Staying in Business
Posted: Mon 13 October, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary 1 Comment »Sometimes I wonder how some companies stay in business at all. I’ve recently had two perfect examples of this.
1. Three months ago, I ordered something from a bunch of shysters called Urban Junkie. When it hadn’t turned up after a month, I chased them up, and on the third chase-up, finally got a response.
“I have checked your order, unfortunately the item has gone out of stock and is not due back in for a few more weeks. No payment has ben taken and we fully understand if you wish to cancel due to the delay.
Sorry for the inconvenience.”
And that’s been it. Two more months and no word at all.
So I’ve cancelled the order.
2. Back when I was using the bunch of shyster twunts known as Parasol IT (I’ve now had £1800 of tax refunds for two consecutive tax years because of Parasol’s inefficiency – that’s £150 per month for two years that they were fucking up) I also got a stakeholder pension through one of their related companies.
Since leaving Parasol, I’ve told Parasol Financials on no less than four occasions that I’ve left Parasol, and need the details of the pension so I can keep on paying in to it. Last week they called, denied having ever heard from me about leaving Parasol (although that soon changed once I forwarded them copies of the emails, and replies to them) and getting quite snotty.
The snottiness changed when I then asked them to send me details, and asked what address they held for me. And (again despite repeated updates from me to them) the address was still the one in fucking Bracknell. From two years ago. Useless twats.
So yes, needless to say, I think I’ll be pulling the pension out from Parasol Financial’s control ASAP.
Really, you just have to wonder how organisations like these stay in business, don’t you?
Swearage
Posted: Sat 21 July, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, D4D™, Sweary Leave a comment »Every so often, I realise that my swearing is becoming too commonplace, and it’s losing any useful impact or utility. It’s not a process I’m conscious of in general, but I do always suddenly get to a point where I think “that’s too much, it’s getting boring now.”
So I’m now going to cut it right back down again – I was going to cut it out completely, but there’s a big project at work that’s due for a deadline of the end of August, so there’s no chance of it being a complete cut-out.
But the plan is that I’ll be cutting it right back down from now, but definitely for the entire of August. It also means that I get to play (yet again) with new swear-words to replace the old standards, and that is almost as much fun in its own right.
Updating
Posted: Fri 20 July, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Geeky, Sweary 7 Comments »One thing I do very irregularly is update software. A case in point is iTunes. Or “Fucking iTunes”, as it’s known in this house.
Now fair enough, I get why a program can’t be running while it upgrades itself. That’s fine. It makes sense.
But in the name of all that’s fucking holy, why the blue blazing shit does iTunes need to shut down Fucking Microsoft Outlook while it upgrades?!? I could understand (ish) restarting a web browser. But email? (And yes, before any techie spod gets a hold on this one, I know poxy Outlook uses the IE rendering engine for HTML emails – well , until Outlook’07, anyway – but that’s a rant for another day. Oh yes.)
Even more annoying, if I tell it to “Ignore” the problem with Outlook, it goes back, tries again – and still insists that Outlook gets shut down. Apple has the funniest fucking perspective on the word “Ignore”, doesn’t it?
And then, not content with fucking about with poxy bloody email, once the upgrade is over and done with, it tells me it also needs to restart the entire fucking PC. Why?!?
And when all’s said and done, what sits there in the fucking system tray again? Oh yes, it’s Quicktime. Which I drop from the system tray every bastard time, because it’s a system-hungry piece of shit that doesn’t pissing bastard well need to be running every time I start the PC. If I want a fucking Quicktime movie to play, I’ll wait the extra ten bloody seconds for the fucking thing to start. That’s fine. I don’t care. But stop running in my fucking system tray all the time, you bastard piece of crap.
And then people reckon I should buy an iPod as well. Fucking Apple. I wouldn’t touch their hardware with a syphilitic leper’s dick.
Two Titled
Posted: Sat 30 June, 2007 Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary, Thoughts Leave a comment »I’ve mentioned before that I’m quite a fan of the books by Richard Morgan – I’ve read (and re-read) all of his stuff so far: Altered Carbon, Woken Furies, Broken Angels, and Market Forces.
So I was fairly high on the purchase list for the new novel, Black Man, and read it when I received it.
Between ordering Black Man a while back, and the time it (finally) got delivered, I noticed that there was another Richard Morgan novel coming out – also in hardback, but two months later than Black Man. This one was called ‘Thirteen’ (Or ‘Th1rte3n’, if you believe the typography) so, like the fanboy I so obviously am, I ordered that too. Great, two novels in a short time – that explains the delay in releasing Black Man, and how long it’s taken the new stuff to come out.
I received ‘Thirteen’ (sorry, I just can’t be arsed with the typographical nancing about) yesterday. And it turns out it’s just ‘Black Man’ with a different title and cover.
To me that’s a pretty scummy way to do things. I don’t know if it’s been decided that ‘Black Man’ is a title that won’t sell, or something. But I would have thought it better to have some form of notification that it was actually a rebranded title, rather than alienating Morgan’s readers, and making the book purchasers feel like shit-for-brains arsehats who’ve been taken for a ride and bought two copies of the same fucking book.
Mood Change
Posted: Wed 18 April, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, MOTB, Sweary 2 Comments »While MOTB may now be officially over, I notice that still there is nothing that changes my mood from OK (if “Oh God it’s early”) to Growl quicker than some stupid little smeghead cunt cycling up behind me on the path and ringing their bell in order to make me get out of the way.
In fact, it’s like flipping a switch. One little *ting* from that bell and Bastard returns, slowing down, making sure that the shit-for-brains arsewipe fucker behind me can’t get past.
In the end I didn’t quite slow down enough for them to fall off their bike, but they had to go off the path and onto the road in order to get past. And didn’t quite dare yell anything at me, as they’d been in the wrong anyway. (not that that appears to matter to Cambridge cyclists most of the time)
Really quite satisfying.
Mondeo Man.
Posted: Wed 21 March, 2007 Filed under: Getting Organised, Sweary, Travel 2 Comments »The car? Oh, that’s fine. The drive both to and from Devon was fine, and there’ve been no problems with it at all.
Well – that’s not strictly true, but the two problems we did have were so minor, it’s hardly worth commenting on. But all the same, I will…
First, the power-socket (AKA Cigarette lighter, except neither of us smokes, so it’s just a power socket) in the centre console was knackered, and I didn’t realise. Obviously it’s one of those things, and the car’s three years old, so hey ho. But we didn’t realise until the TomTom satnav started bleating that its battery was low, once we’d done a six hour drive with it plugged in to the power socket. Oops.
Still, it’s been fixed now (a quick visit to the local Ford dealership, and one fuse later, all sorted) so that should be fine. That little bit may eventually need replacing, if it keeps on coming adrift (it was loose as well as no power going to it) but for now it should be fine. Even better, it somehow didn’t cost me anything – not quite sure how that worked out, but hey ho, I won’t complain.
Second, well, we got stuck on a single-track road in Devon, and I had to reverse the car back down to the nearest passing place. (the other driver was in a Ford Ka, and obviously far more local, but wasn’t going to move one fucking jot) Unused to the length of the car, I got it wrong, so the nearside rear wheel arch and bumper now have a bloody great scrape along them where I interfaced the car with a wall.
I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to bother getting it repaired. I probably should (and the brother-in-law – well, brother-in-semi-law – is going to recommend it, I know) but it’s not serious, and I can’t be chuffed. Besides, it was always going to happen at some point, so *shrug*, I dunno yet what I’ll do. It’s not serious, and its not affecting anything, so pah.
But little things like that aside, it’s proving (so far) to be a good buy. And we’ve already put nearly 1,000 miles on the poor bloody thing.
Cunts (Missing in Action 4)
Posted: Wed 7 March, 2007 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Sweary 6 Comments »Well, it’s established – Ticketmaster are utter, utter cunts.
Thank you for your email.
The tickets you have received are part of an event that is general admission and as such the event has a limited capacity, which is set by Health and Safety. Ticketmaster is unable to issue duplicate tickets for this event as it may cause the event to go over capacity, as we are unable to cancel the original tickets, therefore they can still be used.
This is a decision that is made by the individual venue and Ticketmaster as an agent has to adhere to this. If the venue goes over capacity, the venue could lose its license, which could jeopardise all future events, due to this we cannot re-issue your tickets.
Ticketmaster’s policy is that once a booking has been confirmed, it cannot be exchanged or refunded unless the event is cancelled. So unfortunately we cannot issue you with a refund of the cost of the tickets. Due to these reasons i have passed on a request to our customer service department to contact Secure Mail to investigate this situation. In doing this we will try and make a claim against Secure Mail to refund your booking.
Our representative from customer services will contact you as soon as possible regarding the outcome of the investigation.
I am sorry i cannot help you any further.
So – you ordered tickets, we sent them to the wrong address, where they were signed for by someone obviously not you. That’s your fault. You should’ve known that we’d use a courier ‘service’ (I use that term as loosely as possible) instead of using recorded delivery royal mail like we did for the Massive Attack tickets (which, funny enough, came straight to me, no problem at all) and gone back to your old address for the day when we were going to deliver them.
A refund? Fuck off. It’s all your fault.
And I suppose it is. After all, I ordered using Ticketmaster. My mistake. But believe me, I’ll never make the same mistake again, you cunts.