Business Banking – some more thoughts.

Posted: Thu 9 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Own Business, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Over the last week or so I’ve been busy getting together the literature I need for figuring out which bank I’m most likely to go with for business banking. Previously I’ve used Royal Bank of Scotland, but I’m trying to avoid that bunch of shyster twunts this time round. Well, kind of.

Anyway, the three candidates in the running are:

  • Nat West (Sister company of RBS, but hopefully better)
  • HSBC
  • Barclays

Yes, there are others I could choose to check out too, but frankly I wouldn’t trust Lloyds TSB as far as I could chuck the rubble of one of their branches, and most of the building society clowns don’t do business banking at all. (And in Halifax’s case I wouldn’t use themn out of principle, due to their abysmal adverts, even if they did do business banking)

I still need to figure out best deals and so on (and at the moment Nat West are coming out tops on that one, with 18months of free business banking) and get it all worked out in my head, but it has to be said that on gut feel alone, Nat West are at the top of the list.

Barclays, on the other hand, are at the bottom. I went in there, did a bit of initial paperwork, and then “because their business advisors are so busy with existing customers” had to call away to a national call-centre to book an appointment with a business advisor. In the same branch I was in. So rather than walk upstairs, or place an internal phone call, they’ve called a national number to sort it all out centrally. For some strange reason I don’t find that to be a reassuring state of affairs…

Rubbish and Recycling

Posted: Wed 8 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Green, Thoughts | 3 Comments »

Over the last year or two I’ve got more and more into being Green, recycling as much as possible, and all that eco-friendly gubbins.

A lot of our recycling is collected by the local council, who have a bizarre timescale involving collecting the recycling once a fortnight, garden waste once a fortnight, and domestic household rubbish once a week. In light of this, it’s sometimes interesting for me to look at what’s being collected from other houses, and how much recycling waste they accumulate as opposed to just chucking it all in the bin to be collected weekly.

And the simple result is that most people do just chuck it all in the standard bin, despite the provision of recycling collection bins/tubs etc. Since we started doing the recycling properly, we normally chuck away one bag of “normal” domestic rubbish a week. That’s it. All the rest is recyclable.

I think that probably the best basic way to get people recycling in our area is to swap things around again. Collect the recycling every week, and the household rubbish fortnightly. That way you’re making it harder for people to just chuck it away, and instead making it “easier” to recycle instead.

Now I “just” need to figure out a way to persuade the local council that this is a better way to do things. What’re the chances?

Driving Ability

Posted: Tue 7 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Since starting work with the current company back in June last year, I’ve been able to look out over a junction that – it seems – causes utter confusion to drivers. It looks (very roughly) like this…

traffic diagram

In effect, it’s part of a one-way system, and all traffic (except buses) should turn left. However, the buses can go straight on, and this is part of what seems to cause the confusion. Drivers see the road going straight on, and just follow it. They don’t look at the signs saying “no entry” and “you must go left”, because the road goes straight on, so that must be the way they go.

I reckon I see at least five to ten cars per day make this mistake.

Going the other way, cars can go straight on, but aren’t allowed to turn right. However, again I see at least ten cars per day turning right where they’re not supposed to, and across the flow of traffic.

Of course, there’s also the huge number of pedestrians who are either blind, handicapped, or just don’t look for traffic at all, expecting that they have some kind of right-of-way across busy roads full of fuckwits who don’t notice road-signs, let alone people. The sheer number of times I see cars having to pull up to let people cross the road is just astonishing.

I don’t know if Wokingham is just a moron-magnet, or whether this is indicative of the way people drive, but either way it a) makes for scary viewing, but b) is great for the comedy when people fuck up and get yelled at by all and sundry…

Local Public Transport

Posted: Mon 6 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Travel | Leave a comment »

While we’re away, the Mother-In-Law (well, almost in-law) is looking after the house. One of the things I had to do before she arrived was to sort out timetables for the local buses and trains.

Now, the train bit is no problem, and the timetables are always at the station. So that was fine.

The bus situation, however, is a bit different. When I went to the bus station, which always used to have an office where you could pick up timetables, it turns out that they’ve decided it’s more economical to not bother with that, and simply have the timetable p on the bus stands, wrapped in plastic. In other words, you can’t get a copy of a timetable to take away with you. Well chuff me, that’s helpful, isn’t it?

In fact, you have to either get a timetable online (and do they do timetables in PDF format so you can at least get one easily? Do they fuck-as-like) or you have to ring them or email them and get one sent out. Which is OK if you’re organised and getting this kind of thing sorted in advance. But what happens when you’re just wanting to find out when the next bus is? In short, you’re knackered.

And then they wonder why less people are using the sodding service. I sometimes wonder if First Bus haven’t made the executive decision that actually they’d be able to run a decent service if only they could stop people being inconvenient and actually wanting to use it.

Retrograde

Posted: Sun 5 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Work-related | 3 Comments »

Over the last couple of weeks, work has become really shitty. Since the old CEO (a remarkably decent person) left, The Arsehole (the other main board member, excluding all the venture capital people) has been brought back in. Over the last six months, Decent Person (DP) had been fighting with The Arsehole about lots of business aspects, basically because The Arsehole just didn’t like the way it was all working, and didn’t see the point in things not going his way.

In the last two weeks, DP has pretty much been made into a non-person, and all his decisions and ideas have been reversed. Effectively, the company is back to where it was when I joined last June – hardly a great morale-builder. The work I’ve been doing has been shelved, as The Arsehole doesn’t see the point in it, and so I’ve been working on scut-work taking out the shit that amateurs have put in all the other company e-commerce sites. (Put it this way, I’m sick of the sight of <font> (and even <FONT>) tags) Supposedly this is essential work.

The main company website was revamped at the start of the year with content and approval from DP. The old site was a masterpiece of bullshit, listing at least six products that we don’t do, never have done, and are never likely to do. It was a fucking horror, about as accessible as a locked safe wrapped in concrete, and was generally just bad, bad, bad. The redone site took up 10% of the space of the old one, loaded five times faster, was accessible to everything, and was standards-compliant. Excellent stuff.

You’ve guessed it. The Arsehole has resurrected the old site, doesn’t give a shit about accessibility (His phrase “Blind people won’t be interested in a site/company like ours, so why bother?” sums it up.) or anything else. I’m almost tempted to blether out the site location to a few militant people I know, just to get the fuckhead sued. But I won’t. For now.

Of course, all this is going a long way towards fuelling my drive for sorting out my own sites and business. I’m going to do a lot of letter-writing and so on while I’m on holiday, and see if I can drum up some decent levels of business. We’ll see.

Away

Posted: Sat 4 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic | Leave a comment »

Yes, yet again we’re off on our travels. This time we’re spending a week in the Lake District, along with Hound.

Quite why the place we’ve rented only does Friday to Friday bookings I don’t know, but that’s the way it is. So we’re off from today, and new nice fresh posts will start happening again on the 11th or so. In the meantime, I’ve written a few posts that’ll appear over the next week, so it’ll still be business as semi-usual while we’re away.

Have fun!

Cold Feet

Posted: Fri 3 March, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

On a day that is, in short, fucking freezing, what on earth would make someone decide to walk to work in sandals?

(I should point out, this was something left over in my head from the other day, when it was attempting to snow first thing in the morning, and was bloody cold, but I spotted one person at the train station who was walking around in sandals. Madness)

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