Slack Selling
Posted: Sun 25 January, 2009 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 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 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 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 :
- You’re contacting me even though I opted out of being contacted
- It now looks like the choice is
- Opt in
- 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 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 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 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
- One was for an accident that we’d just driven past, and that was obviously extremely recent. For that, I used 999
- 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.
- 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.