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…

Facebook

Posted: Sun 9 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky | Leave a comment »

Recently, I signed on with Facebook. I’m not going to link to my profile, as it’s been related to my company email, and is on that side of my life rather than the Lyle side.

But I have to say, Jesus I fucking hate it. Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s one of the most unusable and non-instinctive pieces of crap it’s been my misfortune to come across in quite a while. Maybe as a techie I just see the downside, or expect too much. But God, I hate the site.

Then again, I said the same about MySpace too.

Ban It?

Posted: Thu 6 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Yesterday’s “big” news every time I listened was about doctors calling for cage fighting to be banned. Now, while I have absolutely no desire to see a cage fight, I don’t think it should be banned. I feel much the same way about boxing.

In both cases, while the sport is legal, it’s known about. It has support, medical personnel in attendance, rules, and a certain degree of protection and protective gear.

If the fights were to be banned, they wouldn’t stop. They’d just go underground, with no medical support, in illegal spaces, and would just be far more dangerous than the current legal situation. And I suspect that it would cause far more serious injuries – and/or deaths – if it all became illegal.

Personally, I hate boxing and fighting. But I would still far rather it were legal, and to some degree safe, than to see it banned. And that’s what the doctors calling for the ban haven’t thought about at all.

Braindead

Posted: Tue 4 September, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Over the last six weeks or so, I’ve been driving from home to work on pretty much a daily basis. It’s given me a lot more freedom time-wise, particularly while we’ve been in the time crunch of heavy workloads while preparing for the site launch and so on.

Since we launched the main site last week, I was supposed to be going back to using the train. I even picked up my season-ticket pass thing.

And then I got halfway to work, hit a traffic jam on the poxy single-carriageway bit of the A11 (which I’ve written about several times before) and thought:

“Bollocks. I was going to get the train.”

The joys of mental autopilot…

Vindicated

Posted: Wed 29 August, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Cynicism, Work-related | 2 Comments »

Is it wrong to feel slightly smug?

Over the last six weeks, things have been going mental with the site redesign at work, and lots of hours have been put in. The preceding three months have involved me doing a lot of work on the back-end of the site, while others have been faffing with design, wireframes, ideas, and the like. One person in particular has been doing sod-all, but making out they’re the centre of all the work.

In the last six weeks, they’ve been banging on about how all their stuff is done – but it hasn’t been checked in to the version control system, so no-one else has been able to see what they’ve done. And during that time, all my work – and all the work that the other people on the team – has been checked in, visible to all, tested, and done way ahead of deadline. And all the way through, I’ve been saying that the person hasn’t done what they’ve said, and that things will go horribly wrong – each time to be told by others that I’m too cynical, that of course they’ve done what they said, and blah, blah, blah.

So on Friday and today, the day before everything goes live, they’ve been complaining that things ‘suddenly’ don’t work, and it’s turned out that the relevant sections done by this one person have gone horribly wrong, and aren’t actually anywhere even close to completed. In fact, it’s being questioned whether any valid work at all has been done. Everything has turned into a last-minute panic for those sections, and the person has been working all weekend to complete them – as well as working ’til very late tonight.

And it’s been acknowledged that actually, my cynicism was accurate.

So yes, I feel slightly smug. And really rather vindicated. It’s a good feeling.

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…

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