Lookalike

Is it just me, or is there a serious resemblance between Edwina Currie and the photo of Rihab Rashid Taha in this story about the fact she’s likely to be released from US custody?

I bet they’re never seen in the same room…

One of those days

All morning waiting for the British Gas engineer – arriving sometime between 8am and 1pm, so that was nice and precise. Turns out, the utter tossers at BG had sent not an engineer to check the meter, but a moron to read it. Not what had been arranged at all. Cue Lyle the Orbital.

They’re now going back over the call-tape (anyone want to bet it’s been “mislaid”?) to see what the tosspot actually said. We’ve already established that while he was calling the person an engineer, he was actually intending to send a meter-reader, as the customer gets charged for an engineer visit, whether they find anything or not. British Gas are in a win-win on that one, they don’t lose money, and instead it means that customers don’t actually save a frigging thing unless their bill has been overcharged by more than £100 in the first place. Yup, roughly £100 for an engineer visit. It’s no fucking wonder most people simply end up accepting being overcharged by the tossers.

So – can anyone recommend a better gas/electric supplier?

It’s Back

Welcome back little Blogroll, with your red stars for updated sites. It’s been odd while you were up the creek, but now you appear to be back, and so I shall now have to find new things to complain about.

Shouldn’t be a challenge.

Nightmare Site

I’ve just booked a thery test with the Driving Standards Agency. Jesus christ, what an utterly nightmarish site. Just to start with, it’s an IE-Only site – not for any good reason, just that whoever created the abortion didn’t know any better. To book the test then involves no less than three new pop-up windows (which should be forbidden as of October 1st when the new Disability Discrimination rulings come into law – I’m not sure they will be, but they certainly should be) and quarter of an hour of my time – and that’s on a serious internet connection, rather than dial-up. An utter piece of shit.

Still, it’s all booked now, so there we go.

Trains again

I’m sorry to have to post yet again about Virgin Trains, but last night’s journey was spectacular for one reason. For the first time ever, I was on a train where the driver went the wrong way.

Birmingham New Street station is (like most stations) a straight-through job. Reading can be weird, because you do reverse your journey if you’re going on from there – which is always amusing in itself, watching idiots panic as the train pulls away going in the direction it just came from. But I digree. BNS is a straight-through station.

So it was a bit disconcerting to pull away from it last night going in the direction we’d come in from. Leamington Spa – Birmingham New Street – Wolverhampton does not involve going back towards Coventry. Well, unless you’re the driver we had last night.

It took them about 10-15 minutes to realise too. So we ended up seeing BNS twice. I’d seen Stockport three fucking times on the way down, although that was supposedly intentional. This one was just a cock-up.

Quite scary too, really. You’d think someone would have figured it out – not just the driver, but also the signalling staff. And what would’ve happened if another train had been coming towards us as we “left” BNS? The mind boggles.

Harridan

Do you ever have those days where it feels like all you’re doing is nagging and chasing people up in order to get them to do the stuff they’d actually promised to do already? That’s what my day is like today.

I’ve had to chase up the contractors who are supposed to be checking a couple of useful things in the house, (like gas supply, and making sure that the waste pipe in the bathroom isn’t utterly chuffed, and just needs to be repaired/replaced at the joint) another plumber for a quote that he should’ve done three weeks ago, the bank regarding a double-charge that stuck me over the overdraft limit (In a surreal moment they stopped a £10 direct debit that would’ve made me overdrawn, and then – um – charged me £30 for doing so, thus sending me £20 more overdrawn than the original direct debit would have done. I absolutely loathe banks.) and a couple of other minor chuff-ups (including still sending certain bits of post to the address I haven’t lived in for a year), British Gas to ensure that the engineer who’s supposed to be coming tomorrow is actually going to do so, and finally BT to check why they’ve suddenly decided I’m on paperless e-billing when I’ve always told them I don’t want that because they’re inefficient as shit anyway and I prefer to check what they’ve screwed up.

In fact, the only pearl today so far is Photobox who’ve yet again managed to receive my order by 10am and send it out by 11am. Isn’t it sad when you’re actually impressed that someone/anyone can simply provide the service that they say they can?

Paralympics

I’ve been really pleased this year to see the BBC showing the Paralympics as well as the standard Olympics. It’s been avoided like the plague for so many years, and finally they seem to be doing the right thing.

Even better, according to the Guardian (You may need free registration to see the page, I’m not sure) it’s pulling in 2 million viewers, 12% of the available audience at the time. Superb stuff.