Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:05:00 GMT
For the last couple of weeks we’ve been taking the boy to Water Babies, where they help babies to gain confidence in the water, teach them how to grab for a static object when they fall in, and finally work up to getting them swimming on their own underwater.
The sessions are for half an hour each week at Cardiff Marriott hotel’s leisure club, and have been held there for a couple of years. This is apparently all too much for the members of the club, a number of whom have complained about the sessions and had the classes ejected. Not only does this mean that 20 sets of parents have to rejuggle their weekly schedules and travel arrangement, but due to the new venue being far away from my work, it means that I can no longer watch my son swimming.
So, shame on the members at the Cardiff Marriott leisure club, and shame on Cardiff Marriott for not having enough sense of righteousness to tell whichever miserable bastards complained about babies learning to swim to get a life.
Posted in Consumer, General, Hermann | 1 comment
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 02 May 2007 16:48:00 GMT
Max is getting close to the age where he’ll be wanting solids (other than his own fingers, which he’s constantly chewing on at the moment) so I decided to buy a food processor. I went with the Kenwood FP533
which seemed expensive but has all the bits I could ever need (including a dough attachment - lazy!); I also had a couple of Amazon vouchers for my birthday - thanks to those folk who know who they are!
When it arrived, the drive shaft was missing. Not suprisingly, nothing works without that bit.
On the inside of the box, there was a number to call in this eventuality. The first thing to strike me about this number was that it was just a normal landline number - not a lo-call number or a premium rate number, but just a normal phone number.
So I called it. There was a menu with three options, the third of which was “press 3 to speak to a person”. I pressed it, and was told that they were experiencing a high volume of calls and I might have to wait, so I was surprised to be answered straight away by a chap who took 60 seconds to write down the model number, the name of the missing part, my name and address and then said that he’d put one in the post and I should have it within a couple of days.
I can imagine that this is how calling a company used to work about 20 years ago, and it rocks. Thanks Kenwood.
Update, May 4th: Arrived today, cool.
Posted in Consumer | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:20:00 GMT
I decided to cancel my Vodafone account, so I submitted a question via their website asking what I needed to do. They replied and said this:
Further to your query regarding the termination of your airtime account,
we confirm the following:
In order to terminate your airtime account, we require 30 days cancellation
notice in writing as we are unable to accept termination requests via email.
This needs to be forwarded to us at the address noted below:
Vodafone Disconnection Department
Vodafone Ltd
PO Box 549
Banbury
OX17 3ZJ
On receipt of your cancellation notice, a confirmation letter will be forwarded
to your account address, to confirm the receipt and that your cancellation
notice has been accepted.
If you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us
Kind regards
Julie Doe[1]
Vodafone Customer Services
So in good faith, I wrote to them at the above address, asking for a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) so that I could move the number to another provider. At this point, I thought that they would send me a letter confirming receipt and the date on which the cancellation would take effect. I’ll clarify that I was under this impression not only because that’s what they told me they would do, but because it’s common courtesy.
Instead, they started calling the mobile telephone concerned, up to 12 times per day (at which point we stopped counting; they didn’t stop calling), trying to speak to me.
Now the telephone isn’t used by me; I just pay the bills. It’s Stef’s phone, and she has rather a lot on her hands at the moment, looking after Max 24 hours a day.
So I wrote to them again:
Hello, further to enquiry xxxxxxx, where I was informed that in order to
close this account I needed to write to you, I wrote to you to close the
account and request a PAC.
It was not pointed out that I would also be required to endure a barrage
of calls to the telephone.
It is my understanding that your retentions team have been calling this
number up to 10 times per day; please stop this. The telephone,
although I pay the bill, is used by my girlfriend who is currently
nursing a 4 week old baby full time and does not need this harassment.
You will not be able to speak to me by calling the above number, so do
not try. Please issue the PAC number and confirm the notice of
cancellation forthwith.
Many thanks,
Ceri Davies
They replied, saying that they were rather sorry about that, giving me my PAC and closing:
Please note that I have put a note on your account "not to call the
customer" and I please be assure that you won't be getting any calls from
Vodafone.
I’ll grant you that the language isn’t great there, but I was happy with that.
So when they phoned again an hour later, I figured that it was just a delay with this filtering through, because I’m forgiving and stupid like that. Three more phone calls later, I picked up and advised them that I already had my PAC thanks and had been told that the account had been marked “do not call”. At this point, I was told that they couldn’t issue the PAC and that whether the account was marked “do not call” was completely irrelevant unless I was prepared to hand over my postal address right now; if I didn’t, they would continue to call until I did.
What, in the holiest name of fuck, is up with that?
[1]Not her real name. That was Anne.
Posted in Consumer | Tags shit, vodafone | 2 comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:51:00 GMT
Dear lazyweb,
I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that I have lost my copy of Chicane’s Far from the Maddening Crowds, which is easily the best record I ever lost.
I need an AbeBooks equivalent for music (or some kind soul to just buy me a copy from Amazon!); pointers please.
Posted in Consumer, Music | 1 comment
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:16:00 GMT
First things first, we have a privacy policy now. Google Analytics insists that you have one in order to use the service, and since it is the lowest maintenance tool for creating inane and useless statistics, I am using it.
I managed to park in front of my house, whereupon someone drove a skip truck into my car (and yes, my number plate says GNU on it — call it coincidence). My insurer, Sainsbury’s, have been pretty good.
After discussion on hackers@, the crunchgen patch got committed. On a related note, had some discussion with Adrian and Philip Paeps about pivot_root(), which is a system call which switches the root mountpoint with another mountpoint. Seems that what we want is rather different to the Linux syscall of the same name. Adrian’s idea was to reuse the devfs_fixup() code, but I’m under the impression that this gets away with murder by virtue of there being no userland processes running while it is doing the business. More thought required…
I received a nice PowerBook from work, thanks. I still need a new i386 laptop, but my budget isn’t going to stretch to one this year unless Yonah does crazy things to prices.
In that vein, I finally caught up with this century and got a USB stick. Can maybe get to work on that GELI/kenv stuff now.
Christmas was good, although I haven’t been nearly drunk enough due to a cold that I just cannot get rid of. Six days left before we have to go back to work though ;-)
Posted in Consumer, FreeBSD, General, Apple | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:38:00 GMT
EuroBSDcon 2005 is nigh. The laptop that I currently have has the charging cable melted to the motherboard, in such a position that it is impossible to remove yet difficult to get to charge. I am not sure that I want to take it with me. So unsure in fact, that I ordered a Vaio from John Lewis on Saturday evening. I felt bad about that, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, Sony aren’t particularly in the list of companies that I should be doing business with at the moment, what with all the rootkit business. Also, their (Sony’s) website didn’t work with my browser, and I normally make a point of going elsewhere when that happens. In the third instance, I can’t actually afford it and I don’t like to buy computers on credit. I was also rushing myself and paying for it, as the same laptop was up to 50 pounds cheaper elsewhere, but John Lewis was the only company who could get it to me by Tuesday, just in time for an evening of FreeBSD installation before leaving on Thursday (Wednesday evening is reserved).
I wasn’t particularly disappointed, therefore, when I received a mail on Sunday saying that my order had been held up by a random security check and that if I didn’t call customer services before 14:30 on Monday the order would have to be cancelled. Good news.
Since I’m currently waiting on a call from Dell regarding a faulty server they shipped us, when the phone rang this morning and the guy said that he was calling about a problem with my order, I was somewhat confused at the beginning of the call until he explained that he was calling from John Lewis regarding another problem with my laptop order: apparently they do not deliver to universities. When I suggested, this being the case, that he cancel the order, he kindly offered to have it delivered to my home address instead and seemed completely bewildered when I pointed out the futility of that, considering that I had chosen to take delivery at an address with someone in.
It’s a damned good job that I didn’t pay the extra 50 quid to have the laptop delivered on Tuesday, as it looks like I wouldn’t have received it in time anyway.
Posted in Consumer | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:16:00 GMT
I’ve had cable from NTL ever since I worked there and got it free, but I’ve really watched all that much TV and these days it seems to me that the little that I do watch consists of one of these things:
- A list program
- An advert for ringtones
- A film I already own on DVD
- Documentary/news/Nazi^WHistory channel
That costs me 11 quid a month, so it’s got to go. I bought a Freeview box for £30 and now I have free documentaries and news for ever (plus my interactive now actually works, which is more than it ever did with NTL).
Knowing that I have to give one month’s notice, I rang NTL straight away to cancel. Spoke to a chap called John who asked me for my account number and then we sat in silence for 20 seconds. What the hell is wrong with informing the customer that you’re waiting for their details to be pulled up and haven’t fallen off your chair or accidentally disconnected them? John finally asked me what I wanted, and passed me through to the Cancellations team, who were closed!
Now I could be annoyed about the fact that their not working the weekend means that I have to pay for two extra days of service, but I’m too occupied being annoyed about being transferred to a team that he either knew were not there, or should have done.
If I know NTL at all, John had just been found in a skip that morning and put on the phones to earn some hot soup, so I can’t really blame him. So here’s a note to NTL:
I really don’t care if you’re giving me 10MB of bandwidth next summer; I don’t really need it. What I *do* need is someone vaguely competent on the customer service line. If you don’t get some, I will walk.
Posted in Consumer | no comments | no trackbacks