2016’s Smaller Target
Posted: Thu 1 September, 2016 Filed under: 2015/16, 2016/17, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, London, Thoughts, Travel, Weigh Less Leave a comment »Following on from my decision about next year, and doing the Shine Moonlight Marathon (which is a much better name than the Night Walk, IMHO) I’ve also set myself a smaller challenge for completion by the end of 2016.
You guessed it, I’m going to walk a half-marathon distance. Not sponsored or owt (although if I do it, I might just chuck some money Cancer Research’s way anyway) but a bit of a reality check, a “can I do this?”. I know the answer to that is “yes”, but it’ll be interesting to have some quantifiable evidence of it before I plunge into doing the full 26-and-a-bit miles.
I’ve certainly done days with more than 13 miles of walking, so this plan should be utterly doable. Indeed, it might even be easier than usual, if it’s done in one dollop rather than two 5-ish mile walks interspersed with breaks, food, stopping/starting, standing in queues etc. I don’t know – and that’s why I want to find out.
It’ll also hopefully give me a rough outline of the time to aim for on the full event. I’ve got a target time in mind, but again want to check whether that’s even vaguely feasible when faced with reality.
I’ll write more about it once it’s been done, but it’s definitely a goal for now…
2017’s Big Target
Posted: Tue 30 August, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Health, London, Thoughts, Travel, Weigh Less, Weight Loss Leave a comment »This year, I’ve missed out on having a big thing to aim at. (Oooer, missus) The last couple of years, I’ve done Marie Curie’s “Walk to Remember”, an evening 10km walk around a random local-ish stately home, which have been fun, and suited me really well. However, this year they decided to not organise them.
I did sign up this year for the challenge to climb the stairs of the Gherkin in London, but I ended up chickening out of it in the fact of saner voices and already-dodgy knees (No, not dodgyknees the Greek philosopher)
Anyway, although I’ve been doing a lot of walking this year, I’ve missed having a target, a thing to aim for at some point. So I’ve pretty much decided on what my plan will be for 2017. It’s a big one, so there’ll actually be some preparation in the meantime.
So – my challenge for 2017 will be Shine’s Night Walk – an overnight walk of marathon distance in Central London. That’s 26.25 miles, or 41 km, so it’s significantly longer than the distances I usually walk. I can (and do) easily cover 20km in a day when I’m in London or whatever, but I will be aiming at doing more (and longer) walks between now and then, getting used to the durations and distances. I’m pretty sure I could do the walk right now, but I think I’d hurt quite a bit the day after, and I don’t want that to be the case in a year’s time.
So yes, that’s the plan. I can’t sign up for it yet (this year’s one hasn’t been done yet) but will do as soon as I can. In the meantime, I can start getting my ass in gear, now I’ve got a plan in mind.
Advertising Standards
Posted: Sat 27 August, 2016 Filed under: Advertising, Bad Ads, Customer Services, Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Loyalty Schemes, Marketing, OpenTable, Pedantry, Solo Dining, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »With the whole “Solo Dining” project I’ve been doing this year, one of my bugbears has become OpenTable (who provide a lot of the table-reservation services for restaurants) and – more particularly – their “Dining Points” loyalty plan.
As it says on that page about Dining Points,
OpenTable UK members can earn OpenTable Dining Points when they make and honor reservations made through opentable.com, or our related mobile sites and apps.
They say the same thing on another modal window to explain Dining Points.
“Earn points every time you dine”
Except that’s not true – not true at all. I queried why I’d received zero points for several reservations over the last year, and they then started to say (and this is a direct quote from one of the responses)
points are only given to diners who start their search on our website and not the restaurants website as you know. This is because as you came from the restaurant website, you are considered a customer of the restaurant and they use our services on the back end to take your reservation for them. If we started awarding points to the customers of our clients they would feel that we are trying to steal you as a customer.
So OpenTable are, frankly, liars. They say clearly throughout the site “make a booking through OpenTable, and get points“, with no provisos, asterisks, or get-out clauses. This isn’t even me being pedantic about something – they’ve said something (repeatedly, in black-and-white!) that’s simply not true.
This would’ve been an easy fix for OpenTable, if they’d had any sense at all. If they’d said “Oh, sod, sorry, here, have the points, and we’ll make that text clearer“, we’d be done. But no, they started backtracking, patronising, and explaining why I was so wrong to believe their “Get points every time you book” spiel. No apology, no “thanks for letting us know“, nothing. All the customer-service skills of a concrete monolith.
Having hit that concrete monolith with no joy, I decided to take it further. Having checked their criteria, I raised it with the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) and I’ve now had a confirmation from them that, having done an initial review, they’re going to investigate it further.
So, that’s going to be entertaining. I’m assuming that getting an ASA investigation done isn’t a trivial step, nor one that the ASA do for the fun of it. I’m also assuming that, because they’re investigating, the complaint has at least some merit.
As and when I hear back, I’ll write more here…
Early Justifications
Posted: Thu 25 August, 2016 Filed under: Customer Services, Day Trips, Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Gigs, Introspective, Kindle, London, Personality, Punctuality, Reading, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Whenever I’m going somewhere, whether to meet friends, or just for a timed event, I tend to be pretty early. Stupidly early, in some cases – mainly because I just figure “Well, once I’m there, I can find something to do“. At worst, I have a Kindle and a phone, so I’ll always be able to do something with that time.
I don’t expect others to follow the same thing, though – that’s just a world of hurt, because then I’d still be earlier than the expected early time, and it can get stupid. (I have one friend who’s of a similar mind-set, and we ended up being – unconsciously – competitively early for a while, ’til we realised it was just getting dumb)
Sometimes, though, it turns out that there’s a good reason for being early to things. Saturday was one of those times.
I was going in to London for a concert in the evening, and then booked a lunch at Hibiscus as well. My plan was to park up at an Underground station I knew well, Tube into Central London (well, kinda – I still wanted to walk as well), go for lunch, wander around London a bit/lot, get back up to the concert venue, meet up with another friend, go to the gig, and then get back to the car and drive us both home. That plan survived until the first stage…
What I hadn’t realised was that the Northern Line (the only line from the station in question) was shut for the weekend. No trains at all. Of course, London Underground being the useless shitbricks they are, there were no signs at the entrance to the station or car-park, so I’d paid for parking (fortunately only £2 for the day), walked into the station, to be faced with “Nope, no trains”. The useless bell-end outside had no idea how I’d get back from the gig at all – well, he suggested taking no less than four buses, at midnight on Saturday-into-Sunday. So that was no use.
But, I’m well early at this point. So it’s time for a replan. Drive down to the concert venue, find somewhere close-ish to park, and juggle things from there.
And that’s what happened. Drive down (only about four miles, in fairness) and find a side-road with parking. Permits only, but only Monday-Friday. It’s a Saturday, so I’ll go for that. Check the parking meter. Nope, that Mon-Fri only too. Double-check with the online-app for paying, and nope, can’t take any money for that parking, sir.
Then start walking to find where the hell I am – I know I’m closeish, but not exactly where – turn the corner, and oh look, there’s the venue. Literally two minutes, car-to-venue. Wander past to find a bus into central London, oh look, there’s one that’ll do it, hop on, and job done.
That entire re-plan and reorganisation, and I was still at Hibiscus 45 minutes early…
So sometimes there’s a really good reason for being idiotically early to things. If I’d been cutting things fine already, that change would’ve completely chiffed me for the day, and been uber-stressful all the way. As it was, it was still an absolute doddle, and everything went well.
Indeed, it actually made life easier – because coming out of the gig, we were in the car and out of London before we’d probably have even got to the original station…
Four Down, Two To Go
Posted: Thu 18 August, 2016 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Customer Services, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts 2 Comments »Over the weekend, it was four years since my bankruptcy was declared.
That means I’m two-thirds of the way through the process now, although really all that remains is waiting for it to come off my record. All the rest is done.
As evidenced in a previous post, it still has knock-on effects, but that was expected. I never went into the process thinking it was a quick fix, or that everything would be rosy straight afterwards. I’d done my research, and knew the effects.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I expect to be dismissed out-of-hand for having been through this process, and still having it on my record. Paradoxically, I don’t mind being dismissed out-of-hand if the company in question is open and honest about it – if they say “We won’t accept [x], because you’ve got that on your record” then fine. I get that. It’s when I’m lied to about it that it annoys, or when they try blaming someone else. “Oh, your credit score isn’t good enough“, “You haven’t passed our criteria, but try again in six months” and so on. That shit isn’t on – tell me it’s because I’ve been a twat in the past, and that’s fine. Try passing the buck on it, or leading with false expectations, you’re a tosser. It really is that simple.
As time goes on, though, it’s all rebuilding nicely. And that’s the end goal, really – just being back on an even keel, with nothing owed to anyone.
Quiet, Because Busy
Posted: Sat 13 August, 2016 Filed under: BurgerCrawl, D4D™, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Films, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Getting Organised, London, Single Life, Solo Dining, Travel Leave a comment »It’s been a quiet week chez D4D™, although that’s primarily been because life has been idiotically busy instead. In fact, all of August and September are ridiculous, with very little in the way of spare time. Weekday evenings are (generally, kinda/sorta) available, but weekends and so on are completely blocked out.
Last weekend was spent in London on the Saturday (including food at Benares, which was excellent) and then meeting friends on the Sunday. During the week I was then at the cinema one evening, back in London on another, and handling all the standard domestic tat in the meantime – as well as work, which wasn’t an easy week, with lots of rewrites and rethinks of stuff that had been written a while back.
This weekend, today was spent (again) in London, visiting Blues Kitchen and MeatMarket, and then seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Garrick Theatre. Tomorrow is likely to be a daytrip somewhere, and walking round or whatever.
From here, there’s another meal (this time at Hibiscus) and then a concert, a birthday event, and the Threepenny Opera at the National.
September is even dafter, including : Meatopia, watching The The’s “Infected” film, and seeing The Alchemist and Doctor Faustus – both at the Barbican, so I’m there three weeks on the trot, as I’ll use their parking for Meatopia as well. Finally, at the end of September, I actually have a week away, down in Cornwall. Much-needed currently, it has to be said.
I’ll be writing more stuff here to be going on with, but that’s why it’s been quiet round these parts over the last week or so.
Descriptions vs. Reality
Posted: Wed 3 August, 2016 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Food, Getting Organised, Solo Dining Leave a comment »I’ve written several times about some of the restaurant stuff I’ve been doing this year – and I now have my bookings sorted through to October – but there’s been one thing that’s bugging me, which I addressed a bit yesterday.
Some of the restaurants use OpenTable for their booking system – which is understandable, it must make life a lot easier to have all that side handled by someone else.
OpenTable offer a “points” system, so that after a certain number of meals booked through themselves, one can get a discount card/voucher etc. They specify it as “points with every booking made through Open Table”…
They say the same in two different places on the site
Only that’s not actually how it works. I’ve made several bookings – and honoured them by going to the restaurants and having the meals – and earned a grand total of sod-all from them.
So yesterday – having made yet another zero points booking – I got in touch with them, asking how they justified saying “Every booking gets points” when it was so blatantly untrue.
Initially they came back saying “Oh, that’s only for bookings directly through OpenTable, not for when you’ve come through from another site”. So I tried another booking for the same restaurant, but direct through the site. Lo and behold, still zero points. So I got back in touch, and basically said “Bullshit“, with added screenshots and history to show the progress.
I’ve now had a further reply that can be summed up as “Oh shit. Yeah, there’s been a problem. We’re looking into it“.
It’ll be interesting to see if things do get fixed. For now, my account has been credited with the missing points, and we’ll see what happens with the upcoming bookings as well (the next one is happening this weekend) but at least they’re now aware of the problem.