Whenever I’m short of something to write about here, it’s reassuring to know that I can always rely on finding something suitably objectionable to comment on in Metro. Today’s dose of hypocrisy comes from their cover story, which appears under the headline “Store cards ‘scam’ probe”. The report is about the fact that MPs who fear shoppers are being “saddled” with billions of pounds of debt have ordered an inquiry into “rip-off” store cards. The article goes on to point out that, as well as having high interest rates, staff [often] “do not allow customers to take the terms and conditions home to study them properly”.
A few pages later on in today’s paper is an advert for House of Fraser, who are promoting a competition that you can enter by using your House of Fraser, um, store card. I looked for the terms and conditions of the card (or even some information about their interest rate), but rather strangely, even though they had paid Associated Newspapers all that money for a whole page of prominent advertising, they somehow didn’t manage to include this information…
Matt–you seriously need your own comments section.
What I was going to say for today’s entry (#134) is that I agree that the Metro is a distressing little newspaper. I used to read it every day when I worked in the City.
I found that there are two sections very much worth one’s time:
1) The letters page is full of trolls and people responding angrily to the trolls. It makes incredibly satisfying voyeuristic reading.
2) The cryptic crossword is perfect. My morning challenge used to be to start it at Seven Sisters and have it finished by Highbury and Islington (2 long stops). I could do it most days, sometimes I finished it by King’s Cross, but occasionally there was just a bastard of a puzzle that I couldn’t finish at all. In fact, I really miss starting my morning with the Metro Crossword.
Doh–my carefully-placed paragraph breaks disappeared. Sigh.
Ah yes, a comments thingy. It’s on the “to-do” list, it really is. You see, if I’d only bothered to read the manual on moveable type and used that in the first place – and, yes, I do see the irony in that – then it would be easy, but unfortunately, as I come from the school of “how hard can it be?”-type thinking, I decided to write the blog tool myself, and it’s a bit late to change now.
Oh, and yeah, the line breaks don’t work properly on this page, but look, I’ve just fixed them on all the previous entries.
In the absence of me putting in proper weblog comments any time soon, you’ll probably have to make do with that…
It’s only taken me a month, but I have finally got round to getting comments up and running, as you can see!