My Pear Shaped World

Thanks British Airways for my broken window blind

2013-05-11T14:08:00.001-07:00

Recently I returned back from California on a British Airways 747-400 which is always a challenging distance to fly overnight. I normally like to get as much sleep flying over the Atlantic to try to lessen the impact of jet lag.

However, my flight wasn't particularly great. The blind on the Window next to me was broken in ways that were not easily fixable:

Somehow, the blind fillet that should go behind the blind was in front - somebody probably popped the blind out and wedged it back in the wrong way. The upshot was that I was unable to close it which made watching the entertainment system rather difficult. As the evening drew to night, the steward told me to close my blind and I pointed out that it was completely broken and they say "Oh, that's OK then", which it in reality it wasn't was it?

Anyhow, I scraped through on a few hours sleep but it wasn't perfect because of light streaming in early in the morning. I wrote to British Airways and got a sincere apology but zippo zero in compensation, so I plan to fly Virgin Atlantic next time. Well done British Airways, keep up the good work and alienate your customers.

How not to run a shop

2013-05-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Today I visited Uckfield in East Sussex and popped into a charity shop to see if I could find any second hand bargains. At the back of the shop was an excellent telescope without a price tag so I enquired and was told it had not been priced up yet. I asked if it could be priced up and was told I would have to wait or come back another day as they were pricing up other goods. When I explained I was just in the town for a short visit and I lived quite a distance away so revisiting the shop wasn't easy for me.

The curious thing was that they seemed really reluctant to sell it at all. It was as if they would rather let a customer down rather than sell an item to somebody who was willing to pay some serious money for it. So both of us lost out - they missed an immediate sale and I didn't purchase a rather excellent telescope.

A little later my wife and I popped into a small pet shop to see if they had any pet rabbits and when I enquired the owner told me that selling baby rabbits was morally wrong when so many are abandoned and need re-homing. I kind of got it in the ear for my apparent moral deficiency in wondering if there were any baby rabbits for sale. So much for making the customer feel welcome. The irony was that the shopkeeper seemed opposed to selling rabbits but was very happy to run a business supporting these critters with pet food and hutches. Seemed rather hypocritical to me.

Short changed!

2012-08-19T12:15:00.001-07:00

So this weekend I popped over to the local Tesco Express with my son to buy some cheese. Like most modern Tesco stores it had some automated tills that relies on the customer to do the work of the checkout staff.

I explained to my son that I would queue and wait to be served by a human being rather than take the express route and have to faff around with a machine and the lady in front of me turned around and agreed with me, so may be I'm not alone in this sentiment.

Now, what really irks me is that Tesco has two automated tills which effectively kills two more jobs and means my tax dollars are probably being used to give unemployment benefit to some poor souls who could be working in Tescos. More annoying is that Tesco's is making us customers serve ourselves while it creams off the profit.

I was extolling the virtues of being served by a human only to be short changed by the lad behind the checkout. When I pointed out the error, he told me he was busy and had been known to make this kind of mistake, but it wasn't a problem. Well, not to Tesco's, it would have made an extra £3 of profit if I hadn't been explaining to my son that one needs to check the change.

So all in all it was a valuable set of lessons for my son:

Humans make mistakes.

Tescos seems to like making profit out of it's customers and will reduce staff where possible.

We like being served by humans only when they don't short change us.

..such is progress.

You have no mail.

2010-08-13T23:39:00.000-07:00

The UK postal service is getting worse. The impact of losing some letters in the post has impacted upon my life in trivial and not so trivial ways.

For example, my wife ordered some Tesco vouchers for some cinema tickets so we could watch Toy Story 3. 10 days later they have not turned up. Lost in the post apparently. Now we have to figure out how to sort this out. Lost to us: quite a lot of money in vouchers and the time and effort to try and sort it out. It's not exactly life threatening, but it's annoying.

But my biggest annoyance was when my hospital sent me an appointment by post and this did not turn up. I had been waiting 6 months for this appointment. So I had to write to my doctor for a re-schedule, grovel to get an an appointment because apparently was a bad customer for not attending an expensive consultation, and lo and behold I have to wait to November. Not only is the postal service doing my health a dis-favour, but so is my local heath provider. Surely the NHS never gets any mail lost en-route, since they don't seem to believe me when I tell them when my mail does not arrive.

So I'm stuck with the current postal service that does not seem to care about lost mail and because we have a monopoly running this service on the last mile, my mail will be subject to poor service and there is nothing I can do about it. I feel powerless, annoyed and I seem to have no way to get this resolved.

Health and Safety Madness #2

2010-06-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

So in a previous posting I visited B+Q to buy some timber and they would not cut it, so today I visited Homebase instead of B+Q and tried to buy a short length of 2"x4" but it only comes in 2m lengths. So I went to the wood cutting service desk and they only cut big sheets of wood and not the wood I wanted cut all because of health and safety rules.

Apparently some fool may saw a finger, a hand or their head off in some freak accident with a wood saw so instead they leave the customer to figure out how to fold it into two and squeeze it into their car.

So much for an convenience store. These wretched DIY shops are tied up in heath and safety madness. B+Q now has self service check outs - is that because heath and safety reasons too? Will the checkout staff hurt their little digits pressing the buttons on the till or maybe suffer from muscular strain injury swiping my credit card?

Urgh! The world has gone bonkers!

Allegations of former ministers selling influence for cash.

2010-03-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

So it appears that influence in the government can be bought with cash if we believe what is being reported by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 investigative journalism.

Actually, I'm not shocked at all, this is no surprise, nothing these money grabbing snout-in-the-trough MPs seems to do can shake me now. It confirms the fact that some of our elected representatives don't really represent us the electorate, instead they just care about lining their deep pockets.

So, when it comes to the general election and you believe your vote can perhaps in some way help steer the way government decides policy think again. Your vote counts for little - what matters is money. Money buys influence, connections and power. Welcome to corrupted UK politics, goodbye principles, fairness and representation.

Customer Dis-service

2010-02-20T23:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I visited a B+Q (a UK Do-It-Yourself) to purchase a couple of lengths of timber which were 2400mm long and hence rather tricky to get inside a family car. So I visited the B+Q timber cutting desk only to be told:

1. The timber was not big enough to be cut (why!?)

2. I could not be given a saw to cut the wood in-case I injured myself (once again heath and safety rules non-sense).

The staff member was very apologetic, as if to say "yes, I know it's crazy, but I don't make these insane rules up, I just work here.."

So zero service satisfaction there.

Next at the check-out we were confronted with high-tech scanning self-service tills. The tone of the computer telling us what to do was very condescending and when we got stuck a girl monitoring four self service tills was abrupt with us because we had done something wrong.

Come on B+Q, the customer comes first! If you cannot be bothered to serve the customer then your customers will not return! As it is, next time I want to do some D.I.Y. I put B+Q at the end of my list of places to visit. Humph!

MP's Expensive Expenses

2010-02-11T00:41:00.000-08:00

So the UK's MPs have been told to repay £1.12 million of their expenses after Sir Thomas Legg's audit. Meanwhile the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has replaced the Commons Fee Office to monitor expenses. IPSA will cost £6.5 million to run to keep MPs honest.

So £6.5 million probably pays for 100+ expensive civil servants, which equates to about one full time civil servant to monitor 6.5 MPs. That equates to over 5 hours work per week per MP to make sure that the MPs are not stealing tax payers money.

Looks like the UK government has an expensive job creation scheme all because MPs cannot be trusted with it's citizens money. No representation without expensive taxation creation schemes...

Blow your nose and get stopped by the Police!

2010-01-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

The BBC news website is reporting a story of an Ayershire Businessman who was apparently sitting in his stationary car with the handbrake on and was fined for blowing his nose. He was stopped by no less than 4 policeman and given a £60 fixed penalty fine for not being in control of his vehicle. Needless to say he's taking this to court and will plead not guilty. Let's hope sanity applies here and the Police jobsworths are laughed out of court.

UPDATE: Common sense has prevailed. Looks like the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has decided that no further action is required and the case has been dropped. The BBC has a full report about this case. But how much time and money has gone into resolving this? Perhaps it should be docked from the charging Policeman's pay...

DVLA sells your private data

2010-01-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

Apparently private data is being sold by the DVLA according to this article by the register and the Daily Mail. It has been reported that in the past 5 years 18 million names and addresses have been sold by this UK government agency to companies such as parking firms an private clamping companies. So much for privacy of your data. Apparently the data is not sold to dodgy establishments. Hrmm.

Well, apart from that fact that in 2009 the DVLA data was acquired by Castrol via an intermediary and used for some creative marketing according to the the register. Castrol used number plate recognition and data about the owner's car make and model from the DVLA was flashed up on digital billboards. The data was not provided directly by the DVLA and the DVLA stated such use was inappropriate. I'd say it's more than inappropriate - it's absolutely scandalous.

Nice to know that the UK government is happy so share the data of it's citizens - any chance of opting out of this scheme Gordon Brown? Goodness knows how secure my Government owned medical records are...

Private Data is no longer Private.

2009-11-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Oh dear, looks like the communications giant T-Mobile has been a bit too communicative. Today it emerged that staff at T-Mobile have passed data from thousands of it's customers too 3rd party brokers without prior permission, as reported by the BBC.

We can expect several things: One, the Ministry of Justice will get it's teeth into this. Two, some staff of T-Mobile will be charged under the Data Protection Act. Three, the government will get all hot-and-bothered about this and maybe try and react with some extra protections in law.

Will customers get compensation - who knows? One thing for sure is that this is not going to be the last time we see Joe Public's private data up for sale.

It's my seat - now go away!

2009-11-11T15:34:00.000-08:00

The other week I had to visit my company's London office which isn't too much of a big deal - it means taking a train up to Victoria. However, currently I'm suffering from a slipped disc in my neck and it's got to the point where it's been pressing on my spine which causes me to get quite wobbly on my feet. Lately I've been using a walking stick to keep my steady as I've fallen over a few times now.

So there I was one late Thursday evening trying to find a seat, hobbling down the carriages with a walking stick. My first surprise was that nobody in 8 carriages was willing to give up a seat, especially the seats which are ear-marked for elderly or disabled people. My second surprise was people tutted when I tried to squeeze down the carriage with a walking stick because I was inconveniencing them. Ho hum. Glad I wasn't in a wheel chair...

Who'd want to be a student?

2009-11-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

According to the BBC, 132,000 students have yet to receive their first student loan payments this academic year, and it's almost the middle of November.

OK, so there has been a bigger intake of students this year because of a recession, but the delay of payments to students who have minimal income is inexcusable. It does not take much foresight to see that a recession means that more young people head to higher education rather than sitting on the dole queue - but the managers running the student loads failed to see this. So who is in charge?

Well, the Government isn't, that's for sure. Lord Mandelson told the Lords that "there is no excuse for the service which the company has provided." The fact that he condemns their failure is ironic - is the Government is control? - obviously not. Oh, and by the way, the Governments solution to this crisis is to hire experts to lead a review. So don't expect a solution before 2010...

So what is learnt from this disaster? Well, students will learn that a Labour government is rubbish with finances and is incapable of sorting out any problem in an efficient and prompt way. But we all knew that anyway...

My Pear Shaped World

2009-11-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

The World has gone pear shaped, more so lately than anytime, hence I'm going to blog about it. Over the past few years I've got increasingly fed up with plain stupid people and organisations causing untold misery and havoc with fundamentally flawed ideas.

To exorcise the rantings from my aching soul I've decided to off load these petty annoyances into a blog. My hope is that others will feel free to chip in and help me document the stupidity we humans face as we try and survive against the tidal wave of maddening legislation and rules that are followed to the Nth degree by mindless jobsworths who make our lives a misery.

My aim is to write a blog that resonates with fed up and disenfranchised members of the public who are constantly facing unreliable service from civil servants and the service industry. I want to make you laugh at the madness of it all, and also get motivated to get up from your seat and try and fix the problems too!

Watch this space!