ebay Etiquette

With my iPhone at £185 with 7 hours to go I received this:

Dear jamie,

Jamie can I buy it off you now for £200 incl p p
via paypal

Justin

Dear justin,

Don't be ridiculous.

jamie

Dear jamie,

thanks for the rude reply good luck with ur sale
a polite no would be nice . anyone would think ur selling the only i
phone on here th e way u responded . v offputting to bid now

justin

The phone eventually sold for £290. Unfortunately to someone registered in Germany, on business in the US and buying it for their business partner's daughter in Lagos. You can read my response at the bottom of my new listing.

Virgin Media

I hate Virgin Media, I can't remember why I started (I'm sure it was before the junk mail started), but they're certainly giving me no reason to stop. My girlfriend moved house about 8 months ago. Her previous house had cable and so she signed up with Virgin. When she moved she weighed up the option of paying to get out of their one year contract but decided to continue with them on ADSL for the remainder of the 12 months at her new place. That 12 months is now up, and due purely to their shit performance of streamed BBC content I recommended O₂'s excellent ADSL offering. So she called Virgin today to get her MAC only to find that when she moved they restarted her 1 year contract. Is that legal? Can the contract be binding?

O2 Stupidity

I bought a 3G iPhone the other day. Some thoughts:

The shop assistant tried to persuade me to go with the Wi-Fi (THE CLOUD) bolt-on rather than the Web bolt-on because "that's what the iPhone uses". He was a bit stumped when I asked him what good that would do me outside large cities (for example). I wonder whether this is O₂ policy or he was just particularly ill-informed. (Incidentally O₂'s Wi-Fi bolt-on costs £7.50 a month while buying direct from THE CLOUD seems to only cost £4 a month.)

Purchasing £10 credit is obligatory when you buy a PAYG iPhone. Is that legal? I don't need £10 credit as I am using my Simplicity SIM. The £10 credit SIM also gives you a years access to THE CLOUD apparently, I need to work out if/how THE CLOUD know what SIM card you are using.

The iPhone 3G is a bit of a disappointment really. It seems buggy compared to my original iPhone, and the screen looks slightly discoloured and smaller (I know this is an optical illusion caused but the surround). 2.1 does not seem to have completely ironed out the reception issues, there is a lot of lag on the phone (opening the SMS page takes an age for example) and last night I was getting cut off when I plugged the headset in while on a call(!) Apple have still not fixed their crappy SMS client either, you still can't save draft texts, forward texts or insert phone numbers into texts and the camera is still next to useless. I was however very impressed at the network speed when using it as a modem for my laptop. (Yes I know, shush.) I am also pleased that I can now stream BBC Radio using the FStream App.

My Simplicity tariff is £20 a month for 400 minutes. While in the shop I noticed that they had an offer on for the 600 minute tariff down from £25 to £20. Most months I use about 330 minutes, last month I somehow used about 570 minutes(!) which cost me an extra £30 on my bill :( I wonder if the offer has been going for a month, and if so whether I could argue that they should have automatically put me on the 600 minute tariff.

nationalexpress.com

Choose nationalexpress.com. Choose your location, choose your destination, choose your fucking dates. Choose AM or PM, choose the exact time, number of adults, children and dependants. Put in your details, credit card and address. Choose an e-ticket, or not. Choose not to receive further communications. Click continue. Choose to scream as only now do they tell you that your choice has been fully booked and you must repeat the entire fucking process.