Posted: Fri 25 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Weirdness, Work-related |
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…
Posted: Fri 25 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Work-related |
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…
Posted: Wed 16 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, Customer Services, Cynicism, Health |
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.
Posted: Tue 15 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Own Business, Work-related |
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.
Posted: Fri 11 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, News, Own Business, Work-related |
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.
Posted: Tue 8 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related |
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…
Posted: Mon 7 January, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Weirdness |
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
- be using the site more often
- 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.