Category: Uncategorized

Ok, so I know I haven’t posted anything for a week, and I imagine the last thing that any of you want to read is yet another post from me complaining about some company that’s annoyed me (no, really, I don’t spend all my time complaining about things, honestly…), but I’ve been ill, I’ve been busy, and I don’t care–I’m going to do it anyway…

The latest customer service hilarity is down to Virgin.net, who seem to be very good at charging me for broadband, but rather less good at providing it. After discovering that they have in fact made no attempts to set up the service at my new address, I got fed up with them and called to cancel my account this morning. Now here’s the great bit: for the next 30 days they aren’t going to provide me with any services, but they are going to charge me for them. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Since I’m not receiving any service from you, I don’t expect to be charged for it.
Customer Service Monkey: I’m sorry sir, but you have to give us 30 days notice.
Me: Yes, fine, but you aren’t going to provide me with any service during those 30 days?
CSM: Well, no.
Me: So what am I paying for, exactly?
CSM: You’re paying for your account. Your account doesn’t close until 30 days after you notify us.

And there was me thinking all this time that I’ve been paying them for a broadband service. Apparently not.

Well, we are all moved in to our new place. Or at least we have stuff piled high all over the living room floor, and I’m still not quite sure when and how I acquired all this stuff and whether we really need it, but the hard part is over. Or so I thought.

The other day, I had a strange sense of deja vu as I listened to the bloke at London Energy explain to me that there is no electricity meter inside our new flat–the meter registered for our address is apparently half way down the street, so the one that can clearly be seen above the bathroom door must be just a figment of my deranged imagination. Someone might call me back, if they feel like it.

And then this morning I waited for the BT engineer to turn up to activate our land line. Luckily I got fed up waiting fairly early on, because when I phoned up to check on progress, it turned out that the promised engineer had not in fact been booked at all, and we may now be without a phone for the next week (some time later, when I managed to speak to someone who seemed to know what they were doing, he said to me: “well, it’s just as well you phoned us–your account was marked ‘waiting for customer'”).

Screams.

Bangs head against brick wall.

It’s quite possible these days, armed only with an Internet banking login and a wallet full of small plastic cards, to live life without ever needing to carry around more than a few pounds in cash. I remember when I was younger, credit cards still seemed to have some rarity value. These were the heady days of the 1980s, an era of annual fees and adverts for Access on the telly (“does she does or does she don’t take access…?” I seem to recall), when my dad used to joke every time he paid by card that he never carried cash, like the royal family (as if Charlie might flit around buying things for Camilla on his Visa card).

These days, though, it is almost possible to get away without carrying any cash around at all. The corner shop might charge me a fee if I want to buy a lunchtime sandwich with my debit card, but most other businesses will let me pay for pretty much anything electronically, in one way or another, for free. So it’s easy to become slightly divorced from the underlying cash involved in any transaction–my salary goes into my account, my direct debits come out, and I never see any of the actual money involved.

Yesterday, we had to sign the contract for the new flat we’ll be moving into this week, and, because our estate agent is still living in some other century, they would only accept our deposit as either a banker’s draft, or cash. Last time we moved house, I opted for safety, and paid with a draft, but this time I decided to avoid having to pay HSBC £10 just so that some monkey could print out a cheque for me, so I decided to pay in cash.

I presumed that withdrawing our deposit of two months’ rent (a not insignificant amount when you live in London) might be a complex procedure, involving all sorts of security checks and so on, but it turns out that it is laughably simple: write out a cheque to yourself, sign on the back, and that’s it. Suddenly the chap in front of you is counting out £50 notes before your eyes. And counting. And counting…

Maybe I’ve had a sheltered life up until this point, but there’s something strangely scary and slightly empowering about wandering around London with a large amount of money in cash. The chap behind the counter certainly gave me an odd look as I shoved the large pile of notes into the brown envelope I’d brought for the purpose, and quickly shoved it into my coat pocket hoping no one had seen me.

For the next 20 minutes, as I travelled on the tube to the agent’s office, I couldn’t believe that I was actually walking around with so much cash. I had to keep checking my pocket to make sure it was still there.

At the top of the escalator, there was a busker singing an old Fergal Sharkey song. For a few seconds I idly wondered what would happen if I just removed the small brown envelope from my pocket, dropped it into his guitar case and walked away.

But of course I didn’t–I went off to the agent, paid the money and collected the keys. I mean, I’m not stupid.

Well, the public availability of Gmail can’t be far away: like most other Gmail users, I have just been given 50 invites. I didn’t have 6 friends to invite, let alone 50…

Anyone? Leave an email address (might be an idea to disguise it in some way, if you intend to use it again) in the comments and a shiny new account with 1GB storage is all yours.

Her: Hello, is that Matthew? It’s [inaudible] calling from [inaudible].
Me: I’m sorry?
Her: It’s [inaudible] calling from [inaudible].
Me: (still with no idea who this woman works for, or why she might be calling, but not wanting to ask again) Ok….
Her: Are you free to talk?
Me: Er… yes…
Her: Are you still looking?

Me: (thinking: looking? looking for what?)
Me: (realising this must be a recruitment agent) Oh, no I’m not, thanks…
Her: Oh, so you’ve decided to stay at [name of my previous employer].
Me: Oh no, I’m moved on to [name of current employer].
Her: Who?
Me: (clearer) [name of current employer].
Her: Never heard of them!
Me: Oh, ok. Thanks. Bye…

Like most website owners, I check the website logs every now and again. It always makes for interesting reading, whether it turns up a new incoming link, or some interesting search string that has led some unwitting surfer to these pages.

Unfortunately, although I can go back to the original log files if I need to see something specific, many of the statistics presented to me on my webalizer summary for the month of February so far are fairly useless. Take the referral stats, for example (information about sites linking to this one): apart from Google, the top 30 referrers are all showing as variants on the address for the same online poker site, no doubt the result of comment spam robots spoofing the referrer data during a recent spate of failed attempts to flood the blog comments with spam. (Happily, none of these comments ever actually made it onto the site, and the “temporary” hack fix I put in back in August last year seems to be doing just fine–being able to solve the problem of comment spam in a non-standard way is one benefit of having your own blogging system I guess).

But even so, I can still find some interesting information in there. Slap bang in the middle of the list of domains accessing the site is this entry:

“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ISU”

That’s strange, I thought, on first seeing this: I don’t ever recall noticing that before. A quick Google reveals that the ISU is Saudi Arabia’s government filtering organisation, which trawls teh interwebs looking for information to block from its citizens.

Now I wonder what I might have mentioned around these parts recently that might have attracted their attention. It couldn’t be the addition of Craig Unger’s excellent House of Bush, House of Saud to my reading list, could it?

Sal and I spent a thoroughly pleasant weekend in a Paris seemingly filled with kilted Scots, bagpiping their way around town, and in surprisingly high spirits even after their narrow defeat to the French on Saturday afternoon (that said, although a crowd of young chaps belting out Flower of Scotland on the streets of Montmartre might be entertaining for a few minutes, I’m not sure I’d have been quite so happy if we’d unwittingly chosen one of the restaurants opposite them for our lunch…)

But then, it’s hard to be grumpy for long in a city like Paris. Even I was caught by the bug–when we arrived at our hotel at almost 11 on Friday night, we could tell instantly from the body language of the chap behind the counter that something was wrong, but I greeted the news that we were being moved to their other hotel with nothing but glee: not only had I talked to the chap in French, but he actually replied to me in French, unlike almost everyone else I’ve ever spoken to in the country. The fact that their other hotel boasted une autre etoile for le meme tarif didn’t hurt, though, and it’s just possible that he didn’t actually speak the English that usually features in replies to my stumbling French, but I like to think he was impressed by my grasp of the present participle. He even gave me directions to their other hotel in exactly the same terms that the people used to use in French lessons (“take the first street on the right, walk straight on…”)

The pattern continued for much of the rest of the weekend. From somewhere in the depths of my brain I managed to resurrect much of the French that I spent 9 of my formative years learning and have subsequently spent almost as long forgetting, and I was able to dutifully translate for Sal for much of the weekend (it seems they don’t bother with languages in the Australian school system–well, something has to make way for all that sport–and so her semester each of Italian and Japanese didn’t quite cut it).

Having both already been to the city several times before, we didn’t feel much pressure to visit the usual tourist haunts. Consequently, we spent much of the weekend eating and drinking, and mightily pleasant it was too.

I’m just a bit worried that I won’t be allowed back on any of those “back the bid” tubes now that I’ve visited a rival city and been on one of their gagnons les jeux! trains. I expect Seb Coe will be popping round to beat me up any time now for assisting the enemy.

Finding myself up by London Bridge at lunchtime yesterday, I spotted that they were giving out copies of the new free lunchtime version of the Evening Standard (inexplicably, Standard Lite: what was wrong with Lunchtime Standard?)

I’m not quite sure what game Associated is playing here: will saturating London’s commuters with free papers at all times of the day really encourage those same commuters to go out and pay money for the evening edition? (“Finished your free morning version of the Daily Mail have we sir? Go on, have a free lunchtime paper! Oh, you will pop back in a couple of hours and give us 35p for a slightly bigger version of the same thing, now won’t you?”)

Anyway, so I picked one up, purely for curiosity value you understand. I don’t think I’ll make the same mistake again. It’s not just the shabby right-wing undertones. Or overtones most of the time actually–cf. front page story about Shell’s huge profits (“£300 a second”) is, of course tackled not from the obvious environmental angle, but with crushing inevitability under the subheading “Motorists’ fury at £9 billion bonanza”.

No, I expected as much from the London Daily Mail, but the reason I won’t be back is the grammar. Dear God, I was appalled. Take for example the fluff piece (by the delightfully-named Nigel Rosser) about 64 year old Patrick Stewart and his new young, attractive actress girlfriend, who is almost 40 years his junior (“So, Lisa, what first attracted you to multimillionaire actor Patrick…?)

According to the article, “the couple have been inseparable since the actor announced the end of his second marriage to television producer Wendy Neuss 18 months ago”. His second marriage to Wendy Neuss? How many times was he married to her? Would a comma have killed you Nige?

Later on, we are told that the couple “poised for the camera”. Well I’m sure they were…

Honestly. It’s enough to make me reach for the Grauniad.

* If you’d like a slightly longer version of this post, why not insert 35p into your computer anytime after 4pm.

I am surrounded by poor design. Take my digital radio, for example. It’s generally a fantastic piece of kit, and does lots of funky things like allowing you to pause and rewind live radio, and record stuff onto memory cards (oh, and it also manages to receive XFM, which is more than can be said for the old analog clock radio we used to have). Unfortunately, the device has a pretty fundamental design flaw: the designers forgot to include an “Off” button.

I’d have thought this was a fairly basic requirement for a radio, but no: the main control area of the device has four buttons and one of those multi-function jog wheel thingies, like you get on iPods. To turn it off, you have to hold down the centre of the jog wheel for a full 5 seconds (being careful to hold down only the centre, and not accidentally push it in one of the other directions, thus activating one of the other functions). This is an operation so unintuitive that I actually had to pull out the plug from the wall the first time I used the radio because I couldn’t work out how to turn the thing off. I wouldn’t mind so much, but one of the 4 single function buttons included on the device is “Auto-tune”, a feature I have never used (it does this automatically the first time you plug it in), and that I can’t imagine most users will need more than a handful of times during the lifetime of the product. So although I can easily retune all the stations with a simple single button press, the designers chose to make turning the thing off, something I do twice a day, every day, ridiculously complicated.

Another example is my old digital camera, where the designers decided to combine the on/off switch with the open lens function. Great if you’re switching the thing on to take a picture, but less good if you want to browse your stored shots (out pops the lens, and there it stays–right where your greasy fingers naturally fall as you hold the camera to look at the screen). Genius.

And don’t get me started on the hotel we stayed in in Lisbon where someone had chosen to place the toilet at right angles to the bath, and extremely close to it at that, making it almost impossible for anyone owning knees to sit on it.

Nowhere is bad design more prevalent, though, than the Internet. Just because anybody can learn a bit of HTML and write a website, it doesn’t mean that everybody should. I’m fed up with poorly designed websites that aren’t standards-compliant and don’t work on Firefox. I’m fed up with the gratuitous use of Flash, and I’m fed up with sites that haven’t bothered to test their sites properly, or try to validate data that I enter, and haven’t catered for any non-standard options.

For example, shortly before Christmas, Sal tried to order a couple of webcams from an Australian online store to be sent to her family back home. Nice and efficient, you might thing, but unfortunately we ended up tearing our hair out by the fact that whoever designed their online shopping system made the ridiculous/pointless assumption that all postcodes will consist of 4 digits, and no more. Fine if you’re shipping to an Australian address, but not so good if your billing address is in the UK and happens to include a postcode consisting of 5 or 6 characters, and your customers end up seeing a Microsoft ASP error message indicating that the script “could not convert string to varchar”, and then have to phone the company’s Sydney office to get them to process the order for them (which they can only ultimately do by using the company’s own postcode in place of the correct one).

Then, just the other day I tried to sign up with the Spanish website that will be handling ticketing for U2’s Barcelona gig: these jokers allow a strict limit of 5 characters in a postcode. Not so good if you have a 6 character UK postcode though, is it?

I expect much more of this sort of thing as I change my address in anticipation of our upcoming house move with all the various companies providing me services. Increasingly, companies don’t seem to trust me to type in my address correctly, but instead insist on using things like the Royal Mail postcode database to validate and standardise what their customers tell them. All well and good if (a) your address is in the database, and (b) you have a simple house number/post code address–not so good if you have a specific flat number or an unusual address. As far as the Royal Mail are concerned, for example, the flat I have lived at for the past year doesn’t exist.

Some companies take this “don’t trust your customers” logic to extremes–try registering on BA’s website, for example, and have a look at those options for “Title” (oh no, they appear to have omitted “Pope”…). Seriously, would it have been that hard to just let people type in their title? Or how about “Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Other…”? I’m surprised they don’t have a drop-down list of first names and surnames to choose from, although surely that can’t be far away.

And what benefit do these companies possibly get out of this? The Australian webcam company and the Spanish ticket agency might have fractionally reduced the size of their customer database by limiting the length of acceptable postcodes, but they both nearly lost at least one customer in the process. Is it really worth it?

Yeah, so poor, sloppy design really annoys me. Seriously. It doesn’t have to be this way…

It’s becoming increasingly easy for me to worry about the passage of time. Last month’s XFM club night brought back some particularly vivid memories of music from long ago, and the crucial “Woah! Was that really ten years ago?” mark has already passed for such significant events in my youth as Definitely Maybe, The Holy Bible, His n’ Hers, Parklife, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. This summer it will be ten years since Pulp’s seminal Saturday night Glastonbury performance, which I listened to on a small transistor radio in the kitchen during the dishwashing job I had at the time, and the height of Britpop silliness: Country House vs. Roll With It. This week, of course, marks a full decade since Richey Edwards left his car at the Severn Bridge services and disappeared.

The world of indie music aside, however, nothing makes you notice the passing of time quite like the activities of your peer group. Gone are the days when we would get together to celebrate an 18th, or a 21st, or a graduation: in the last month or so it has become clear that for me and my contemporaries, the age of the wedding has begun.

Up until the end of 2003, I had never even been to a wedding. Now, I can think of at least 6 7 off the top of my head that Sal and I have been invited to this year, and we already have one pencilled in for 2006. And that’s not to mention the recent outbreak of pregnancies amongst mid-twentysomethings in London and Melbourne. These days, every time the phone rings, or an email drops into one of our inboxes it seems that someone else is making life-changing, adult decisions, and, gasp, growing up…

Sure, all of this is happy enough for the people involved, but somewhat depressing for me. Would anyone like to explain what happened to my youth? Where did it go?