go back to having my own limited company.

The difference this time though is that I intend to run it all through an accountant, for the simple reason that I don’t want all the paperwork hassles. It seems like a good option to get an accountant to handle the tax paperwork, companies house bureaucracy, and self-assessment tax forms – and not least to make sure that it’s all done right, so that I don’t have to worry about it.

I’m not doing this because I want to try and avoid paying tax or anything – I’m doing it because I want to make sure I do pay the right amount (allbeit paying less than the 40% level) and not leave myself open to IR35, or to nastiness from tax audits and the like.

The visit went well, and I got some good information out of it. I’m going to sound out at least one more accountant as well, just or comparison purposes -there’s no sense in just going with the first person you talk to, after all. But from the information today well, it’s going to make sense to go this route – it’ll save me a whole bundle on tax, but also it looks (by my rough maths) like it’ll also work out cheaper on a monthly basis than the umbrella company has.

And that’s not taking into account the £*cough* they cost me on a disputed invoice too…

Redesign

Posted: Mon 7 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

No, not here.

I noticed the other day though that my bank had decided to arbitrarily redesign their online banking log-on area, so that it looked very different from how it used to, yet they hadn’t said anything about it.

Now, when everyone’s banging on about identity theft and phishing scams that direct you to copies of banking sites etc. and get you to add in all your normal log-in details, don’t you think it would’ve been smart to actually let their customers know that they were redesigning it, rather than just doing it and pushing it out to the world? Particularly in the week before Christmas, when customers are likely to

  1. be using the site more often
  2. be rather more sensitive than usual to the risk of losing their details/money to some phishing scumbag scammer?

I spoke to their customer services department about it – partly because I wanted to verify I wasn’t falling to some DNS-redirection hack or whatever, but mainly because it just struck me as such a monumentally fucking stupid thing to do – and their response was

Oh yes, I suppose we should’ve done that, shouldn’t we? Oh well, too late now.

Admittedly, I’m paraphrasing slightly – but not by much. The first sentence is verbatim, the second is paraphrased.

Tipless

Posted: Mon 24 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic | 1 Comment »

The BBC has a story about bin-men complaining because they’re not getting tips this year, and in some places they’re getting abuse instead.

Now, I don’t actually believe in giving them grief – any policies that are in place about bin collection etc. aren’t really going to be rectified by having a go at the binmen, but instead by complaining (repeatedly) to the local authority – but I can give you one reason they’re not getting tips.

It’s because they do a lot less than they ever used to. Now it’s the householder’s responsibility to take the bins to the front of the house (top of the drive, whatever) in time for the bin-men to come, and then to take it back down the drive to its proper place afterwards. You’ve got to make sure that any extra rubbish is put in the “proper” bags (not that we ever have any extra rubbish, but other people do) or they won’t collect it, and will instead leave it sat by the (now empty) bin.

So all the bin-men actually do is load the wheelie-bins onto the back of the wagon, push a button, and then unload the bins again. And they want a fucking tip for that as well?

Perhaps if the bin-men did something extra – say, even for “just” the pensioners and infirm – to take the bins from their place up to the lorry, and then put them back – like they used to do- then they might get a bit more gratitude and respect. And maybe even some tips.

Google Mini

Posted: Mon 17 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Ah, a day of fixing problems – first with a localhost IIS setting that’d been screwed up by someone installing a piece of software ‘to connect with their home PC from work’, and secondly with an install of Google Mini.

Joy.

Still, it’s keeping me out of trouble, I suppose.

All quiet on the home front

Posted: Tue 11 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, D4D™, Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

A day at home today – working on a client website and visiting said client with a progress and “future stuff” meeting, which was very promising. Always a good way to spend the day.

In amidst that little lot, I’ve also bought some extra bits we needed for decorating the hallway (a whole separate post, which I promised a couple of days ago and still haven’t got round to doing) and ordering a new desk for when we sort out the bedroom/office stuff. (probably either between Christmas and New Year, or early in ’08) And yes, there’s another incredulous post about customer services that’s coming up, thanks to the desk ordering process. Still, that’s for later, or another day.

Oh, and we’ve also completed the painting of the hallway, so that’s another job off the list. Yay, go us.

But because of all that, it means that things chez D4D™ are quiet today. Normal service will probably be resumed tomorrow.

Delivery Times

Posted: Fri 7 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Festering Season | 3 Comments »

Bah, HumbugRecently, I’ve had the fortune (or, in some cases, misfortune) to do a bundle of different purchases (No, not for the Festering Season™, but for birthdays, myself, and all that guff) and it still amazes me the difference in order processes- and in particular the delivery processes.

About a month back, I used DrinkOn.com for some wine, to be delivered elsewhere. The order process was really nice, dead easy – but wow did the delivery side let them down. They used a bunch of couriers called APC, who are (in my opinion) nothing short of shit. The first attempt at the order ended up with three bottles out of six broken. We complained, and DrinkOn sent out another order – which did get delivered OK, but all told it still took nearly three weeks to get it right.

Last Monday, I ordered two things from Amazon for my mum’s birthday, which (as it turned out) came from two different suppliers. One was despatched the same day, and got to my mum’s place the day after. The other one – ordered (and supposedly despatched) at the same time – finally arrived there today.

Then yesterday afternoon I ordered an OWL Wireless Electricity Monitor for us. And it arrived today – less than 24 hours after ordering it.

Now that is impressive.

B&Q Fuckwitticus Commentiara

Posted: Sun 2 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, B&Q, Customer Services | 5 Comments »

Last night, I got another comment on one of my B&Q posts, obviously by someone who doesn’t really understand the entire concept of “read the post, then comment on it”.

This time the comment was

this place is full of shit! did your mum and daddy not teach you fucking manners? try being in our shoes for a day then you’ll know.

Which, considering it was related to the post where I was very polite to the fuckwit chimp “manager” when we were trying to get a sample tile in order to buy 125m² of them. (And yeah, B&Q did lose the sale because of the attitude, but I was still polite to the cretin)

Still, it all adds to the amusement, I guess.

BBC Good Food Show – Birmingham NEC

Posted: Sat 1 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Travel | Leave a comment »

Yesterday we went to the Good Food Show at the NEC, despite me feeling like someone had buried me, resurrected me, added some voodoo, and left me as a shambling revenant version of my normal self.

We’ve been a couple of times before, so we know that the show is a good one, and that didn’t change this time round.

Personally, I still find that the shows are too busy, and/or that the aisles are too narrow – you can’t afford to have massive traffic jams around whole bundles of stalls/stands where they’re either giving loads of stuff away or doing endless demonstrations. It’s not like the NEC hasn’t got the room to handle some extra space between stands either – to me it just shows a complete lack of understanding when it comes to customer flows and so on.

Anyway, that’s a bugbear I have with most trade shows and their ilk, so it’s nothing related to just the Good Food Show.

We did do pretty well this time though – got some supplies from our favourite places (Snowdonia Cheese Company and Lime Tree Pantry, I’m looking at you in particular) along with decent discount packs from a few other places, and generally had a really good time.

The Good Food Show is something that (in my opinion) is always worth going to. It’s not cheap – somewhere around £17 per ticket for the basic entry – but it’s worth going. Well, so long as you’re into food, anyway.

Shortages

Posted: Thu 15 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness | 4 Comments »

How on earth does a decent-sized “one-stop shop” run out of Coke? (As in Coca-Cola®, not coal or dodgy white powder from Columbia) Even more relevantly, how do two similar shops run out of Coke?

That’s what happened this morning – I went in to the normal place to pick up a couple of bottles, and nothing. No Coke, diet coke, coke zero, or even the diet stuff with lime. Plenty of Cherry coke, but that’s because it’s disgusting, and no fucker ever buys it.

So I nipped over the road to the other place. Same story.

How? The mind boggles.

Renewal of Mail Redirection

Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, D4D™, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

Over the weekend, I got the usual letter from Royal Mail about continuing my mail redirection from Attleborough to the new house. Now, I know that the process is a simple one – albeit one that seems to cause a lot of people problems. D4D™ comes up second (at the moment) if you type the renewal address (www.royalmail.com/renewal) into your google search window, rather than into the address bar in a web browser.

And lo, once I’d typed in the address in the correct place, all went smoothly. Most of my mail is already coming to the correct place, so it’s not a big hassle anyway, but I’ve renewed for another three months just to make sure. It took about five minutes all told, which isn’t bad at all – and is certainly better than taking a week to process…

Well Timed

Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel | Leave a comment »

Oh, well done, One Railways. On the first sub-zero day, with frost all over the place, let’s use a train at 7am where not only is the heating off, but the air-conditioning throughout the train is jammed on.

I swear, it was colder inside the train than it was on the platform at Cambridge.

I’ll write more when my fingers have thawed…

Windscreen Wipers

Posted: Sun 11 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic | 2 Comments »

As many have observed before, when it comes to technical/practical stuff, I’m a complete numpty.

This weekend’s case in point came with the car, and replacing the windscreen wipers on it. Or not.

I’ve known for a while that the wipers needed changing – they weren’t clearing the screen properly, and the one on the rear screen was flapping at the end. I bought the wipers last weekend, and didn’t get round to putting them on. In some ways that turned out to be a good thing.

Anyway, once I’d got down to Oxfordshire yesterday I decided to change the wipers before going down to London, and made (to be blunt) a right bollocks of it. Still don’t know how, but I just couldn’t get the new blades to go on correctly, despite having made note of how they went on.

In fact, in the end I went to the local Ford garage, and asked them to do it. They took about 30 seconds to fit them, and probably sniggered behind their hands at my incompetence. But I don’t care – I’ve never had an issue with the fact I’m a numpty, nor with admitting that to people who do know what they’re doing in their own area of knowledge/expertise.

So yes, I’m still a complete technical/practical twonk, but at least I’ve now got fresh windscreen wipers, regardless of how they got put on. Oh, and I’ve still no idea how they actually did it!

Current Data

Posted: Fri 2 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

I’ve just had a call from an electricity board, wanting to know if I had an account with them. Turns out that I do, in Norfolk – they’re the ones we currently use.

However, this call was based on my address in – um – Manchester. Not even the last address in Manchester, but the previous one. Which makes the data, to my reckoning, at least four years out of date. Nice to know that these records are kept current (pardon the pun) isn’t it?

Or maybe it’s just time for me to change my mobile number. I’ve obviously had that at least as long.

Business Banking

Posted: Thu 1 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related | 2 Comments »

Many moons ago, I opened a business account for the limited company I had at the time, and it all turned into an utter nightmare. The problems primarily spouted from the fact that my personal current account suddenly came under the control and “management” of the business banking people, which led to huge screwups all round. I finally closed that account back in ’05 after roughly two years of absolute hell.

Anyway, with that experience in mind, I’ve so far avoided getting a bank account for my wee business. But it’s coming to the point where I need to, so I’ve been doing some checking around, looking at fees, costs, and all that malarkey. It’s duller than shit, of course, but still stuff that needs doing.

Of course, based on my previous experience, I’m avoiding RBS like the plague because I still do my personal banking with them. So one of my primary requirements – if not essentials – for any business banking account is to make sure that the relevant bank doesn’t then insist that I have to have my personal banking with the same bank. Even if I had wanted to stay with RBS, that requirement would kill their chances.

I’m still looking around the various tosspots members of the banking community, but so far HSBC are looking like a good candidate. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d find myself saying.

Business Redesign – About Me

Posted: Tue 23 October, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related, Writing | Leave a comment »

With the redesigned business site, one of the things I seriously need to update is the entire “About Me/About The Business” page. It’s never been great, but now needs to contain a lot more information than previously.

The thing is, believe it or not, I’m utterly crap at writing that kind of thing. I don’t like writing self-promoting and self-publicising stuff, although I know it’s a necessary evil in the context of having a business. Freelance Switch had a piece about this kind of problem with a couple of ideas I might try out as well.

Then again, maybe I should just write it as though it were a blog post, and that might come up with something workable.

Legalities

Posted: Mon 22 October, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

I haven’t written a great deal about this yet (and there’s still a big ranty post in the offing about it) but it’s finally beginning to look like I might get paid for some of the work I did back near when we moved into the new house.

It’s been an absolute nightmare, but basically the client got the work I’d done, declared it OK, then when the invoice was sent out by the umbrella company that I use, refused to pay it. All of a sudden, despite a number of emails saying “that’s fine, send the invoice, we’ll pay it” (which, thankfully, I’d kept) the work became unacceptable, and they were disputing paying anything at all.

The umbrella company haven’t been great in this either – despite me being the person paying for their so-called “service”, I’ve been the one having to chase this every inch of the way. Yes, there’ll be a solid letter going to them once we’re all done, believe me. It’s taken a lot of calls to get things done, but I’ve now been told that they’re actually (finally) taking the guy to court to get him to pay up. Hey, it’s only taken five months so far.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens now. I still have a vague suspicion that this isn’t all done yet, and that things are still going to be a pain, but at least I’ve now got the support of the umbrella company, and they’re doing something about it.

I’m not going to go into details at the moment for obvious reasons, but at least things finally seem to be progressing. When I got the contract, this client wasn’t overly happy at going through the umbrella company for the work, but I’m glad in this instance that I stuck to my guns – otherwise it would’ve been even more of a nightmare, I suspect.

Car Servicing

Posted: Thu 18 October, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness | 1 Comment »

The other day, I had to take the car into the garage for a couple of things – nothing massive, just a replacement headlight bulb, and a check into some squealy noises in the power-steering.

In the end, the car was in the garage all day, as I was at work. They did the bulb, checked for the intermittent noise, and looked at some other stuff.

When I went in to the garage to collect the car and pay the bill, I was fully expecting a bill for £80-£100, what with time, materials and the like. My estimate of what the bill would be was hugely wrong – awesomely, impressively wrong.

The bill actually came to – are you sitting down? – 95p. Needless to say, I didn’t bother paying it by credit card…

Let the train take the strain

Posted: Tue 9 October, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel | Leave a comment »

I saw yesterday in the news that apparently the route I use to get to work is a huge success, with 35% more passengers on it per year than originally predicted. Which is great in a number of ways – although not so great in a number of others.

Last year saw the route take 670,000 passengers, which isn’t bad for a fairly rural/provincial service.

But, if the route is so successful, and (if you average out the costs of travel at £10 per passenger – which I reckon is probably a conservative estimate) has already repaid the original investment would it be too much to ask to have trains of three or even four carriages, rather than the current standing-room-only rigid-in-peaktime trains of only two carriages? It’s not like the platforms can only cope with two carriages, and it would probably persuade a lot more people to use the service on a regular basis.

As it is, the service is OK – depending on when and where you get on the train. In the mornings, I’m lucky now to get a free table, although on the way back it’s not to bad (for me, anyway) as I get on the train as soon as it pulls in, rather than trying to jam myself in at the last possible second. But for many people that’s how they see the peak-time service – as one equivalent to a commuter train to London, jam-packed and standing room only.

If One Trains repaid some of the customer/passenger investment by adding an extra carriage or two, the service would be just as well used – and probably more so – but with a considerable lessening in the number of customer complaints.

You’d think that would make sense, wouldn’t you?

Migrating Databases

Posted: Mon 8 October, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Own Business, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Currently, for various reasons, I seem to be heavily involved in moving databases around. Not just the data, but the databases themselves. If you’re at all geeky, it’s kind of interesting, seeing how other people organise data as opposed to how I prefer to do it, and looking at the future-proofing of such data. If you’re not geeky then don’t read any further, you’ll just get bored. There’ll be something else along later for you, I’m sure.

In one case, the client is moving from an on-line service provider to an in-house solution that’ll be written solely by Yours Truly. In a lot of ways it’s a complete nightmare – the provider will only export the data in one format, an Excel spreadsheet. That then has to be converted to something that’ll work with SQL, then get tweaked so it’ll work without crashing on import to MySQL, and that’s just to get it into a “temporary” table before I do a whole bundle of conversions on the data in order to get it all to work in the way I want it to.

In the other main scenario (there are a couple of other smaller jobs too, but two main jobs at the moment) I’m going the other way – from an existing in-house database (on MS Access) to a much more stable, versatile, and extensible on-line version with nice web front-end and a bundle more functionality. Again, it’s producing some interesting challenges- not least that Access really doesn’t like exporting to anything. Ever.

All the same though, both jobs are interesting and (dare I say it) fun. They’re making me think (hard) and come up with solutions to problems, which is actually always something I enjoy. Once I’ve got the current data migrated over, then I get to do a load of other stuff with it in order to fit it all in with the plans/ideas that’re already present, and that again will be something I enjoy.

Yes, I truly am that sad. Worrying, isn’t it?

CAPI_Worker module

Posted: Fri 28 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Getting Organised | 18 Comments »

A while back, I upgraded my phone to the Sony Ericsson K800i. Once I’d received the phone, I also installed the Sony-Ericsson PC Suite, so I could synchronise the phone and my PC (something that’s always a pain in the arse anyway). Ever since then, I’ve had an error come up every time I start the PC, telling me that the CAPI_Worker module has crashed. It’s not a big problem, but it’s an annoying one, because it also meant that while I could connect my phone to the PC for moving files around and the like, I couldn’t actually sync it – I synced OK the first time I installed the PC suite, but then it wouldn’t connect any more.

Anyway, last night I did some furkling (also known as “fucking about on t’internet, and searching Google in particular”) about the problem, and then had a play on the PC. Sony Ericsson themselves insist there’s no problem, and that if the CAPI_Worker module is crashing, you’ve got a dodgy install of Windows. Only that’s not the answer at all – fortunately, I read someone else’s post about that before I tried re-installing Windows. But I did find a fix. After the more link, it gets a bit geeky…
Read the rest of this entry »

Commuting Travel

Posted: Mon 24 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »

According to this story, a study by the RAC Foundatioin suggests that about 70% of British workers travel to work by car.

To be honest, I really can’t say that I’m surprised. Up until recently, I’ve always commuted to work by public transport- whether that’s bus, train, or both. It’s been very rare that I can walk to work, and also pretty rare (until moving to Norfolk) for me to drive to work, although that’s primarily due to the fact I’ve only owned a car in the last six months.

While I was in Manchester, it was always far easier to use a bus than to drive in to work. Cheaper, too- by a massive margin. The amount I paid for a weekly ticket into the city centre was about the same as I’d have paid for one day’s parking. Even when I started working in Oldham, and doubled by weekly bus-ticket costs (due to needing tickets from two bus companies) it was still significantly cheaper. Mind you, the service by First Bus from Oldham was fucking abysmal, which didn’t help – but it was still easier than doing the run by car.

In Bracknell (the only place recently where I could walk to work for some time) I didn’t drive to work- the train to Wokingham (once I’d moved from the walk-to-work place) took 10 minutes, and would race past the daily traffic jams on the A329(M) every day. Again, it cost me about £10 per week to do – and parking for the day in Wokingham would’ve run to about £6 or so, which made it cost effective.

When I started here in Cambridge, I was still living in Bracknell, and used the train to get here and back every week. If I’d been driving it would’ve taken me about as long as the train journey, but if I’d had the choice, I’d have used a car – just lugging a week’s worth of clothes on the train every week was a pain in the arse, and would’ve been far easier in a car.

Since we moved to Norfolk, I do still tend to use the train most of the time. As I’ve written before, it takes a bit more time door-to-door, but does have the advantage of giving me extra time to do work, and the like. Works for me.

This week, though, the train line is being fixed/maintained/repaired/whatever along a large section of the train route, which is being replaced by buses. So I’m driving in this week, because it’s easier.

But if Attleborough wasn’t on the main train line to Cambridge, or if I worked outside the city centre, I’d be driving it every day. There would be no point in using public transport, because it would make the commute unfeasibly long. When I change contracts, if it’s a place off the beaten track, I’ll be driving in.

Reports like this that then say people should use more public transport are all well and good, but before anyone is able to get the majority of people onto public transport, the infrastructure for it has to be there – the services have to be reliable, on-time, and regular. More importantly, they have to go where people want them to go – there’s no point creating a huge business park that doesn’t have a good bus service, for example (and believe me, I’ve worked in a few of those).

Until the infrastructure is sorted out, people won’t use it. And until people start using it, the companies will say there isn’t the demand for the infrastructure to be expanded. Good, innit?

“Observant”

Posted: Fri 21 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | 2 Comments »

I’ve been using online banking for years now. I look at it at least every couple of days, and keep a fairly close eye on what’s coming in and out of the account, which means I also look at the online statement on a regular basis.

A lot of the transaction details start off with four numbers, something like “8217 iTunes”. I’d never really paid attention to them, just figuring that it was some kind of bank code. In a way I was right.

You see, I’ve just figured out what those numbers actually are.

Recently, the bank sent me an updated Switch/Maestro card- nice of them, considering I hadn’t asked for it- which (obviously had a different 16-digit number on the front to the one I already had.

Yes, the four numbers on the bank statement are the last four on the card. Turns out I’d forgotten to update the card details on my iTunes account, so the old card (which should’ve been “immediately cancelled once I started using the new one”, according to my fuckwit bank) was used when I downloaded some music from them. And lo, the old card’s four numbers are listed against iTunes.

Clever, innit?

21+

Posted: Thu 20 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

In light of this ridiculous story where a 71 year old man was refused alcohol “because he wouldn’t confirm he was over 21 when asked”, I wonder how long it will be before someone else comes forward and says “I’m 16, and the same store let me buy alcohol”?

Advent

Posted: Tue 18 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Festering Season | Leave a comment »

Bah, HumbugWe went to Sainsbury’s last night, and there, next to the Hallowe’en gear (Hey kids, only six weeks to buy this shit!) were chocolate advent calendars.

In September. I despair. Hell, the bloody fireworks aren’t in the shops yet, but the fucking advent calendars are.

I suspect D4D™ may be going anti-festive earlier than usual this year.

Slack Service – Not

Posted: Mon 17 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

Last weekend I wrote about some of the slack customer service we’ve been dealing with recently.

In order to provide some balance, this week we’ve also had some really good experiences too.

On Saturday we went and saw a local place that supplies wood-burners, coal and logs. We needed some fire tools as well for our wood-burner, but also needed that much-written-about load of logs for our woodpile. We bought the tools, and ordered a trailerload of logs, along with three bags of kindling. We needed a pallet as well to be used as flooring for the wood pile, which they just chucked on, no charge.

It was due for delivery “Late morning, early afternoon” today. It’s already here, and arrived by 8am. Definitely a place we’ll be going back to.

Also, that cycle shop mentioned last week had my bike ready and waiting when we went to collect it- and charged me less than I’d expected!

So yes, all told, fairly impressed.

Now, if the plumber turns up it’ll be a good day…

Long-Term Residents

Posted: Wed 12 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel, Weirdness | 1 Comment »

I must admit, on my first reading of the story yesterday of the couple who have been living for 22 years in a Travelodge hotel (and I use that term very loosely) my first reaction was “Why?!?”, closely followed by “Freaks.”

It’s taken me a good 24 hours to get past that reaction- and if I’m honest, it still comes back to that on occasion. Personally, I couldn’t stay in a Travelodge for 22 days, let alone 22 years. I’ve written before about staying in one, and about their dodgy booking practices (although that appears to have stopped now) – but I have to admit that they’re comfortable to sleep in, if nowt else.

However, seeing one of the quotes from the couple, I can understand their motivation a bit more.

“The Travelodge room suits us so much better than our first-floor flat in Sheffield, which has no disabled access for Jean. It’s important as she now suffers from a bone disease and uses a wheelchair.”

Now yeah, fair enough – their disabled access isn’t bad at all, usually.

But still, twenty-two years in a Travelodge. Fucking hell. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Don’t buy from Mesh Computers

Posted: Mon 10 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

DON’T BUY FROM MESH COMPUTERS!

I wish I could say I was surprised by Blue Witch’s tale of woe with Mesh computers, but I’m really not. Over the years I’ve heard lots of similar stories, and Mesh have been long-time residents on my “people I wouldn’t buy anything from” list. (Yeah, I do have such a list – although it’s mainly just a mental one)

Still, it’s always good to have another reminder about them…

Slack Service Redux

Posted: Sat 8 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services | 1 Comment »

I finally went in to the cycle place in Attleborough today, thought I’d check first the useless fuckers were open. I’d called again this morning, and again no answer. So I went in.

The reason they hadn’t called me back? (after going back through the messages on the phone in front of me)

“You called on a Wednesday. We don’t open Wednesdays.”
“So what’s the point of an answerphone, if you don’t bother listening to the messages, or getting back to people?”
“You called at 1.20 on a Wednesday. We don’t open Wednesdays, and we’re closed for lunch between 1 and 2”

I gave up – there was no way I was going to get sense out of him. Still, the bike’s now in for a service, so we’ll see what they do with it.

I also finally managed to collect the picture we booked in to get framed two months ago. At the time they predicted it’d take two weeks. So, bit of a difference.

“I must admit, I’m a bit disappointed that this took two months instead of two weeks”
“Yes, that was a bit of an unexpected delay.”

And that was it. No apology, no nothing.

Tosspots.

Slack Service

Posted: Thu 6 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

One thing that’s beginning to get annoying about living here in Norfolk is the way so many of the inhabitants seem to be utterly incapable of simple tasks like replying to emails, or picking up a phone.

Recently I’ve been trying to talk to the local bike shop about getting a service for the bike I bought a couple of years ago. I’ve slacked off on this, but I do want to get back into using it, but before I can do so, it needs a good service. So I’ve been trying to get hold of the CycleLife shop in Attleborough to get them to service the poxy bloody thing. Do they answer the phone? Do they bollocks. Do they reply to messages on the answerphone? Do they bollocks. In short, they’re a bunch of tossers.

We’ve also been trying to get some response out of the poxy plumber, who we’ve asked to do some work. I’ve called him three times, and emailed him twice. Herself has called him two or three times. And so far? No response at all.

I don’t know if it’s just people being rude, or if they’re too busy to take on new work, or if they’re just tosspots. What I do know is that it’s incredibly bloody annoying.

Shocking News

Posted: Sun 19 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

Stop Press : NPower are cheating extortionist bastards.

Not that we didn’t all know it already, but the BBC News site seems to have caught on to it anyway…

Indicators

Posted: Tue 14 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism | 4 Comments »

Recently, a friend of a friend went out and bought a new car – well, new to them, not brand-new. Now, at which of these points would you decide to not buy this vehicle ? (I should point out, one of these is a joke – the rest all happened)

  1. The vehicle in question is seven years old, and has only 24,000 miles on the clock
  2. The dealer knocks the car down from £6,500 to £5,000
  3. The offered warranty on the vehicle is one month.
  4. The dealer says he was thinking of painting it bright yellow, it was such a damn lemon
  5. The brakes seize on the car three days after purchase

So – when would you have decided not to buy it?

Taxing

Posted: Mon 13 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel | 1 Comment »

I’ve now had my car nearly six months. Which, of course, means that it’s also coming up to the expiry of the six month road-tax I got with it.

I got the reminder for the road tax last week, and decided to have a go at the entire Road Tax online thing – and it all went really painlessly. Herself had tried it last month for her car, and hadn’t been able to get through the process, so I was wondering how good it would be, but yeah, the entire process was easy – and a lot less time-consuming than going to get the disc at the Post Office!

eNannying

Posted: Fri 10 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Security | Leave a comment »

The story today about a report recommending better laws against ‘e-crime’, recommending that software producers etc. should be made to pay compensation to the victims of ‘e-crime’ left me frothing at the mouth.

Responsibility for protecting users also fell to “the IT industry and the software vendors, the banks and internet traders, and the internet service providers”, he said.

Now I’m sorry, but that is just utter shit. Well, up to a point, anyway.

Personally, I firmly believe that we’re responsible for our own security, whether that is the physical stuff (closing/locking doors and windows, locking the car, that kind of thing) or whether it’s computer security – anti-virus, firewall, security patches, keeping the OS up to date, all that guff. However, I also try to bear in mind that the world is full of fuckwits, so I would like to see PC manufacturers/sellers have some decent (and preferably free) security software pre-installed on all new machines. Mind you, I’d also like to see ISP CDs provide the same kind of thing. And I’m not talking about processor- and memory-intensive hogs like McAfee or Norton, either. And I do think that if you’re provided with a broadband router/modem, then it should be one with a built-in firewall, rather than just the cheapest box they can find. So on that score yes, I do feel that companies should be encouraged to do more to deal with the problem from the start – and to have these things installed and activated by default, without the need to go through shedloads of financial commitments and contracts (McAfee/Norton/Symantec, I’m referring to you) – just have it ready to run from Day One.

But when all’s said and done, that security is still a personal responsibility, not one that should be legislated by government. If you opt for being a fuckwit, not running AV, running an out-of-date or unpatched browser/OS, and then clicking on some dodgy email purporting to be from your bank rather than going direct to the bank website to check it out, you deserve to get stung. I tend to think of it as an idiot tax.

Antivirus-wise, AVG offers a completely free version of their fantastic anti-virus software, which I’d recommend to anyone. Personally, I use the paid-for licensed version, because I think that the software is so good it’s worth the £25 for two years for a single license. (I’ve actually got it licensed for 5 machines, I think – should keep me going)

But none of this internet security stuff is really difficult. You just have to have some kind of intelligence, and not just click on a link in an email, for example. It really isn’t rocket science.

And if you can’t be arsed to run AV, or do just click on that link that says it’ll go off to [xxx] bank so you can change your password, as it may have been hacked already? Then I’m afraid you should be liable for the results of your own idiocy. And I’d say the same thing even if I were to fall for something like that.

Idiot tax – pay it, and learn from the experience.

Schizoid

Posted: Wed 8 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Currently, I’m working on and maintaining two sites in parallel at work – the ‘live’ site and the one that’s under development, but needs the content to be maintained and kept up to date with any new stuff that comes in.

It’s a truly schizophrenic experience, and one that regularly makes me think “I’m sure I did that already.”, only to realise that I did it on the other site.

It also leads to an ungodly headache on occasion. Like- ooh- today, for example. And it’s only just gone 9.15. (despite the post saying 8.15 – guess who couldn’t be arsed to set server or timezone to +1 hour for the summer)

Secure Passwords

Posted: Tue 7 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Geeky | 2 Comments »

At work, our password changes roughly every month. That’s fine, and makes sense. My work-related passwords are nothing to do with the ones I have for anywhere else, but they also tend to be sweary, because when I can’t be arsed to think of a new password, I’ll use some sweary combination – for example, the one before the current one was ‘cock-knocker’ . Hyphen and all. Go on, guess it at random.

This month’s one is also sweary, but in a far ruder way. Again, that’s fine up to a point. It’s not visible when I log in, and it’s not saved in clear text anywhere. So that’s fine.

Except that our illustrious IT department ‘fixed’ another section of the work I do, and I now need to enter my network password as part of the batch file that sends site revisions up to the various websites. And it leaves the password there in plain text for all to see.

So, yeah, bit of an oops. I may have to select a new (non-sweary) password in light of this development. Arses.

Banking Security

Posted: Sat 4 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

Last week, I received a new debit card from my bank. All well and good – except that I hadn’t requested one.

When I called them to find out who had ordered it, they told me that they’d sent it themselves, as part of an “upgrade” to their security. This ‘upgrade’ involves sending out a new card with a different chip on it, and then at some point they’ll also be supplying me with some kind of card-reader. When that happens, supposedly it’ll plug in to my PC, and then I won’t be able to access my internet banking without both card and card-reader.

And that would all be lovely – except I have a nasty habit of using three or four PCs in any one given week, what with home PC, laptop, work PC and occasionally the work laptop as well. So in a fit of “upgrading” security, they’re making me go through extra hoops of inconvenience, having to carry this extra piece of gubbins just so I can access my online banking.

And when it comes to ‘increasing’ security, all that is immediately failed by the fact they sent out the cards with no warning. In envelopes that obviously contained a plastic card. So how would I have known if it didn’t appear? Simply – I wouldn’t.

So I don’t quite see how that’s an ‘upgrade’ to security…

Strike!

Posted: Fri 3 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism | 2 Comments »

Maybe I’m just naïve, but I really don’t understand how mail workers going on strike is supposed to resolve their dispute.

Royal Mail’s trying to cut costs, partly by laying off up to 40,000 people. Now if it were me, I’d be looking at getting rid of the fuckers that were knackering my business by striking…

But strikes don’t – in my perception – engender sympathy from the public for the plight of those on strike. Instead it’s all “fucking strikers”, and “making a pain in the arse of themselves”, particularly when you start wondering whether they’re also still getting paid full wage while standing around doing sod all.

So how does striking resolve the issue?

Cheat Sheets

Posted: Fri 3 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related | Leave a comment »

One of my colleagues at work emailed me a list of ‘cheat sheet’s yesterday, and among them was this particular beauty – titled “& commands”.

Now I’m sorry, but if you’re going to write a help sheet or reference guide, it’s better to at least use the correct title for the thing you’re doing a reference on.

They’re NOT “& commands” – they’re HTML entities. OK, technically they’re just entities, but I thought I’d specify a bit. I’ve used them in XML, SGML, HTML, and probably a couple of other MLs as well.

But to call them by entirely the wrong name, well, it’s hardly going to reassure me that you know what the chuff you’re talking about, is it?

Delivery Details

Posted: Thu 26 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised | 2 Comments »

As I’ve mentioned before this week, a couple of weeks ago we ordered a couple of water-butts from Greenfingers.com. Because they were likely to be delivered while we were both out at work, I also left a note in their “special instructions” part of the order process to say that if we were out, then it was fine to leave them in the garden behind the house. All well and good.

Anyway, I got a call from Greenfingers, telling me they were going to send the butts out the next day. Again, all well and good. After that, though, it all got a little bit surreal.

“Now, sir, you’ve added a note telling us that if no-one’s in, the order can be left at the back of the house”
“Yes, that’s correct”
“Well, can you also write the same thing on a piece of paper, and tape it to your front door? Our couriers need to have permission before they’ll leave anything at a property”
“But I’ve already authorised that to happen, by adding the special delivery comments”
“Ah, but the courier needs authorisation from yourself”
“He’s got it. I’ve given it to you, and thus by proxy to the courier”
“Well all the same, can you leave a note taped to your front door?”
“Let me get this right. You want me to advertise to all and sundry that a) I’m going to be out all day, and that the house is empty, and b) that there’s a good chance there might be some good stuff out the back. Do you want me to leave the door open for the courier as well, just to make sure?”
“Is that a ‘no’, sir?”

Now tell me, what’s the point of passing on a special request like that, if it’s not going to make it to the people who’re doing the delivery? And what’s the point of leaving a notice like that on my door?

As it turned out, the water butts did get delivered, and did get dealt with just fine. Even without a note on the bloody door.

Quality

Posted: Wed 25 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic | Leave a comment »

Two weekends ago, we bought some new bedroom furniture. Not cheap – although not hugely expensive, either – but a new king-size bed, bedside tables, and a corner unit to hold a TV. (although that’s not in the bedroom) It all arrived last Tuesday, and I put the bed together (on my own) on the Wednesday. (The other bits were all assembled already, and thus were immune from my tender attentions.)

The bed though, was actually pretty easy to put together. Yes, sure, it had a couple of awkward moments- all to do with the (stupid) positioning of certain bolts that hold the frame together – but then the rest of it all went together smoothly and easily. Even the wooden slats went in without the need for additional screws – they just sit in their pre-assigned notches, and it’s all nice.

Even more importantly, though, it feels solid. That’s a novelty, for things I’ve put together. It doesn’t creak, groan, squeak, or wobble. It’s comfortable, and feels like it’s never going to move.

So it wasn’t the cheapest thing we could’ve bought. But sometimes (as in this case) paying a bit more has paid back dividends on comfort and security. Definitely A Good Thing.

Predicting the Weather

Posted: Sat 21 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, News, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

While I realise that a lot of the people trapped in floods, or inconvenienced by the stopping of train services etc. aren’t having much fun, I do think it’s pretty impressive the way a number of agencies and organisations have been dealing with the unexpected effects of the weather.

Now OK, pretty much everyone should’ve known that yesterday was going to be exceptionally wet, with (according to a couple of sources) two months worth of rain dolloping down in 24 hours, but the unexpected bit came down to the effects of that rain on unexpected places. Over the last few years we seem to be getting a lot more cases where floods happen in places that’ve never flooded before – or at least have only flooded once every thirty years, or something. Yesterday, who expected that the M5 would be closed because of flooding, for example.

The quote that sums it up for me comes from John Kelly, Oxfordshire’s emergency planner (and what a weird job that must be, always expecting/planning for the worst or most bizarre situations. Hmm, must look at what it involves…)

We’ve ordered 150 sleeping bags from the Army… and some of my staff have gone down to the local Tesco to get things like towels, toothpaste and soap.
“This is part of our plan, this is a thing we plan for, and we make arrangements for, but things always go wrong.
“This is not the first choice of school, because the one we were going to had actually been flooded itself.” (from the BBC story linked above)

Yes, the place that was on the plan to be a safe haven from flooding was – um – flooded.

However, even with (I would expect) most people knowing it was going to piss down all day, how come I saw so many people in Cambridge yesterday dressed in just thin summer clothes, with no jackets, umbrellas etc. ? Did they just think that the prediction wouldn’t happen? Or that it wouldn’t affect them? Weird.

Updating

Posted: Fri 20 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Geeky, Sweary | 7 Comments »

One thing I do very irregularly is update software. A case in point is iTunes. Or “Fucking iTunes”, as it’s known in this house.

Now fair enough, I get why a program can’t be running while it upgrades itself. That’s fine. It makes sense.

But in the name of all that’s fucking holy, why the blue blazing shit does iTunes need to shut down Fucking Microsoft Outlook while it upgrades?!? I could understand (ish) restarting a web browser. But email? (And yes, before any techie spod gets a hold on this one, I know poxy Outlook uses the IE rendering engine for HTML emails – well , until Outlook’07, anyway – but that’s a rant for another day. Oh yes.)

Even more annoying, if I tell it to “Ignore” the problem with Outlook, it goes back, tries again – and still insists that Outlook gets shut down. Apple has the funniest fucking perspective on the word “Ignore”, doesn’t it?

And then, not content with fucking about with poxy bloody email, once the upgrade is over and done with, it tells me it also needs to restart the entire fucking PC. Why?!?

And when all’s said and done, what sits there in the fucking system tray again? Oh yes, it’s Quicktime. Which I drop from the system tray every bastard time, because it’s a system-hungry piece of shit that doesn’t pissing bastard well need to be running every time I start the PC. If I want a fucking Quicktime movie to play, I’ll wait the extra ten bloody seconds for the fucking thing to start. That’s fine. I don’t care. But stop running in my fucking system tray all the time, you bastard piece of crap.

And then people reckon I should buy an iPod as well. Fucking Apple. I wouldn’t touch their hardware with a syphilitic leper’s dick.

Sentenc.es

Posted: Wed 18 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

(via Gordon)

While I’m not in the position of being overloaded by email (I tend to process it as it arrives, and thus not end up with a wodging great backlog most of the time) I think that this method of dealing with emails in a fixed number of sentences is brilliant, and may well be adopted anyway…

Doh!

Posted: Wed 18 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

I have to say that I do find the story about promoting the Simpsons movie by painting a big Homer next to the Cerne Abbas giant quite amusing.

Then again, I also find the slightly stampy-feet reaction from the local Pagans quite amusing, that “they’re doing a rain-dance, hoping rain will come and wash the ad away”.

Google Cookies

Posted: Tue 17 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

So Google are now supposedly all heroic for saying that they’ll set their cookies to delete after two years (my emphasis) instead of the current setting, where they will expire in 2039.

I’m sorry, but two years is still bollocks. Along the way they also say that two year expiry entails not visiting any Google website in that time.

Now, I use cookies on a lot of sites – they’re a standard thing, after all. But with any site I work on, they’re usually set to delete in 30 or 60 days. Yes, of course if a user re-visits the site then the cookie gets re-set, but still with the 30 or 60 day expiry. If a user hasn’t visited the site in that time, then the cookie deletes, and if they re-visit after that, then they might have to re-set a preference or two.

I don’t understand why a company like Google can’t set their cookie to expire after something sensible, like 90 – or even 180 – days. If someone hasn’t come back in three (or six) months, then the cookie expires. More than fair.

Why on earth would you want a cookie to hang around for two years?

Virgin on the Ridiculous

Posted: Tue 10 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, News, Travel | 1 Comment »

All I can say is ‘And about time too‘.

I’ve ranted long and hard about Virgin’s shitty cross-country rail service. And now they’ve lost the franchise. Boo-bloody-hoo.

Still, I bet Arriva make just as much of a pig’s ear of it…

Charging too little?

Posted: Tue 3 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

The Top Ten signs you may be charging too little – fairly tongue in cheek, but amusing all the same.

Taxing Issues

Posted: Mon 2 July, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Oh god, yes, I’m back to doing self-assessment tax-returns again.

A while back I got a ‘short form’ self-assessment. This shouldn’t be rocket-science, as I’m completely PAYE (Pay As You Earn) at the moment, so it’ll just be a matter of filling in the final figures from my P60 for Tax Year 2006/07, and job done.

Only, um, I haven’t received a P60. That’s odd. I’d best check it up.

So an email goes off to Parasol, the umbrella company that’s currently my ’employer’, asking what’s happened to the P60.

“We’ve sent it out, back in April” comes the reply.
“I haven’t received it. What address did you put on it?”
“[xyz], Bracknell.” they say.
“I haven’t lived there since December, and have updated my address details with you on both moves since then. So why did it go to an address that’s six months out of date?”
“…” Nothing. No response.

They have managed to send me a PDF copy of the P60, so I can do all the tax-return stuff, but all the same, I’d still like to know why they sent the P60 to the wrong address…

Two Titled

Posted: Sat 30 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

I’ve mentioned before that I’m quite a fan of the books by Richard Morgan – I’ve read (and re-read) all of his stuff so far: Altered Carbon, Woken Furies, Broken Angels, and Market Forces.

So I was fairly high on the purchase list for the new novel, Black Man, and read it when I received it.

Between ordering Black Man a while back, and the time it (finally) got delivered, I noticed that there was another Richard Morgan novel coming out – also in hardback, but two months later than Black Man. This one was called ‘Thirteen’ (Or ‘Th1rte3n’, if you believe the typography) so, like the fanboy I so obviously am, I ordered that too. Great, two novels in a short time – that explains the delay in releasing Black Man, and how long it’s taken the new stuff to come out.

I received ‘Thirteen’ (sorry, I just can’t be arsed with the typographical nancing about) yesterday. And it turns out it’s just ‘Black Man’ with a different title and cover.

To me that’s a pretty scummy way to do things. I don’t know if it’s been decided that ‘Black Man’ is a title that won’t sell, or something. But I would have thought it better to have some form of notification that it was actually a rebranded title, rather than alienating Morgan’s readers, and making the book purchasers feel like shit-for-brains arsehats who’ve been taken for a ride and bought two copies of the same fucking book.

Calming Down

Posted: Fri 29 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Own Business, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Calming Down

After the chaos of the last couple of weeks, things are finally calming down a bit. Some of that is through our own actions, and some of it is through the actions of others.

Firstly, we’ve completed two full rooms of the house, to a point where all we now need to do is buy some extra furniture for the living room, and unpack books and stuff onto bookcases in the office. It’s a good feeling – and the reactions of other people who’ve come round has shown us that the plans we’ve got for the place are just about right. The rooms we’ve worked on (and when I say ‘we’, I mean primarily Herself) look really good, smart, open, and comfortable. If you saw ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos (and you still might) you wouldn’t believe they were the same house. We’ve now just got to complete one more room (our current bedroom, which will- eventually- be the guest bedroom) for the moment, and that now really only needs some painting to be done.

Secondly, the garden stuff is well on the way. There’s not been a lot we could do over the last couple of weeks, with the levels of rainfall, but equally everything is still becoming more manageable. There’s still an amount of work to be done, and most of that will be done in July, but it’s getting there.

And Thirdly, my workload has dropped. Client #2 have received what they wanted, they’re happy, and the job’s done. When I got the contract, it was supposed to be a rolling thing with continuous work coming in, although I was rather cynical about that, and wondered whether that was some kind of ‘sweetener’ to get someone good to do the site, rather than just a two-month contract. Bizarre, but hey. Turns out I was right – the site’s been completed- within timescales and budgets- and all of a sudden there’s no more work coming in, but thanks for the site.

To be honest, I’m not surprised – and nor am I really all that bothered. I’ve been paid for the work I’ve done, the client is happy, and that’s fine. It’s also had the side-effect of giving me some other ideas of my own that can be developed and tried out. Even better, it means I’ve got some time to myself again.

In hindsight, taking on Client #2 wasn’t my smartest move. It pushed up my workload to silly levels (although not quite to the levels of downright stupid – been there, done that, no plans to do it again) – and while normally it wouldn’t have been a problem, when I then also took into account house stuff as well, it wasn’t my finest hour.

Still, all’s done now, and July is looking like it might actually be slightly more sensible. Well, except for social life – we’re away this weekend, I’m seeing Peter Gabriel in two weeks’ time, and then we’ve guests the weekend after. Lessened workloads never looked better.

Setting Up

Posted: Thu 28 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related | 3 Comments »

Ah, I do love it when I have to sort out the PC of a new starter in a company.

Particularly when the IT department in the company are a bunch of smeghead chuffbags, and can’t get anything right.

So far, Windows Update has had to install 57 fixes that IT couldn’t be keffed to do.

As well as that, various useful things (in the context of the work we do, and how this company’s web stuff is set up) like :

  • IIS (Internet Information Services, for those who don’t know- a web server that in this instance runs on the local machine)
  • Subversion
  • Tortoise SVN client for Subversion
  • Firefox
  • MS Office
  • MS Outlook, along with setting up email account etc.

So, nothing important then. *cough*

Repair and Replace

Posted: Wed 27 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky | 1 Comment »

Last weekend turned out to be a bit more expensive than expected.

During that time, we managed to (finally) sort out the room that is going to be the office for a while. (’til all else is done, then we get to upgrade/fit-out the garage into an office and workroom, which’ll probably end up being around this time next year) Walls painted, gloss paintwork done (and then walked in by the fucking cat) and floor tiles cleaned. Bookshelves, desk, and computer all installed.

And it was while we were putting the computer stuff back in that I discovered the expense bits. The wireless network card’s aerial was a) bent, and b) snapped off when I touched it. Oh bugger. And the receiver dongle for the cordless mouse was bent 90°, and (on testing) utterly buggered.

The wireless card wasn’t too bad to replace – £25, and job done. Installed fine, and not even the need to hunt down whatever the hell the password is for the wireless network. Disturbingly simple.

As for the mouse, I’ve replaced it with another cordless one, but this time not a rechargeable one. Supposedly two AA batteries will keep it going for six months, although I’ll believe that when I see it. I ended up ordering it on Monday from Amazon on express delivery (Yeah, I know, ‘sucker’) and it arrived yesterday. So could be worse.

In the meantime, well, a combination of using the laptop for most things, and a sad (and very geeky) level of knowledge when it comes to keyboard shortcuts in Windows made everything usable. Although when I say ‘usable’ I mean “I can do it on occasion, but if I had to do this all the time, I’d soon be swearing like a sailor”.

DVLA

Posted: Mon 25 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised | Leave a comment »

One of the most annoying things we’ve been having to deal with since moving in to the new house is the residual paperwork and guff that was the responsibility of the previous owners.

As it turns out, the man of the house died back in September last year, which is what prompted the sale. His widow went off to live with relatives, and the place was empty. Now fair enough, I understand it must’ve been nightmarish, but at the same time, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been done (or, more accurately, not done) that is continuing to provide hassles for us.

For instance, the family sold the old boy’s car. Fair enough. Except they didn’t file the relevant paper work with the DVLA, so we’re now getting shitty red letters from bailiff companies and the like about parking fines that’ve been done by the car’s new owner. Of course, because the family didn’t file the paperwork, he’s still listed as the registered owner, and at the address that is now ours.

Currently, those parking tickets are running at about £600, and I’m wondering when more will come through the door. We’ve been able to get hold of the family via the estate agents, luckily, and have been forwarding on the demands once I’ve spoken to the companies involved. And I’ve also told the DVLA that the family sold the car, and it’s now nothing to do with us – so hopefully they’re going to amend the record for the car as soon as poss.

We’ll just have to see how it all goes.

In some ways, though, it’s probably a good thing that the family also haven’t yet set up good old mail redirection, or we wouldn’t have had any idea that this cock-up was going on. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

Address Migration

Posted: Thu 21 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

One of the things that always infuriates me when I get a new phone is the sheer hassle that’s always present when it comes to moving the address book (and/or contacts) from one to the other. For some reason it’s just never as simple as it could/should be.

Of course, there’s the ‘classic’ option, of saving all the contacts onto the SIM card instead of on the phone. But if you actually use the contacts and address book, then you need them to be on the phone – the SIM just holds ‘name &number’ data. So if you have a contact called (for example) Tom, and he has a home phone, work phone, mobile, and email, that’s four records on the SIM. On the phone, it’s one record – which is, of course, how it should be.

But I’m yet to find a phone that has a simple “Send all the contacts from this phone to another one” – whether that’s by Messaging, Bluetooth, IR, or anything else. Even (or, perhaps, particularly) Windows Mobile can’t manage this task – it can send your contacts one at a time, so why can’t it do all of them in one big bundle of data?

In fairness to Windows Mobile®, it does synchronise with MS Office on a PC. Fortunately, so does my new phone. So I could connect the XDA to the PC, synch all the contacts off the phone into MS Outlook , disconnect the XDA, connect the K800i (which, of course, also has a completely different cable) and synch the contacts out of Outlook onto the K800i. But all the same, what a faff.

Is it really that difficult to handle phone contact transfers?

I know (before Gordon says it) that this is one of those events where user-centred design would work really nicely. I don’t care how the phone transfers the address book – I want it to Just Work™, without being a nightmare faff of cables, or one-by-one data transfers. Just one simple ‘Move my address book to another phone’ option – or perhaps even a first-use option (i.e. one where the process is part of the initial phone set-up) that simply says “Copy the address book from your old phone?” – and if you choose it, you get to choose whether the data transfer is done by IR, Bluetooth, WiFi, or something else. (Bluetooth is the ideal candidate, of course, with WiFi a close second).

Is that too much to ask?

Rural

Posted: Tue 19 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky | Leave a comment »

The image below should provide ample explanation of why I hadn’t bothered (until today) with getting a 3G phone. Dark blue is the area where O2 have 3G coverage in this area…

Unless Im in Norwich, theres no bloody point

You could, of course, check where you live, too.

Servicing

Posted: Tue 12 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Travel | Leave a comment »

I forgot to say earlier, but today my car is in the garage.

It’s recently gone over the 60,000 miles – which means I’ve done just under 4,000 in the poxy thing already – so it was time for what Ford term “a major service”. I’ve no idea what that entails, but it’s about £225 to do.

As it is, I’m faintly optimistic that that’s all I’ll have to pay – I haven’t had any calls saying “Oooh, we found that the kajoogly sprocket is nearly frubscotched, that’s gonna cost you £xxx” (or words to that effect, anyway).

Still, I’ll know more when I get there at about 5:15…

Planning

Posted: Tue 12 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Getting Organised, House Work | Leave a comment »

On Friday, the first stage of our planning application for the extensions to the new place passed through. So far as we know, no-one has complained or lodged an objection to our plans – the notice went up outside our place three weeks ago, and the deadline for objections was Friday.

According to the relevant website information (It’s great, being able to track the application online, and know what’s coming up) we should get the final approval through around July 9th. It’s not the fastest of processes, but that’s the “joy” of dealing with local authorities.

In fairness, it’s also quite a lot faster than I’d been led to expect. In the previous place, our neighbour told us he’d made the initial application for planning permission back in January, and the council hadn’t even processed it ’til the start of April. In fact, his notice about plans, and the request for objections went up only a couple of weeks before ours.

So far, we’ve been lucky (or organised, I’m not sure which) in that we’ve had an architect draw up the plans, and do the planning submission for us. It means he’s known what we want, and how to get it through planning permission. And if it goes through without a hitch, well then, I will consider his fees (when he eventually sends us a bill) will be well worth it.

Internet Access

Posted: Fri 8 June, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: @Media2007, Customer Services, Thoughts, Travel, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Over the last few weeks, my internet access has been – how shall we say? – “interesting”.

Not only did I end up on dial-up for a week after moving house (along with epic levels of sweary words), but while I’ve been in London the access has been decidedly patchy too.

@Media made the – very smart, in my opinion – decision to not have wifi access in the rooms. It sounds weird to not have internet access at a web conference, but it’s brought about an impressive reduction in the number of people surfing, answering emails, and generally eFuckingAbout while presentations are going on. And that’s a good thing – it’s meant that more attention has been focussed on-stage, and there’s also less distraction in the audience – it’s hard to concentrate on what someone onstage is saying when the person in front/behind/next to you is belting away on a manky clicky keyboard.

But the hotel I’ve been using is supposed to have wi-fi – it’s extra, and supplied by Spectrum Internet. And for the last two days it’s been about as stable as Charles Manson on LSD.

So all told the internet access has been pretty ropy while I’ve been here. No bad thing in some ways, but it does mean I’ve not been able to get a fair amount of web-based work done. Ah well, that’s what weekends are for, apparently.

Moving Phones

Posted: Wed 30 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Getting Organised, House Purchase, Work-related | Leave a comment »

I should’ve known that the efficiency of BT in the last move was an exception, rather than a rule. I should’ve chased them up more, I know.

I was lulled into a false sense of security by someone who sounded efficient, but wasn’t.

So on Friday when I tested the old phone number at 3:30pm, and got a ringtone, I thought “Oh, bollocks.” So I rang BT’s Moving Home department, and eventually got through.

“Oh, I don’t know what’s happened there – the system seems to have decided that there was a problem with the order, and then we didn’t tell you about it”
Yeah, no shit. At 4pm on a Friday, imagine how happy that makes me.

As it turns out, the order had got completely lost in the system. No idea why, and no-one can tell me, either. Bunch of tossers.

But in fairness to them, within 2 hours of being told, the landline had switched over to the new number and the new place without any further hitches. That bit is simple, by all accounts. (Doesn’t explain why it takes them two weeks notice usually, but there we go)

Broadband, however, is a problem. Supposedly it takes five working days, regartdless of anything else. It’s incredibly annoying, but again it’s one of those things where there’s really nothing I can do except wait. Oh, and phone them on a daily basis to see how it’s going. *grin*

But ’til Monday June 4th, it looks like I’m stuck with slowband. And oh God is it slow, after being used to ADSL for the last four and a bit years…

Extended Sentence

Posted: Fri 25 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Well, it’s been determined, my sentence here has been extended again – I’m now here ’til the end of August.

At that point, I’ll have been in this one contract for 11 months.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

Overload

Posted: Tue 22 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Introspective, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having a bit of a crisis with regard to my workload, among other things. If I’m honest, a lot of it is down to the fact that- at the moment, at least- I have to admit that I’ve taken on too much at once. As well as the normal day-to-day work, I’ve also got one big project on the side, as well as a couple of smaller ones on the back-burner. (Although that still means they’re in my head, and need to get done) Additionally, there’s one new one where I really need to talk about it a bit with some other people. Oh, and of course there’s also all the stuff around moving house. Not much on at all then.

In fact, if I just listed the stuff I’m getting paid for at the moment, it’s still working 7½ working days per week. Not one of my saner moments, admittedly.

Fortunately, the big project has a first deadline of the end of June, and everything should still be OK for that – it’s just that a couple of the steps along the way have sort of slipped a bit. There’s some reasons for it (and I’ll probably write a bit more about those later) but mainly it’s because I just can’t at the moment motivate myself to go ferreting through bizarrely-written databases. Particularly when they’ve been done in SQL Server, rather than anything decent.

But at the moment, well yes, I’m just feeling a little bit stressed about the entire thing, and not really having all that much fun. It’ll sort itself out, I know – and fairly soon now – but all the same, right now it’s a bit more chaotic and pressured than I’d prefer.

On the other hand, well, maybe I’ll learn something from this. (Although I kind of doubt it, somehow)

Changed Address

Posted: Wed 16 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, House Work | 1 Comment »

At bloody last, my poxy bank has managed to change my address details.

It’s only taken three weeks.

In other news, the credit cards and so on that I have all managed it instantly, online. Even sending off the driving licence parts to Swansea and getting new updated documents back took less time.

Truly impressive.

Change Of Address

Posted: Sat 12 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic | Leave a comment »

Of all the things that need to be co-ordinated when you move, you really wouldn’t think that getting your bank to change your address would be one of the most difficult bits, would you? And in general, it wouldn’t be. Unless you happen to have the Manchester branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland as your account’s ‘home’. And ooh, lucky me, that’s exactly the problem.

In general, dealing with RBS isn’t a problem. I use the online banking, that’s fine. I go into the Cambridge branch, or the Reading one, and everything happens quickly, smoothly, and efficiently. If anything has to go back to my ‘home’ branch though, it goes tits up at high speed.

I don’t know what it is that makes the Manchester branch of RBS into such a bunch of useless bastards, but I do know it’s consistent in its crapness. (Actually, I do have a suspicion about what the problem is – it’s that I had a business account with them as well, and I’ll lay money that somewhere in their system, anything to do with my personal account still goes through the business section)

This time, as with when we moved to Norfolk in December, I called the phone banking section to do the change of address. All fine, apparently. Except that I know they have to send some kind of paper-trail document to the Manchester branch for them to process. Why, I’ve no idea. But that’s the way it is. Joined up banking with the RBS, oh yes.

And when the address change document goes to Manchester, it gets lost. Or mislaid. Or screwed-up and thrown in a bin. I don’t know. What I do know is that it doesn’t get processed. So ten days later, I call the phone banking people again, and ask why it hasn’t been done. Oh, we don’t know – the system says the address has changed, but the Manchester processing centre hasn’t activated it. Why? We don’t know. It must be a small system glitch.

Aye, right. That ‘small system glitch’ is also known as ‘it entered the document black hole called Manchester Processing Centre’.

We’ll see if the change gets processed this time, now I’ve invoked a formal complaint…

Inspiration At Last

Posted: Fri 4 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related | 2 Comments »

Ah, it always comes in the end. This time it was in the form of a letter from a scumbag agency I had the misfortune to register with while down in Bracknell, wanting to move on from CrapCo. Yeah, that long ago.

Bear in mind that since registering with them, I’ve now had two other jobs, and have moved from Berkshire to Norfolk. Which Scumbag Agency knows about, because I’ve told them. Repeatedly, and at great length.

And today? An email about Java developer positions in – wait for it – London, Exeter, and Southampton. I’ve never been a Java programmer- never wanted to be, never will be. Not my thing at all.

Fucking idiots. And I’ve told them that, too. Twunts.

Moving Numbers

Posted: Thu 3 May, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, House Work, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Yesterday I called BT about us moving house, and organising the (hopefully) seamless transfer of phone and broadband from where we are now to where we will be, and all on the day we move.

Which is going to be the 25th May, just in case anyone cared/wanted to know.

It shouldn’t be a problem, as we’re only moving roughly six miles, and will still be in the same area code – but no, we won’t be able to keep the current phone number. Apparently we’re going to be on a different exchange, and this throws a spanner in the works for keeping our existing phone number.

I don’t care, particularly, but it just seems strange that BT can’t manage the (on the surface) simple thing of keeping the phone number if you move within the same phone area code. Apparently it’s fine if you’re staying on the same exchange, but it’s a no-no if you’re moving exchange. Mind you, it’s not like there’s going to be someone using that number on the different exchange, is it?

Maybe I need some landline phone expert to educate me a bit on this one…

Card Processing

Posted: Fri 27 April, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, House Work, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

One of the jobs that needs doing on the new house is to get the electricity supply and meter moved. Because of the region we’re in, we have to use EDF Energy.

Yesterday we got the quote for the work – some £320 or so – and advice on how to pay it. Of course, we want this done ASAP, so I call up their call centre to use a credit card to pay for it. Ho hum.

Anyway, I (eventually) get through – after 25 minutes on hold – and go through the credit card malarkey with the person on the other end. All fine – I’m never overly happy about giving over credit card details on the phone, but yadda yadda, could be worse. Until the end of the call…

“OK, I’ll take these details over to my supervisor, she’ll key them in, and we’ll get this done for you.”
“Woah! You mean you’ve not been doing this directly into the system?”
“No, we write it all down, then pass it on to our supervisor who’s authorised to enter the details. It’s security, you see.”
“OK, put me through to your supervisor NOW, please”

So I get through to the supervisor, who goes through the process again. She can’t understand why I have a huge problem with giving all my credit card details – including the security number on the back –and address details, and having some divvy little git writing them down before processing them. Then I say “Well, how would you feel if you called somewhere, and they did this with your credit card?”.
“Ah, I see your point. Well, all the paperwork is destroyed afterwards.”
“OK, and what’s to stop – say – one of your call takers from bringing in a sheet of carbon paper (I know, low-tech) , so they write the details down, and at the same time the carbon paper means a duplicate copy has been taken. Do you check for things like that?”
“Um. No.”

It’s all been done now, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on the card account over the next couple of weeks. And writing a snotty letter to EDF Energy about this method of payment processing…

Advertising vs. Truth

Posted: Mon 23 April, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | 1 Comment »

The difference between what fast food looks like in adverts and in reality.

Someone needs to get out more. Or less. I can’t quite work out which.

Stupidity 1 : Border Crossings

Posted: Mon 16 April, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Travel | Leave a comment »

via Cryptogram, I came across Tom Kyte’s story of a border crossing – it sounds like it should be from a script of “Some Mothers Do Have Them”.

Brilliant. Funny. And just slightly scary…

B&Q – Another Attempt

Posted: Sat 14 April, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: B&Q, Customer Services, House Work | 11 Comments »

I forgot to say at the time, (although I did mention it in the summary of the week) but when we were checking out quotes and costs for getting floor tiles for the house – a large task, but one that makes a lot of sense in the long run- we decided to brave B&Q again. After all, I’ve slagged off their home delivery service and website, and the comments from various B&Q employees on there have all made out that the people in the store are a lot better.
Now bear in mind I didn’t go in with the attitude “B&Q are shit” or any preconceptions – and also bear in mind that we’ll be going back later for some of the things we do want, which we’ve seen there for decent prices.
Anyway, we’re looking for (at the time – the specs changed slightly later on) roughly 126m² of floor tiles. That equates to One Fuck Of A Lot of tiles. About a thousand tiles, depending on the tile size (obviously) and when you take into account the amunt of tile adhesive and grout we want as well, we’re talking somewhere around the £2-2,500 mark.
We see a tile type we like, and (when we eventually find one) ask a member of the staff team whether it’s possible to buy one tile to take home to check we like the things when they’re in situ.
“Oh, I dunno, snomydeparmen. I’llgoantryanfinesommunwhoknows” Roughly translated, this works out as “Oh, I don’t know. Sorry, it’s not my department. Wait here, and I’ll go and try to find someone who does know, and may be able to help you“. I think.
We wait.
Eventually he comes back with someone else.
“We don’t do sample tiles. It’s not policy”
“We’re not wanting to just take one, we’re quite happy to pay for it”
“We don’t do sample tiles. It’s not policy. You can buy a complete box, and bring it back for a refund”
“We don’t want a box. We just want one tile so we can see how it looks. Look, here’s one that’s seperate, so you don’t even need to break open a pack”
“We don’t do sample tiles. It’s not policy.You can buy a complete box, and then bring it back for a refund”
“Look, we’re going to be buying a hundred and twenty five square metres of these tiles. We would like to buy this one seperate tile, so we can see how it looks in the place before buying two grands worth of tiles, plus adhesive and grout”
You guessed it.
“We don’t do sample tiles. You can buy a full box, then return it if you don’t like them”
“OK, so for want of this one seperate tile, you’re prepared to lose a sale of about two thousand pounds?”
“We don’t do sample tiles”
“Can I speak to your manager please? I’d just like them to know why they’re going to lose this amount of business”
“I am the manager” (Aye, right)
“OK, then. You’ve just lost our business, because you won’t let us buy this one tile, because it’s ‘not policy’. That’s two grand (roughly) plus all the adhesive, tile grout and so on. Nice work.

He did let us have the tile in the end, once we’d started walking away. Amazing what that’ll do, just demonstrating that actually yes, you can find other places, and that B&Q aren’t the be-all and end-all of the business. I’m not quite sure what the ‘policy’ is that he was quoting, but I suspect it’s “B&Q have a policy of not wanting large dollops of business. Piss off to a proper place instead”

Unsurprisingly, we won’t be going with them for the tiles. And yet again it gives the lie to all those commenters who say that the staff in-store at B&Q are really helpful and do their best to help anyone who asks.

In my store (replicated across the entire network) we give 200% effort into giving every single customer excelent customer service.

Aye, right. 200% of fuck-all is still fuck-all.

Domains

Posted: Wed 11 April, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Web Development | Leave a comment »

One thing that constantly annoys/irritates/amazes me when it comes to websites and the like is the sheer number of businesses who only get the one domain name.

Currently, we’re looking at a particular manufacturer of wood-burning stoves, and trying to find a local dealer for them. First of all, the company has been (so far) utter crap in getting back to us, which is a bit of a worry.

Secondly – and bear in mind, they’re a UK company – they own the www.site.com domain, but not the www.site.co.uk one. Now OK, the .co.uk one is being hosted by a certain bunch of scumbag domain squatters, but I’d still consider either a) spending the money to get the domain, or b) going through the domain dispute system to say ‘Sedo are a bunch of scumbag domain squatters who’ve registered this domain in order to sell it’.

But because it’s a UK company, I naturally go to www.site.co.uk , rather than .com . This isn’t the only company with which this happens either – recently I’ve found a whole bundle of them. It’s incredibly annoying, and just goes to show how little some companies still understand about t’internet.

Nagging

Posted: Thu 29 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Technology | 3 Comments »

While I have to admit that in general we’re both pretty pleased with the TomTom satnav unit I bought earlier in the year, there is one thing that I wish I could change.
TomTom operates in what I refer to as “Goldfish Mode”. Much the same as the voiceovers in Masterchef (Sorry, Masterchef goes Large, god help us all) and Dragon’s Den, TomTom assumes you have- at best- a memory span of thirty seconds. Which means you get instructions like

“In 500 yards, turn right at the roundabout, first exit.“
You get to about 100 yards from the roundabout.
“Turn right at the roundabout, first exit“
You get to the roundabout, and start to go round it
“Take the exit“

It drives me insane, and a lot of the time I find that it’s actually distracting, because you start to wonder if you’ve missed something relevant.
All I want is an option on the menu that says “Just notify me of the directions ONCE” that I can tick, and not be treated like I’m a bloody idiot. I know, lowest common denominator and all that bollocks, but jesus, just once, can’t something also have options that aren’t for that low-end user?

DIY

Posted: Mon 19 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Work-related | Leave a comment »

One of the more fun things about my current workplace’s blatant inefficiency has involved the (further) extension of my contract.

Because the people involved are utterly disorganised, inefficient, and have more feet than clues about the business, I’ve even ended up writing my own contract extension documents. Then all I did was ask them to sign it, and I’ve sent it on to the umbrella company.

You know, if I were less honest, I could’ve added – oooh, I dunno, a zero to my day rate, or something – I doubt they’d have even noticed.

But I’ve been good. For once.

Insured

Posted: Thu 15 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Travel | 3 Comments »

I have to say, I’m really rather impressed with Tesco’s car insurance.

First of all, because I’ve been a named driver on Herself’s policy, it worked in a way similar to a no-claims bonus (which I don’t have) and meant that my insurance was shedloads cheaper with them than with anyone else I looked at.

Second, I needed to get a copy/confirmation of the policy over to the place I bought the car before I go and collect it, so that they can sort out the six month’s road tax, and all tht guff. And while they initially managed to get the relevant fax number wrong (twice) once they’d got the number right, everything went through fine.

And yesterday all the paperwork came through, after having organised it on Saturday. So I’ll have that with me as well when I go to pick the thing up tomorrow.

Now maybe this is just the norm for insurance companies, I don’t know. But for now, well, I’m impressed.

Cunts (Missing in Action 4)

Posted: Wed 7 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary | 6 Comments »

Well, it’s established – Ticketmaster are utter, utter cunts.

Thank you for your email.

The tickets you have received are part of an event that is general admission and as such the event has a limited capacity, which is set by Health and Safety. Ticketmaster is unable to issue duplicate tickets for this event as it may cause the event to go over capacity, as we are unable to cancel the original tickets, therefore they can still be used.

This is a decision that is made by the individual venue and Ticketmaster as an agent has to adhere to this. If the venue goes over capacity, the venue could lose its license, which could jeopardise all future events, due to this we cannot re-issue your tickets.

Ticketmaster’s policy is that once a booking has been confirmed, it cannot be exchanged or refunded unless the event is cancelled. So unfortunately we cannot issue you with a refund of the cost of the tickets. Due to these reasons i have passed on a request to our customer service department to contact Secure Mail to investigate this situation. In doing this we will try and make a claim against Secure Mail to refund your booking.

Our representative from customer services will contact you as soon as possible regarding the outcome of the investigation.

I am sorry i cannot help you any further.

So – you ordered tickets, we sent them to the wrong address, where they were signed for by someone obviously not you. That’s your fault. You should’ve known that we’d use a courier ‘service’ (I use that term as loosely as possible) instead of using recorded delivery royal mail like we did for the Massive Attack tickets (which, funny enough, came straight to me, no problem at all) and gone back to your old address for the day when we were going to deliver them.

A refund? Fuck off. It’s all your fault.

And I suppose it is. After all, I ordered using Ticketmaster. My mistake. But believe me, I’ll never make the same mistake again, you cunts.

Missing in Action 3

Posted: Tue 6 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism | Leave a comment »

An update, an email from the idiots at Ticketmaster…

Thank you for your email.

Given the nature of your request it has been forwarded to our Customer Service Department for further investigation. However, this sometimes requires assistance from third parties, such as promoters and venues and may take a little longer to look into.

We are grateful for your co-operation, as every effort is made to reach a satisfactory outcome for you. We will contact you with a response as soon as possible.

The gig’s tomorrow. So whatever happens, the outcome ain’t going to be satisfactory…

Sick Building

Posted: Tue 6 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Work-related | 1 Comment »

I can’t say I’m overly surprised to see that Barclaycard are closing their call centre in Manchester’s city centre.

When I (very briefly) worked there back in 2003 or so, it was a horrible place – built in the 50s/60s, with no air-conditioning or ventilation to speak of, with sides made of huge blocks of glass. In short, it was a sweatbox, and a demoralising one at that.

Updating the building would’ve cost millions, and probably still not been overly successful. So no, it’s not really a surprise.

Missing in Action 2

Posted: Tue 6 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services | 4 Comments »

Well, I’ve chased up the incompetent tossers at TicketMaster about the tickets for Nine Inch Nails tomorrow.

They’ve used a bunch of tosswad arseholes called SecureMail to deliver the tickets. SecureMail don’t have any on-line method of tracking deliveries, so that’s really fucking helpful. But when I spoke to them, they insisted the tickets had been delivered. In January. To our old address, despite having changed the address details with Ticketmaster in December. And apparently I signed for them. Which is really impressive, as I hadn’t been there during the week since October 1st, and we hadn’t even lived there for two months at that time.

And their response? Effectively, “Not our problem, we delivered the tickets”.

Just to the wrong address, to the wrong person. Great.

Hire and Return

Posted: Mon 5 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Travel | Leave a comment »

I took the rented Peugeot 407 back today – it’s been a good weekend, and all told that car had about 600 miles added to it, which it handled on one tank of diesel – not bad at all.

While I’ve enjoyed driving it, and it’s made my life a lot easier over the weekend, I have to say that I don’t think I’d actually buy one. I’m not even completely sure of why, which is annoying – it’s been a fun drive, and it’s a fantastic car, but something just didn’t click somehow. I wish I understood myself sometimes.

When I was at the office on Friday, I asked what they’d decided to let me play with this time, to which the answer was “Well, you’ve had the Laguna already, so we decided to give you this one instead.”

Anyway, when I took it back, they asked how it’d been. I said it’d been great fun, and was an enjoyable car to drive. At which point the guy smiled, and said “Yeah, we thought you’d like that one“.

I’ve been going there too often, obviously, but that really is some good customer service…

Missing in Action

Posted: Sat 3 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Music, Sweary | Leave a comment »

You know, I’m beginning to think I’m cursed when it comes to gigs – particularly at Brixton Academy.

Last time I was supposed to go, to see Massive Attack, it snowed, and I didn’t go.

This time, I’m supposed to be going to see Nine Inch Nails next Wednesday, only I haven’t yet received the ticket from cunty fucking Ticketmaster. Yeah, sure, I’ve moved since I ordered the tickets, but I’ve also registered that change of address with the useless bastards, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Yesterday it took me half an hour just to get to, fill in, and send the form to ask where my tickets are. I still haven’t heard back. Useless fuckers. The site has been ‘improved’ and now lags to chuff, blows up the browser, and is generally now just as broken as Ticketmaster’s ‘service’ in the first place. So I suppose that at least it’s representative…

So far, the odds of me seeing NIN are emphatically not good. I stand to be signally unimpressed…

Hiring

Posted: Sat 3 March, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Travel | Leave a comment »

Over the weekend, I’m going to be up in Nottinghamshire, and as we haven’t yet got round to buying Car 2 , I’m hiring one again.

No idea what I’ll get, but I’m sure it’ll be fun. And considering that I’ll be covering at least 350-400 miles, well, at least it’ll be in someone else’s car… Heh.

Update, once I’d collected the car : Ha! It’s a Peugeot 407. The thing’s fuckin’ gorgeous. It’s going to be a fun weekend.

Organising That Health-check

Posted: Sat 24 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Health, House Purchase | 1 Comment »

So yes, the healthcheck that finally happened on Friday was an utter nightmare to organise.

It started off with being told that I needed to sort one out, and that the insurance company had engaged a third party who would contact me to organise an appointment at my convenience.

Yeah, right. What actually happened was that the company called me up and said “We’ve made an appointment for one of our nurses to come and see you at home on Tuesday at 4pm”. Which is hardly at my convenience. So I called them back and told them so.

Them : “But why don’t you want an appointment at home on Tuesday at 4pm? We’ve made all the arrangements”
Me : “Because I’m not going to be at home at that time. I’ll be at work. If your company is willing to pay me to take half a day off work to come and see you, I might consider it”
Them : “No, we can’t do that. But we don’t understand what the problem is with this appointment, it’s at your home at 4pm”
Me : “Amazing as this may seem to you, I work. Maybe I’m the only person you’ve ever dealt with who works, but there we go. So 4pm on a weekday is not convenient. I’m home for about 7pm, if that helps”
Them : “Oh no, our nurses only work 9-5”.

At which point I ended up going back to the insurers and telling them they could stuff their business. The people they engaged would have problems discerning between an arse and an elbow, and there was no way I was using them. So they promised to organise something else, a proper medical at a proper doctor’s surgery. However, it would still be organised through a third party.

And then I got another call about a week later, from the first third party, still trying to make a ‘convenient’ appointment for me on a workday at 4pm, and which for an appointment ‘at my convenience’ was strangely immovable. This time they got told to sod off.

When the second third party finally called, the first thing they said was “So, you need an appointment in Norfolk?”. At which I think I growled. The woman at the other end certainly seemed surprised. I re-explained the situation (actually, that’s probably more like re-re-re-re-explained, but there we go), and they finally discovered a surgery that was close to the workplace. Halle-bloody-lujah.

But all told it’s still taken four weeks to organise a poxy medical. But if my blood-pressure is too high (I doubt it will be, but still) I’m going to blame it all on the poxy fucking insurance company and their medical third parties. So there.

Patronised

Posted: Fri 23 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Health | 2 Comments »

Ah, the joys of being patronised by medical ‘professionals’.
“Well, Mr Lyle, you’re really rather overweight, aren’t you?”

which really should get the response “Really? And there I was, hoping to climb Everest tomorrow“, instead of the one I gave, which was “Yes. And?“. To which the twat had no answer.

Amateur Hour

Posted: Wed 21 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related | 2 Comments »

As regular readers of D4D™ will have noticed by now, I absolutely hate working with bloody amateurs.

At the moment, the entire network at work has the stability of overcooked spaghetti, and completely dies with depressing regularity. By which I mean roughly every 20-25 minutes. No connection to network servers, no connection to the outside world, no nothing. Even when it is working, it’s still flakier than the Singing Detective, with particular gems including that (according to our system) the BBC News website doesn’t exist. Not even that it’s taking longer than usual to connect, but it just doesn’t exist.

And yet the IT support department insists there isn’t a problem.
“Oh, we’ve checked, and everything’s fine”
“So why can’t I connect to anything?”
“Um, dunno. But we’ve checked, and everything’s fine”

It’s driving me (and everyone else in the office) fuckin’ mental. And the IT Support (and their superiors that this is already being escalated to) have all the technical skills of yoghurt.

It’s going to be a very long day…

Holmes Place

Posted: Sat 17 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

You’d think I’d have had enough of Holmes Place over the last year – and you’d be right.

Yesterday, though, I got a call from the Wokingham gym, telling me that they’d been bought out by Virgin Active, and would I like to go for a free visit there, and take a partner with me?

Me : How blunt do you want me to be?
HP/VA Person : As blunt as you want. (Ooooh, that could’ve been a bad move…)
Me : OK then. I wouldn’t rejoin Holmes Place, regardless of who owns you. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone, even my worst enemy. In fact, I’d go so far as to actively encourage anyone thinking of joining to not do so.
HP/VA Person : Oh.
[there followed an explanation of all the old crap about contracts, HP being unable to provide a gym at all, and threatening me with a bailiff if I didn’t pay the entire remaining sum.]
Me : So overall, I wouldn’t trust HP as far as I can throw them, nor their new owners. And in my opinion, they’re scumbags.
HP/VA Person: OK, well, thank you for being so honest in your response.

Now, I have to say, I think that she actually handled the call really well, and there was nothing nasty about the entire thing. An apology would’ve been nice, but now I’m done with them, I know it’d be too late for one anyway – and so did she.

All the same, though, you’d think they might’ve taken me off their ‘to call’ list…

Wide Open Vista

Posted: Fri 16 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky | 1 Comment »

When it was released, I wrote a small post about why I had no intention of moving to MS Vista® – and from the news stories etc. that’ve followed on, I have to say I’m pretty cool with being right about it.

This piece from The Register demonstrates my case nicely.

The basic summary? Wait at least until Service Pack 1 is released.

Handwritten – an Update

Posted: Thu 1 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Security, Technology | 1 Comment »

About a week ago, I wrote about the cashpoint (ATM) machine with the handwritten notice on it – which (to my surprise) garnered no comments at all.

Anyway, walking past the same pair of machines today, I noticed that this time the same one was out of order, but had up the machine’s default “Out of service – please use another machine” message on the display. No handwritten sign was in evidence at all.

I wonder if anyone’s noticed yet that they lost money last week?

Vista?

Posted: Tue 30 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

So, today Microsoft launches its new Operating System, Vista™. Whoopee-Doo.

Will I be going for Vista™? Hell no – and there’s a few reasons why.

First of all, I’m just not one of those people who simply has to have the latest greatest newest versions. Hell, I only started using XP on my home computers last year. Until then, Windows 2000 had done me very nicely indeed, thank you. In fact, I still don’t like a lot of XPs ‘features’, although I’m getting used to them.

Secondly, as with every other Microsoft OS, the first release will be a bug-fest. It’ll be horrific, and it’ll piss off a lot of people – particularly those who’ve paid to be able to ‘upgrade’ (I use that term *very* loosely!) as soon as Vista is released, and then find that various odds and sods Just Don’t Work. In my opinion, you’re always best to wait ’til at least the first Service Pack has come out, which will fix most of the major bugs. But I also despise the Microsoft attitude where you pay for software, and are still effectively a beta-tester of the OS. That just sucks.

Thirdly, there’s all the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that’s built in to Vista – and that’s something I really object to. In fact, that’s a whole different rant, but basically why the hell should I have limitations on something I’ve bought, and decide I want to listen to on my PC, or MP3 player, or wherever – and why the hell would I buy a piece of software that enforces rights management on items I’ve legally paid for?

So, three good reasons why I have no intention of upgrading to Vista until its absolutely necessary for me to do so. Which, by my reckoning, will be somewhere around 2011.

Progressing : 2

Posted: Wed 24 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, House Purchase | Leave a comment »

So, we’ve now engaged a solicitor, and all that paperwork has gone off, including copies of all our ID. I know they need some kind of proof that we are who we say we are, but still, it seems a bit odd to be able to send copies of ID documents – surely that’s no real proof of existence?

Paperwork has been flying around the place – solicitors guff, estate agents guff, mortgage guff, insurance guff, and payment protection guff.

And we see the architect about our potential plans for the new place on Friday, which should be fun.

Also, supposedly the mortgage company sent out their valuing surveyor yesterday to check the place out, make sure that the building exists and so on. It’ll be interesting getting their report – I’ve paid £560 for a ‘Homebuyer survey’ so it should tell us about anything medium-to-major on the property.

So yes, things are coming through pretty smoothly so far.

Handwritten

Posted: Wed 24 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

In my opinion, some people just deserve to be ripped off.

Picture the scene – two cashpoint machines (ATMs to the Americans) side by side, in the wall of a bank. On one, a handwritten notice saying “This machine is out of order. Please use the other one.“. And the other machine has a queue of about six people using it, complaining that this one’s a bit dodgy too.

Me? Maybe I’m paranoid. But there’s no fucking way on earth, even if it were the only cashpoint in town, that I would use that machine. And it’s for the following reasons.

  1. It’s outside a bank, thus making people feel psychologically more secure. (“Oh, no-one would mess with this machine, it’s right outside the bank”)
  2. The notice is hand-written, you pillocks. Surely the bank would have either
    1. some pre-prepared properly printed notices
      or
    2. just turned the damn thing off, and let it display the ‘out of order’ notice
  3. The second machine is obviously slow, as there’s a queue
  4. People are audibly complaining that the second machine isn’t giving out money either

To me that’s a whole list of reasons that would generally add up to “this machine has been tampered with, and is currently recording your card details, and repeated attempts to type in your PIN” and as a result I just wouldn’t use it.

And let’s bear in mind, I’m talking about Cambridge. It’s not like there aren’t (quick mental tally) at least six other cash points within three minutes walk.

Like I said, some people just deserve to lose their money.

Warning Signs

Posted: Thu 11 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

I normally find some amusement from the warning signs and notices that currently seem to be appearing everywhere.

Yesterday, I was looking in the local M&S, and had a look at one of their prawn mayonnaise sandwiches. Impressively, it had the warning

May contain shellfish

What gets me, though, is the “May”. It’s a bloody prawn sandwich – if it doesn’t contain shellfish, I want to know why! After all, at that point really it’s just a mayonnaise sandwich.

Houses and Bureaucrats

Posted: Thu 11 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised | Leave a comment »

Over the last few days, we’ve seen a whole bundle of houses. There’s still two more tonight, one on Friday, and about another eight over the weekend. By the end of that, though, I’m kind of hoping we’ve found a couple that we really like.

Actually, that’s not fair – we’ve already found one that we both really like: it’s just that it’s got a lot of questions around it. And that’s the problem – finding the answers to those questions is going to involve the local church diocese and the local council’s planning department.

In short, fucking bureaucrats.

I’ve already been waiting two days for the tosspots in the diocese to come back to me – if they haven’t contacted me by lunchtime today I’m going to chase them up again. As for the council (coincidentally, the council I nearly ended up working for) I’ve spoken to their ‘Customer Contact Centre’, who told me that I can’t speak to the planning department on the phone, everything has to be in writing.

Which, as an indicator of the future, isn’t all that promising. Still, I’ve emailed them now, and we’ll see just how long it takes the tossers to come back with any form of answer. Although I suspect that the answer will take the form of

Don’t know, don’t care. Next question

Waiting

Posted: Tue 9 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic | Leave a comment »

Today I’m working from home, waiting for a couple of deliveries. Both are furniture-size, although small-furniture, so it should be OK.

Of course, they’ve given no indication whatsoever of what time they’ll arrive. It could be anytime between 9am and 6pm.

Oh yes, and even though it’s all coming from the same place, for some godforsaken reason it’s going to be two deliveries, unless common sense has broken out at the despatch department. And let’s be honest, what’re the odds of that? (Low to sod-all, in my humble opinion)

Still, it does mean I get to be at home doing some work, instead of sat in the office.

DVLA

Posted: Mon 8 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Festering Season | 1 Comment »

Since we moved, I’d kind of forgotten (and it worked out for the good, as I needed to rent a car during December anyway) to send off my driving licence in order to get the address changed on it.

Anyway, I sent it off between Christmas and New Year, and it came back on Saturday, all well and good.

I think it’s pretty impressive, to have taken less than a week to get the address changed and both parts of the licence returned within a week even during the Festering Season.

Out of Office

Posted: Fri 5 January, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Weirdness, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Sometimes the habits of recruiters and agencies just completely amaze me.

I got an email at about 7pm last night from a recruiter about a web-development job based in York. Now, OK, I’m not interested in it (for many – and obvious – reasons) but I figure that if they’re still trying to put me in jobs in York, perhaps it’s an agency I haven’t updated (in two years) about my current situation/location. The job’s a fairly urgent start, with interviews next Tuesday and Wednesday.

So I send a reply email – to the email sent just last night, remember – with an updated CV attached, and get an “out of office” response to it.

I’m out of the office until Wednesday 10th January

So – spot the flaw in this – you’re advertising a job for interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday, but you’re not back in the office ’til Wednesday?

Bizarre.

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