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.

nationalrail.co.uk

The National Rail Enquiries site www.nationalrail.co.uk sucks on mobile devices, really sucks. The javascript often does not automatically insert the correct date or time and the auto-completion on station names slows typing to glacial speeds. You're also not allowed to search for journeys minutes into the past, which is annoying as the minutes are grouped into 15 minute intervals (eg, if it is 4:35 you must choose the 4:45 option, not the 4:30 option). In fact the site was so frustrating that I started to develop my own alternative.

Just days after starting that page I visited nationalrail.co.uk on my iPhone and was stunned to be forwarded to pda.nationalrail.co.uk. Apparently they do have a mobile site. I was so impressed that I emailed them to compliment them on it. When I later visited nationalrail.co.uk again on my iPhone I was no longer forwarded to the mobile site and had to type in the address manually. I emailed them again to point out that their device recognition and forwarding was a bit flaky only to receive the following: "You are not automatically directed to the mobile version of our website." How the fuck are people supposed to know about these things?

I have now also noticed that the search results are not even the same, try getting the direct weekday 8:36 Brighton to London Bridge service on the mobile site.

Incidentally there is also a mobile TfL site that you may not know about.

Updates

Virgin Media is still sending me junk mail. Yesterday I called and was told that Virgin Media probably have no control over this particular piece of junk mail as Royal Mail probably addressed and sent it. I have been advised to contact Royal Mail to stop the junk mail so I will see how far I get with them. I was also given Virgin Media's Marketing contact details.*

After waiting a couple of weeks for O₂ to get back to me (2 days quoted) I decided to call them. After explaining my problems I was told that the full amount I was charged while away has been refunded to my account. I guess they just couldn't be bothered to investigate.

Having destroyed my SmartTalk, Griffin have ceased contact. Maybe it was a joke.

* Seems that the Virgin Media guy I spoke to was wrong: 1. The opt out service only relates to unaddressed mail. Royal Mail is still legally obliged to deliver all addressed mail, which includes mail that is addressed “To the Occupier”. The Virgin Media junk mail is all addressed "To the Occupier".

Simply Cycle To Work

This post is dedicated to my friend Kai, who loves stuff which isn't nearly as simple as it could and should be.

I have been considering buying a new bike recently and the fact that my new company subscribes to the Ride 2 Work* scheme, coupled with the recent failure of my front brake cable** and the stars aligning meant that the auspicious time of bicycle purchase was upon me. The government's cycle to work scheme is advantageous as an employee pays for cycle equipment out of their gross pay over the course of a year, not only saving whatever income tax*** they would pay (ie, roughly 30%) but also by staggering the payment over a year. So I visited HR to ask how one could go about joining the scheme. I was told that the paper work wasn't ready but that as I was so in need I could run it past my big boss. He was busy but I went to a cycle shop after work to have a look at bikes, assuming that I could buy a bike and basically just pass the receipt on to my employer. After chatting with the assistant**** in the shop about the scheme I was again reminded of the rule that nothing is simple that can be made complicated by bureaucracy. Here's how the scheme actually works: You find out which shop your company has joined up with. You chose a bike from that shop. You record how much that bike costs. You fill in the following forms: Employee Registration, Employee Salary Sacrifice Agreement and Purchase Order. Finance (hopefully) approves your request. Your work informs the shop's head office. They send back a voucher. You collect bike. This, according to the first sentence in section 1.2 of the bumf I now have "couldn't be simpler". I beg to differ.

* As I have discovered this name is important, as it indicates which company you can buy your cycling equipment from, Ride2Work is the Evens Cycles scheme, other cycle to work schemes are available.

UPDATE I don't think this is true, in theory the scheme just allows your employer to give you an interest and tax free loan to buy a bike, however in practice companies such as Evans manage to lock companies in to their own schemes by making it simpler for them.

** Yes I am still using it. I came across the bridge of death this morning to find firemen trying to free another cyclist from beneath another lorry.

*** Actually it's better than I thought, you not only get income tax and national insurance off, but VAT too bringing the saving up to about 40% in my case.

**** When I said to the assistant that I would save whatever tax I pay, say 30%, he replied, well, it could be 50%. That's right, I am in the top tax bracket. Not.

Human Resources

"My Door is always open."

(But that doesn't mean you should walk through it.)

Griffin International Exchange

Still regarding the Griffin SmartTalk:

We handle exchanges for international customers a little differently. Rather than have you send us the defective product, we request taking a digital picture of the defective product destroyed. You can smash, burn or crack open in whatever way you would like, so long as you do so safely. Also, take a digital picture (or scan a copy) of your receipt. PLEASE DO A BEFORE AND AFTER PHOTO.

I'll say that's a little "different". Is someone winding me up?

O2 Customer Support

After coming back from the Balkans I found to my pleasant surprise that all the texts I'd sent had been taken from my monthly allowance, however I did have a series of expensive calls, most of which I hadn't made (or taken), it looked like they'd not only charged me for calls going to voice mail, but also the texts they's sent me informing me that I had received said voice mails. (I guess this because one of the recorded phone numbers was only 5 digits long.)

I decided to play it safe and just tell O₂ customer support that I had not made the calls and not confuse them with my suspicions. The woman I spoke to would just not have it. Those calls are on the system and therefore they were made, she would not accept that there could be any mistake. Regarding the 5 digit number her response was that sometimes the system doesn't record the whole number. Yeah, right. Eventually, after much prodding she reluctantly agreed to fill in an investigation form and said that someone would contact me within a few days. A week later I am still waiting.

Incidentally, O₂ Broadband customer support has been the best that I have ever experienced. Unfortunately I can't say the same about their mobile support. Maybe it has something to do with calling on a weekend, you get badly trained, badly motivated, hungover staff.