Andrew Speakman

Orange are the second mobile company I will probably never use again after this.

I decided to get a new phone and transfer my orange contract number to orange pay pray as you go. I don’t use my phone much and the free line rental offers can be hard work, remembering to send back the right bill and voucher every 3 months, but they’ve always worked for me in the past. What made my mind up against another cashback deal was when I was looking into them recently and read that things were about to get a lot harder, with the stores using all sorts of ways to try wriggling out of giving cashback. It might just be roumor, but this time I can’t be bothered.

So I looked at the pay as you go packages on offer, and the orange one seemed to be reasonable, and they had a phone that I thought was ok for a good price. I bought online at orange.co.uk and decided to make my life easier by buying credit at the same time. The phone arrived, I activated it online, and waited for my £50 credit become available.

This is where things started to get complicated. No credit appeared. I called Orange, and after going through the usual digit fandango spoke to a person who told me that my phone wasn’t properly activated or registered, I forget which, so I would not get the credit yet. So I went through a similar process to the one online, giving a new passcode etc. All done, still the credit didn’t appear. A day or so later I fandangoed and waited in a queue again with Orange’s new miss Essex call computer and was told that because I’d bought my credit online I would have to wait 21 days for the credit to appear on my phone. ‘You see it’s to do with the system and security and distance selling rules innit’. I spoke to countless people, probably in countless continents, all of them telling me a different story, whilst I repeated the same story. It was as if no-one had ever bought credit with an orange pay as you go phone from orange.co.uk before. The scary thing was that none of them knew how much credit I’d bought and I was asked to do silly things like fax a copy of my bank statement showing proof that the £50 for the credit had come out of my account (which it had). Oh dear.

I kept calling, I asked to return my handset, to which the poor person at Orange reacted with horror, sounding like they were almost in tears. Eventually I got the credit, but it took more than two weeks. I have also repeatedly being asking for a receipt including the £50 credit I bought. This was in October. So far I have received 3 receipts, none of which show that I bought any credit.

I always forget which audio port is which on the back of my PC. Then because I’m inquisitve / too lazy and stupid to get a torch to look at the labelling next to the ports, or just randomly try them, I always google for an answer. This normally takes me about 5 minutes if I don’ get sidetracked (like now). The answer which I am looking for, that is suprisingly hard to find, is the PC 99 colour code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_99

light blue = line in
lime green = line out
pink = mic

I don’t know much about legal documents, but for the most part website disclaimers seem to be about trying to lessen the risk of being sued in this dog-eat-dog compensation culture. They also ‘make your website look well professional, innit?’

Anyway I was looking into some of these docs online and stumbled across this.

The last sentence in the last paragraph says ‘For the avoidance of doubt, Amazon.co.uk does not limit its liability for death or personal injury to the extent only that it arises as a result of the negligence of NLITEC, its affiliates, directors, employees or other representatives.’

Whoops, Friday afternoon find and replace error!

Was thinking about the new tugging at the heart strings pampers advert where soft music plays and they say that they’ll pay to vaccine one child in the third world against tetanus. It looks like pampers have to disclose how much money goes to charity, and toward the end of the advert the small print says that 2.5p per pack goes to charity. Say an average pack of pampers costs £5, this means they donate 0.5% of the cost of a pack to charity.

The Facts
Buy a 26 pack of Pampers Active fit Maxis at Asda for £5 and give one child a tetanus vaccine
OR

Buy 26 of Asda’s own brand equivalent Little Angels Action fit Maxi for £3.97, leaving you with £1.03 change from £5. Give the £1.03 to charity, which would give 41 children tetanus vaccines

Donate to Unicef here

I have done a few funky image edits, check them out. They’re probably not that funny or relevant if you don’t know the subjects.

The BID boys

Jason C Lampard

Vader Bullemor

I never knew who he was but today I do. Someone else got mistaken for him (another Guy), they become famous, Guy Kewney also gets strong press coverage. We’re all winners, right?

Maybe not - Guy Kewney has really taken some hard knocks in comments about his blog posting on the subject. I had a big ranting essay prepared which was sympathetic with Guy Kewney, but I hit the wrong button and it was lost (maybe it’s for the better anyway). What my essay boiled down to was that I think Guy hastily posted on his blog, without considering his wording carefully, and some people mis-interpreted this. Once this happened all and sundry jumped on the bandwagon and unleashed their fury.

I then went on to say that I respected Guy for actually standing up and contributing, and that I had little respect for those who with far less tact and thought than Guy had laid into him, with ignorant accusations of racism and disrespect. It’s easy to annonymously take a dig at someone, but I wonder if those same people would be brave enough to make the same comments if their identity was openly available like Guy’s is. I also wonder if these same people actually make a net contribution to the internet with a blog or website.

At this point my rant turned to my own experiences which I related to Guy’s, concluding that political correctness can be used as a screen and taken too far, which can result in more prejudice and also create the ideal diversion for genuinely bad people. I also babbled a bit about consumption and all take but no give and how even though we’re a very consumer-centric society, many people realise and more are realising the need for a natural balance.

E&L are the champion procrastinators. At least they answered their phone the last time I called, though.

A few weeks ago I got a letter in the post from E&L it asked me to confirm my claim amount by signing a slip and sending it back to them. So maybe I’ll actually get to see the money before the end of this year! I do hope this isn’t another delaying tactic though.

 

 

I also got a worrying letter from them saying that my pet’s condition would no longer be covered by their policy. I’ll switch after the claim is through, even if no-one else will cover against the formation of Struvite crystals.

Another ‘Myspace Killer’ is likely to appear soon. My experience of myspace is that it is awkward to use and unreliable. But it’s got the most people on it, and is geared towards music, so I’m sticking with it for now.

Maybe it’s where I live, but we do get an awful lot of door to door sales (as well as illicit cold phone calls). Reading this article in the Times spurred me to write here. As in the Times article, I have had Talk Talk around trying to get me to sign up wit them, but I find Southern Electric a much worse culprit.

Only this weekend a man with braces (on his teeth) came knocking on my door. He started by telling me that I was paying too much for my electricity and that Southern Electric ’supply’ the power to my home (which I know is not true, it’s EDF who maintain the infrastructure around here), which means that they can give me cheaper electricity. Apparently he had a ’special’ deal for people in the area. I told him I wasn’t interested, not wanting to enter into discussion. He then persisted to ask me if he could have a look at my meter. ‘No!’ I told him, ‘Why not? We own it!’, he said. This is a blatant lie, it was British gas who came to fit a new meter recently, and it clearly states on it ‘Property of Capital Meters Ltd’. And even Capital Meters couldn’t just turn up on my doorstep to look at the meter. So I told him that he couldn’t come in whether he owned it or not, and sent him on his way.

In the past Southern Electric have used other tactics, like telling me nothing will change when I switch providers (yes it will, my money will go to someone else, and probably in different quantities), and that I should compare prices after I have signed up with them (before would be more sensible). What concerns me is that a more vulnerable person could be trampled all over by salespeople like this. My advice: Never sign up to anything from cold caller, tell them you’re not interested. If you want a better deal, do the comparisons in your own time.

I have written about Maplin and its internet presence before - how they have an affiliate scheme where people can sell Maplin products on their personal web site. This is an acceptable way of trading, albeit not something I would do if I was a large established company and wanted to build my online sales and reputation. But I’m not a large company, so maybe I don’t know best, it just strikes me as short-termism - a way to generate some quick sales and raise its search engine profile.

Back to the headline question, which I won’t answer, instead, I’ll just explain what I’ve noticed. I’m always searching for products on Google, and more and more I see Maplin cropping up in the matches, with products I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to sell. When these matches are clicked, they take you to a Maplin search page with no results for the product in question. Just today, I did a search for the now, finally released, almost 2 years late Behringer BCD2000 and got Maplin as a match only to find that they don’t sell it.