Last summer we moved slightly across town, reluctantly taking ourselves out of Cherry Hinton and into the adjacent council ward, Queen Edith’s. Because of some desperately illogical parliamentary boundary setting, despite now being much closer to the city centre we find ourselves moved outside the Cambridge city parliamentary consituency and into “Cambridgeshire South”. In my voting lifetime, I have voted for candidates from all of the major parties on occasions (I vote strictly for the candidate, never the party), and I have been represented by at least a dozen members of parliament, from all the major parties (including one from the SDP!). I think that Cambridge’s current MP, the Liberal Democrat Julian Huppert, may be the most inspirational I’ve ever had, so it’s been interesting, since the move, to get used to finding ourselves represented by one of the country’s most unpopular MPs, Andrew Lansley. It’s quite a contrast.

One thing which has stayed the same is that we have the same county council as we did in Cherry Hinton, more’s the pity, as it’s a council whose politicians I find quite objectionable. The ruling Conservatives wasted millions of pounds of our money on the appalling misGuided Bus vanity project, but even our local Liberal Democrat county councillor made himself unpopular by trying to push through a massive rise in councillors’ allowances last year.

However, in this week’s elections it’s the city council we’re dealing with, so it’s been time to find out what’s on offer to us here in Queen Edith’s ward.

Unlike Cherry Hinton, this is solid Liberal Democrat territory, with the Conservatives a fairly distant second last time out. The city council has elections three years out of four, with councillors standing for four years at a time. All three of the Queen Edith’s councillors are Liberal Democrats, and standing for re-election this time is Amanda Taylor, who has been a councillor here for 18 years and who has impeccable local credentials. She lives just three roads away from us.

I have been impressed by Ms Taylor. She’s active locally, that’s clear, attends a decent number of council meetings, and appears to be a thoughtful speaker:

Video: Richard Taylor rtaylor.co.uk

What’s more, Ms Taylor has contacted me a couple of times by email, once after one of my rants must have appeared on her Twitter timeline, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by that level of interest in residents’ concerns. She knows what goes down well with the local voters, and reflects this in her main campaign literature, although I strongly object to a thoroughly misleading chart there showing the parties’ share of votes last year. This has had a huge chunk lopped off the top of the Labour bar to make it seem like they had far fewer votes than they really did.

Her Conservative rival is Richard Jeffs, who appears to live just outside Queen Edith’s, which must be a disadvantage, but hey, he’s only from a short walk away. Although there might be no Conservatives on Cambridge’s city council, judging by recent election results he ought to stand an outside chance here, so I’d have expected to have been on the end of some serious campaigning. But we’ve received nothing. I’d seriously like some idea of what Mr Jeffs is offering, but we haven’t even had a leaflet through the door, never mind a visit. I know nothing about him, Google isn’t any help, and the whole thing is quite mystifying.

The Labour party, on the other hand, have made a real effort, and it’s clear that despite their third-place showing last year, they’re seen as the real opposition by the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, Amanda Taylor has issued a slightly confusing leaflet (in that it’s hard to see who it’s from, at first) which tries to tell us that if we vote Labour, it could mean the Conservatives get in, and that in turn would make Andrew Lansley very happy. I think that’s a disappointingly crass assessment of voters’ intelligence. What’s more, Ms Taylor shows a bar chart of the parties’ vote shares in Queen Edith’s which appears to show that Labour stands no chance here, and that a vote for them would be wasted. However, this is a little disingenuous of her, because the chart is from the last time she stood for election, four years ago. If we look at the results of every city council election here in the last five years, we see a trend which illustrates why Ms Taylor may have a fight on her hands for once:

Labour’s candidate is Sue Birtles, who lives a couple of roads away in the other direction. Ms Birtles is certainly saying all the right things, and has some glossy campaign literature. However, even my 11-year-old (who is unusually interested in politics) noticed that her latest leaflet did seem obsessed with one subject, saying: “it’s a bit eco-friendly, isn’t it, Dad?” Everything seemed to be concerned with cycling or, er, recycling. Which is fine – and I do appreciate the limitations of a city councillor’s role – but there are other issues. Her main leaflet covers a wider range of subjects, although not Labour’s strange (and slightly worrying) “anti-house-sharing” initiative, which Ms Taylor spoke out against (above) when it was defeated in council recently.

Like Ms Taylor, one of Ms Birtles’ leaflets insults the voters’ intelligence slightly with a reference to irrelevant national politics, as if we all believe that the Liberal Democrats are the government, rather than a moderating influence. A picture showing David Cameron and Nick Clegg with their hands raised and a caption saying “Hands up if Cambridge Lib Dem councillors are backing your policies.” Hell, we all know that even Cambridge’s Liberal Democrat MP isn’t backing most of their policies!

Finally, we have Martin Lawson, for the Green Party, who – it should be remembered – have two councillors in Cambridge, which is two more than the Conservatives. Mr Lawson lives on the far side of Cherry Hinton, out of the ward but not that far away; however, we’ve not seen any evidence that he’s standing: no literature, no canvassing and no posters or hoardings on local houses. With Ms Birtles clearly aiming at the green vote, it’s hard to see how he’s going to make any impact.

The Verdict

My mind isn’t yet made up, but I’m confident that there are at least two decent candidates amongst those standing, so I shall certainly be wandering around the corner to cast my vote on Thursday. The media seems to be focusing on Cambridge as a possible landmark council gain for Labour, but that would be a massive swing, and I’d refer them to the excellent blog by Phil Rodgers first. And if you want to catch up on what the LibDem council has been up to over the past few years, the best place to start is the extraordinary blog by Richard Taylor which has been holding the council to account, impartially, for a long time now.

UPDATE
I’ve had some correspondence with Ms Taylor, eloquently defending her claim that “a vote for Labour could let the Tories in”. Here’s why I don’t think there’s any chance of this happening. With her warning, Ms Taylor is presumably addressing the possibility of Lib Dem voters switching to Labour and dividing those two parties’ share of the vote, dragging them both below a presumably stagnant Tory vote. But over the years, Labour and the Lib Dems have consistently got a total of 60-65% of the vote in this ward, and I can’t see that falling. That means that at least one of them must get at least 30%. The Tories would have to find considerable gains from somewhere to reach that level, and I can’t find any betting people currently putting money on the Tories gaining votes anywhere, not least in a council ward where they appear to have disappeared without trace this time around.

My bet is that the combined Labour and Lib Dem vote will actually increase, thanks to the two parties’ efforts (perhaps past the 67% point where no other party could win), and they will both beat the Tories by a distance. Ms Taylor may not agree, but I think her claim does not stand up.

POSTSCRIPT
The morning after: Well, Queen Edith’s delivered the shock of the night, with Ms Birtles thoroughly disproving the “Labour can’t win here” claim by coming from a distant third to win the ward quite clearly. Here are the results:

Sue Birtles (Labour and Co-operative) 1084 (40%)
Amanda Taylor (Liberal Democrat) 963 (35%)
Richard Jeffs (Conservative) 513 (19%)
Martin Lawson (Green Party) 172 (6%)

A remarkable achievement by the winner, for sure, but not that impossible when plotted on a graph. All the falls are quite predictable, and there’s no reason why those votes shouldn’t cascade down to the one party which is on the up. As I mentioned above, the Tory vote was always likely to fall, especially with the low profile of the party’s candidate, and the Green Party was never going to make an impression with its even smaller presence during the campaign. My figure of a possible 67% of votes being up for grabs between the Lib Dems and Labour candidates, which would make a Tory win impossible, turned out to be very conservative. In the end, the share of votes between the two active parties soared to 75%, with Labour getting the majority. There’s some good coverage of the wider trends in the city on Phil Rodgers’ blog.

Congratulations to Ms Birtles (and, it should be said, many committed local supporters) for demonstrating the effectiveness of a lot of good old-fashioned house-to-house campaigning. I hope she makes a good impression as the first Labour councillor in Queen Edith’s for many years (if not ever – anyone know?). Commiserations to Ms Taylor who has clearly put in a lot of hard work here over the last 18 years, and that deserves acknowledgement.

It’s been available for a week or two here in the UK, long enough for any horrible problems to have surfaced (none did), and so it’s time to see what Apple’s iTunes Match is like. My feeling is that although it appears to be a great concept on the surface, it’s far too sophisticated a concept for 95% of iTunes users to get their head around. So although it may be a profitable sideline for Apple (and indeed a necessary one, to see off potential competitors), it’s not the future of music storage, especially at £21.99 a year.

iTunes Match offers three things. Firstly, the chance to store a copy of all of your music on Apple’s servers. I like this, although there are alternative services. I have my iTunes library of 13,000 songs on an independent hard drive, and backing it up is a worry, especially since I divested myself of my entire CD collection last summer. iTunes Match promises to be the straightforward, off-site backup I’ve been meaning to set up for years.

Secondly, iTunes Match is clearly going to make it possible to download anything I own to my iPhone (and other devices) without needing to copy the stuff over from my main computer in advance of wanting to listen to it. My iTunes library is much larger than my iPhone’s storage capacity, and at the moment I just keep my favourite stuff on the iPhone. But music which I get a sudden urge to hear is often not my favourite stuff. That can be annoying. I do subscribe to Spotify, and in many ways this is just giving me access to my own music library in the same way that Spotify gives me access to Spotify’s much larger one (although without the streaming – i.e instant listening – option). However, I own music which Spotify does not offer yet, and plenty that it will never offer, so this seems like a nice add-on.

Finally, iTunes Match will replace poor quality versions of most songs with nice pristine versions from Apple’s library. This is cool in theory, although in practice I have very little which is stored in lower quality than Apple offers.

Right, let’s go. iTunes Match can be found on the “Store” section of iTunes. Buying it is the painless procedure you’d expect from Apple. Then it immediately starts to scan your library, to see what Apple has already got, and what it can’t identify and will therefore need to upload from your computer to their servers. I imagined this initial scan wouldn’t take long, although fully expected the upload of any unique material would take a while, despite a 50Mb/sec internet connection. I was wrong. Even the initial scan took forever.

The first stage is called “Gathering information about your iTunes library”. That didn’t sound too hard, but the progress bar moved very slowly indeed. In fact, it took all day, and after about 13 hours, when nearly done, my Mac got to its automatic shutdown time, and promptly quit iTunes. I was horrified, and justifiably so, because on rebooting and restarting the procedure, it seemed to start again (almost) from the beginning. So I left it overnight, and after another 12 hours, I watched as it finally got to the end of that stage …then moved on to stage 2.

This one was called “Matching your music with songs in the iTunes Store”. It didn’t appear to be any speedier than the first stage, although in the end it only took about 6 hours. Nothing remarkable to report. And so we get to stage 3.

As you can see, 5000 songs (under 40% of my iTunes library) were matched, or at least displayed at this point as being “available in iCloud”. I was a bit disappointed by that, as my musical tastes aren’t that obscure. I expected the classical stuff (not that there was much) not to match, mainly because of the lack of a standard way of titling and tagging classical music. But my collection is 80% rock and pop, and it’s rare that any of the CDs I’d ripped over the years weren’t in the GraceNote database. So what was going on? I watched as the progress bar moved relatively steadily in this third stage, as songs were added to the total “available in iCloud”, and thought it was unexpectedly fast, maybe one per second. Then I realised that it was just the cover art which was being uploaded here, at least to begin with, not the songs. So maybe Apple did have more than 40% of my library which it could match, but just needed the cover art for a lot more of them? I’m not sure why that would be the case.

So I’m guessing that the process goes as follows: a bunch of stuff gets “matched” and is available immediately; a second lot is matched but needs the cover art and becomes available quite quickly; then a third lot needs both the cover art and the track itself to be uploaded.

So, a few hours later, we appeared to be done. Investigating the iTunes library on my Mac, I found the following classifications of the 13,493 songs:
“Matched” or “Purchased” – 11,204 songs
“Uploaded” – 1,518 songs
“Ineligible” – 6 songs
“Duplicate” – 2 songs
“Error” – 762 songs

The odd few ineligible or duplicate songs aren’t of interest, but the 762 “Error” songs (5% of my library) is of more concern. What to make of these? Off to Google we go, and one suggestion, from Macworld, is that the files are corrupted in some subtle way which may still leave them listenable. Interesting. So I grabbed half a dozen AC/DC tracks, created AIFF versions, deleted the originals from both my library and iCloud, and selected “add to iCloud” for the new AIFF versions. The result? The iCloud Status classification next to them changed to “Waiting”. Unfortunately, there it stayed. Following another tip, I selected “Update iTunes Match” (from the “Store” menu), and after a bunch of messages, found that the AC/DC tracks now had “Removed” next to them. Meanwhile, some of the “Error” tracks changed to “Waiting” (even though I hadn’t asked to have anything done to them) and the iTunes window continued to say “Matching your music with songs in the iTunes Store…” After an hour, all the “Error” tracks had changed to “Waiting”, with the exception of the AC/DC ones, which were still “Removed’. So it looks like if you try to do the slightest update, the iTunes Match procedure goes through your entire library again, including all the “Error” songs which will still be in “Error” status because you’ve not touched them. This is all rather tedious. But this wasn’t going to beat me. I selected the AC/DC songs and “Add to iCloud”. And although it took a while, their status changed to “Uploaded” (not “Matched”, mind you). This wasn’t really what I wanted though, because if you remember, these songs are in AIFF format.

So here we are. Not a comprehensive success, with 756 songs formerly marked as “Error” now marked as “Waiting”. There are loads of people with the same problem. However, 95% of my music library has been “Matched” or “Uploaded” and is therefore available on other devices. We’ll see if that turns out to be worth all of the effort.

Just got back from a showing of “Sherlock Holmes” (which was rather good, by the way) at Cambridge Cineworld. The talking point of the evening, however, was not the main movie, but a trailer shown beforehand for a quite dreadful-looking movie called “The Sitter”. The problem was that the trailer was in no way suitable for an audience containing 12 year olds, with more use of bad language in two minutes than would be allowed in an entire 12A movie, and some sexual references which were uncomfortable even for the adults in the audience. Now, if people want to make and watch movies like that, then fine, but the (presumably mistaken) showing of this trailer demonstrated why the cinema multiplex business is slowly killing itself. Mark Kermode would nod his head knowingly.

On heading out from the showing, the young manager was clearly waiting for us all, accompanied by our complaints. It turned out that he’d been besieged by angry cinemagoers all day, and could only offer the defence that “the computer says it’s a 12A trailer for a 12A film”. When we pointed out that “The Sitter” was actually a 15 movie, and showed him the BBFC website, he resorted to saying that “the computer says otherwise”. When we asked if he’d watched it, he said that he had (unsurprisingly, given the complaints he’d been getting), and we asked if he agreed that it was unsuitable. At this point, while not saying yes, he admitted: “We’re not able to stop the trailers even if we wanted to, they come direct from a satellite”. So whatever was being streamed to his screens, the human being in charge was unable to do anything about it, regardless of the distress – and at our showing, anger – being caused. It makes you weep.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

2. Attack the Block

3. Senna

4. Source Code

5. One Day

6. The Adjustment Bureau

7. Thor

8. Paul

9. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

10. The Kings Speech

So, there’s been much news coverage over the past few days concerning a survey which says 1 in 10 of us plans to leave online passwords in our will, although I’m not sure if that’s actually something which is physically happening or just a nice idea. The reasons include the sheer financial value of films, music and software, as well as the sentimental value of family snaps and videos, all of which are increasingly likely to be stored only online. But as a reader suggests in The Times today, this could be a disastrous thing to do. The letter points out: “Once probate has been granted, the will is open to public inspection” and therefore your passwords would be open to the world.

Now, when I go, I hope that the executors of my will have enough information to clear up my financial affairs. (That reminds me, I really should ensure there’s a way for them to access my online bank accounts and other important documents. If they can’t do so, they’ll have to go through the process of getting a hard copy of my death certificate to the banks, and it could take some time.) But I doubt they’ll do much more. All those hundreds of other online accounts, from GMail down to free memberships of websites I’ll never visit again even while I’m alive, will be allowed to quietly fall into disuse. My executors won’t bother to close them down, even if they could (can you even close and delete a GMail account?).

However, what happens if I publish my passwords in my will? Sure, the bank account details won’t be of use to anyone, because presumably by the time the details are made public, the accounts will have been closed (or let’s hope so). However, the world would have a free run at everything else. I’ve made a good attempt at allocating different passwords to everything I’ve ever subscribed to, but I’ll admit to having used some passwords more than once, and I know some people use the same password for everything. There’s a lot of mischief which might be caused if someone gets into my Twitter account, for example, and masquerades as me to people who don’t know I’m dead. And the thought of what might happen if strangers got into my GMail account, which already has 6Gb and 7 years’ worth of private correspondence in it, doesn’t bear thinking about. There are many examples online of people finding out a seemingly innocuous password belonging to someone else, and using that to get into a series of increasingly important accounts. What we need to do is document our user names and passwords somewhere, safely and separately, for our executors. But that place isn’t in a will.

It’s impossible to expect your executors to delete your online presence after you go. Don’t put their futures in potential difficulty by giving strangers even the slightest ability to exploit your absence.

We’ve just moved house. It’s not something anyone with a life would want to do often, if only because of the sheer chore of letting dozens of different organisations know about the change of address, never mind the pain of changing things like TV and telephone services. Most significant of all, there’s the sheer cost of moving. Sure, there are Estate Agents, Solicitors and others to pay, but the real blow – when you live in expensive cities like Cambridge – is stamp duty, which has risen to eyewateringly high levels in recent years. If we stay in this house for ten years, and spread the cost of the stamp duty over that period, it comes to (wait for it) a couple of hundred pounds a month. I hope you make good use of it, Mr Osborne.

But hey, nobody’s going to feel sorry for me buying an expensive house. What I can do is to tell you about some of the services we used, and if they were any good. Almost uniformly, they were.

The Estate Agents

First of all, we had to sell our existing house. We had four estate agents round, and three of them clearly just looked at a nearby house similar to ours which had sold a year earlier, added a bit on to reflect the rise in house prices over the year, and recommended that’s what we put the house on the market for. But I was convinced that the area was underpriced, and amazed that there seemed to be no allowance for the fact we’d spent over £40,000 on a top-quality extension just four years earlier. Enter Kevin Burt-Gray of TuckerGardner (update: see comments below).

Kevin understood all of the above. He realised the value of the location, opposite Cambridge’s best public park. He suggested a price nearly 15% higher than the other estate agents, and what’s more, advised us of a (lower) price at which to put the house on the market, in order to eventually get the target price. He was eventually proved almost exactly right. There’s no way we would have got that sort of price – which was a fair one, by the way – without Kevin.

Now, I’m not a fan of Estate Agents. Last time we moved house, the firm we used did so little work that I resolved to sell the house privately when it came to doing it again. I even set up a web page which would be visited by house buyers regularly, so that when the time came to sell the house, we could just advertise it there (the page still appears well up the top of the Google results, and is visited by hundreds of people a month). However, we wanted to move quickly, and took a chance that TuckerGardner would get us a premium over what we’d be likely to get by selling it privately which would be enough to cover their fees. We were right. And so were they.

The Solicitors

Conversely, last time we sold a house I was amazed at what great work the solicitors did, for what they charged. There was no way we’d look at any short cuts on this front, so all that remained was to choose one. Asking friends and family locally for recommendations didn’t turn up much, so I did some research online: my criteria were that we used a locally-based, independent firm, which specialised in conveyancing. I didn’t want to be sitting in waiting rooms waiting for other clients to finish discussing their impending divorces. Despite their rather uninspiring web presence, Massucco Buttress ticked the right boxes, and a visit to their equally unprepossessing office by Cambridge station confirmed they were the people we wanted. I particularly warmed to Amanda Buttress’ comment that she never tried to be great friends with the local estate agents – that’s just what you want to hear from someone whose job includes banging estate agents and other solicitors’ heads together.

The firm did a thoroughly efficient job, and really helped to make things happen when it all got a bit bogged down nearer sale time. They were certainly a lot more impressive and proactive than the solicitors they were dealing with up and down the chain. Again, thoroughly recommended.

Buying a House

I haven’t mentioned that we were buying a new house. Now here’s an opportunity for somebody. If you’ve never bought a new house before, here’s what happens: you have to start negotiating with the house builders. You’re completely on your own, with no support, against salespeople who have been professionally trained in negotiation. It’s a ridiculous situation. I have no interest, ability or desire to negotiate. Why is it, in a country which has largely moved on from the third-world practices of bartering, that when it comes to the largest purchase of your life, the process is dragged down to the level of an Arab market?

I enquired from people who know better than me what the process entails. “You ring up the house builder and make them a silly offer”, I was told. “Then they say there’s no chance, and declare that you’ll have to pay the full amount. So you say you’ll think about it, and ring back later with a higher offer. They say they can take a bit off, but not that much. And so it goes.”

That’s exactly what happens. I hate this. I wondered if I could get a professional negotiator to do it for me – I’d happily pay someone £5,000 if they could get the house for £10,000 less than I could manage to negotiate. But I couldn’t find anyone offering such a service. It’s a huge market opportunity, if you ask me. Hundreds of new houses are sold nationwide every week, and a fair proportion of the buyers have no interest or inclination to get into a bartering situation with people who do it for a living.

The Move
We asked a few friends to recommend a local removal company (again, I wanted to deal with a locally-based specialist) but not much came of this. So I turned to Twitter, and the response was excellent. Five recommendations within the hour, four of them for Fulchers of Cambridge. We had a second company in to quote, just to ensure the price was OK, but Fulchers were actually cheaper, so that was sorted. They delivered packing boxes well in advance of the move, they were absolutely professional on the day, and they collected the packing material a week later. We couldn’t have asked for better service.

So here we are, a few weeks later, and I have to say, as far as house moves go it was relatively painless. That said, it was still a massive upheaval, and something I wouldn’t want to do again for many years. Let’s hope we don’t have to.

I love my TV and broadband, and I’m happy to pay whatever it takes to get the best service out there. A few years ago, after a long run of exclusively using Cambridge Cable and its successor ntl, I switched my TV service to Sky, simply because (at the time) it was so much better technologically. But I stayed with the wonderful broadband service from ntl (now Virgin Media), so for the past 5 years I’ve had both companies’ products. And I’ve been able to observe that while they compete with each other technologically, they’re at opposite ends of the scale when it comes to customer service.

In principle, because of its ownership and many other aspects of what it does, I don’t like Sky/BSkyB. However, it’s absolutely superb at what it does. Virgin Media’s customer service and administration is such a shambles that I can’t imagine there’s any chance of it ever bringing its service up to that sort of standard. Sadly for Virgin Media, it must be impossible in such a large organisation to “start again”, which appears to be what’s needed.

Now, normally customer service isn’t that important to me. After all, I watch TV and use the internet every day, and only need admin or tech support once or twice a year, if that. But when you have a choice of two organisations, one offering almost faultless customer service and the other making you want to scream, you do have to start factoring it into the equation.

Following a recent house move I had the chance to reassess what services I would have. The new house was pre-wired for Virgin Media, and it’s clear that with the new TiVo box, the TV service has comfortably caught up with Sky. With 100Mb broadband on the cards, there was no way I’d have been changing that service to any other provider. So I decided to switch the TV and go to the complete TV/broadband/telephone bundle from Virgin Media.

The result? Not unexpectedly, technologically fine, administratively disastrous. I arranged the transfer and upgrade of services a few weeks in advance. There were warning signs. The price I was quoted seemed ridiculously cheap, so I got the member of staff (some poor wage slave in an Indian call centre) to read back what I’d ordered, and “hmm, that’s odd sir, the system doesn’t seem to have registered everything we’ve just discussed, does it?” We eventually got it sorted. I also asked if I could take my telephone number with me, only to be told “I don’t know”. Well, it’s rather important. “Could you ring back just before the move and we’ll be able to confirm that?” Well, you’ve rather got me over a barrel, haven’t you?

Enter the Geordies
I rang back a few days before the move. I need to confirm that I can take my telephone number with me next week. “Hmm, I can’t really tell you sir”. Oh, I’m sure you can. How about finding someone who will? Ten minutes of listening to Tinie Tempah on hold, and a Geordie voice appears. This is clearly beyond the Indian Call Centre’s pay grade. “I’m just looking at your account Mr Rand”, says the very friendly voice, “and I don’t know what they’ve done, they’ve made a real hash of it, but you leave it with me, get on with your house move and your old number will be transferred with you. No problem!”

Four Days Later
So we’re in the new house, surrounded by boxes, and the installation crew turn up from Virgin Media. Nice guys. They love all the prewiring in the house; everything’s set up in a couple of hours. The TiVo boxes look a bit daunting, but I’m sure they’ll run me through the basics. “Sorry we can’t tell you anything about these new TiVo boxes sir, we don’t know anything about them, but if you need any help, you can call customer service”. We exchange glances. It’s quite obvious to both of us that it would be easier for me to just work it out myself. “By the way, the HD services don’t work on one of the boxes either, but I’m sure customer services can sort that out for you too.” He might well have added “(Good luck with that)”.

“And here’s your phone number”. It’s one I’d never seen before.

Stay calm.

I ring India, later that day. Very apologetic. “I don’t know what’s happened sir, but there’s no reason why you can’t have your old number. It’ll take 24 hours or so, but I’ve filled in the form and is there anything else I can help you with?” No, please, just make sure it’s done.

A quick aside. Virgin Media’s automated answering system. You know, the one where they say: “we’re now going to give you five options…”. None of them usually seem to apply to what I want, and there’s no “any other queries” option, so I’ve just taken to selecting something vaguely close. After a couple of banks of these, you’re then asked: “please key in characters from your password”. But I have no idea what my password is. Why should I? There’s no way of saying “I don’t know”. At this point, some people would just give up in despair. Maybe that’s the idea. Maybe it saves on the number of callers they get. It turns out – according to one customer service person I spoke to – that it’s irrelevant, you can just key in anything. So what’s the point? Or at least, why don’t they tell you it doesn’t matter if you don’t know your password?

Two Days Later
You guessed it. I dial my home phone number from my mobile, and still nothing. “We’re really sorry about this sir, I know the form has been filled in. You’ll have your number in 24 hours. Certainly if you don’t have it working in 48 hours, call us.” Well of course I will. But can you be sure it’ll work this time? After all, it’s the fourth time I’ve requested my number is transferred. “Absolutely sir! The form has been filled in!”. Blimey, this form must be magic.

One more aside. I called about the HD channels not appearing on one of my TiVo boxes. I explained it to the first person I got through to. They put me through to someone else. I’m beginning to get bored of Tinie Tempah, none of these transfers take less than two or three minutes on hold. The next person listens carefully to my problem (and don’t forget, every new person I speak to is asking for my customer reference, or password, or something). They say: “Ah, you’ll need TiVo support for that, I’ll pass you on”. Why couldn’t I have just hit a button at the beginning to choose TiVo support in the first place? But now I’m going “up a level” and I know what that means – India have declared. A pleasant Scots chap sorts me out (it takes 45 minutes of playing with the box, something the installers shouldn’t have left not working in the first place, but hey-ho). The Scots chap is clearly unhappy that I didn’t get a proper working system, or a proper demonstration of how the TiVo worked. You and me both, mate.

It reminds me of ten years ago when Virgin Media was still ntl, at a time when they didn’t acknowledge the existence of Apple Macs, but I had a problem with my Mac’s broadband connection. After being passed around, I was eventually put on to a specialist Mac support guy in Wales, who was just brilliant. What’s more, he acknowledged how hopeless ntl’s support was and said: “listen, here’s my direct line. Any problems, just come straight through”. Wow.

Three Days Later
Oh come on, you didn’t think it’d end happily, did you? If it had, maybe I wouldn’t be needing the therapy of writing this. Still no home phone number. Back on to India. Very apologetic. “The form has been filled in”. Ah, the magic form again. Look, a whole series of people have assured me it would happen the next day, can I speak to someone who can actually get something done? I’m transferred eventually to a supervisor called ‘Neil’. I’m sure some Indian people have English names, but I’m dubious that’s his real one, somehow. Anyway, he sounds confident enough to be a genuine supervisor. I never lose my temper with bottom-rung operatives, it’s rarely their fault. But I feel I can be a little more forthright here. “All I can say is that the transfer of your number is in progress”, he says, “I can’t really offer any more than that. And it’ll be done in ten working days”.

Oh you’ve got to be kidding me.

Ten. TEN? But it was going to be done when I moved in. The third time I asked, it was going to be done “within 24 hours” of that. A few days later, the fourth time I asked, it was going to be done “within 48 hours” of that. Several days further on, it’s now going to be done “in 10 days”. I tell Neil that this is just not acceptable. He has a ponder, and says: “I tell you what, I can get that reduced to 5 days”. I think I’m supposed to be grateful. But I’m powerless. And that’s the most frustrating thing of all.

Now, I appreciate that not having people being able to ring you for a few weeks isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s just that somehow, I knew this was going to happen. At almost every level, when you speak to Virgin Media customer support they’re apologetic. The operation clearly doesn’t work, from top to bottom. The foot soldiers in India are clearly hamstrung by the systems in front of them, and (being an overseas call centre) the problems they have in relating to their customers. When you get up a level, there are just constant sighs of exasperation with what’s going on elsewhere. It must be an awful place to work. But it’s just as bad for us as users. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Later on, the phone rings, for the first time in days. Maybe a miracle has happened? Unfortunately not. “Hello, this is Virgin Media. If you join our mobile phone service, we can offer you a free Blackberry Curve…”

Most of this article was written while on hold to Virgin Media Customer Service. You still can’t call me on the number which I’ve had with them for years.

POSTSCRIPT
As mentioned in the update at the top, after writing this, I was contacted by the Virgin Media “Social Media Team” (via Twitter and email) and by the company’s “Head of Customer Experience” (see comment below). Impressively, the telephone number situation was sorted in 24 hours, and I’m very grateful for this. It seems slightly churlish to raise the following question – but I must – which is “Why couldn’t normal customer service make this happen?” Clearly the capabilities are in place to expedite matters. Ten days to transfer a phone number indeed.

THE NEXT DAY
“Dad”, comes the cry from downstairs, “Why is the telly not working?” I look at the screen. It says: “You have not subscribed to this channel”. Or indeed any channel, by the looks of things. Oh hang on, the broadband’s down too. Time for technical support. That’s one of the numbers I haven’t pressed on the menu over the past fortnight. “No problems reported in your area sir”, says Luke. “But it says here that you’ve been disconnected for non-payment of bills”.

I’m not sure how to explain speechlessness in print. They have my direct debit details. They’ve been taking money from me for years. Luke puts me through to a nice lady in accounts. “There’s nothing outstanding here”, she says. Indeed, that description could probably apply to most of your organisation, but thanks anyway. So what should I do? The nice lady offers to take the matter up with something called “Collections”. But we have to wait ten minutes to get put through to them. Mid-80s David Bowie to listen to today.

Apparently “Collections” says there was £3 outstanding, but couldn’t explain why it wasn’t “collected”. Clearly it’s easier to just switch customers off when there’s a glitch in the system. That always gets things moving. The nice lady says that it’ll all be sorted in a moment, “but it might take 24 hours to restore all of your services”. I refrain from losing my temper, reminding myself as always that it’s not her fault, it’s down to the lack of investment in systems which work, from people at board level. The trouble is, I’ll never have the chance to talk to one of them. I wish I could. It’d make me feel so much better.

So as I write, everything’s working. My advice to anyone using Virgin Media services, and whose systems are fine, is don’t move house. Indeed, don’t move a muscle. You might just get the service you want (as long as accounts doesn’t get involved).

AND THERE’S MORE
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. A letter arrives, telling me that my services have been restricted (whatever that means) because of the unusual account expenditure taking place. I’m a bit concerned: many years ago, with ntl, I was sent a 10-page bill amounting to hundreds of pounds which was nothing to do with me – they actually had to send out an engineer to look at my set-top box to confirm it wasn’t. So I was worried that something like this had happened again, and immediately got on to accounts to find out what the unusual account expenditure was. “It’s only a standard letter”, I was informed, “and won’t affect your services; it’s just to let you know that we’ve noticed something out of the ordinary’s being charged to your account”. Sure, but I haven’t been spending anything unusual, so why the warning letter? The accounts lady peers into her screen (I have a nice mental image of Virgin Media’s call centres by now). “Well, there’s a couple of hundred pounds been spent from your account, which isn’t normal.”

I have a think. £200? We tried out an “On Demand” movie. That doesn’t account for the other £197 though. Oh hang on…

Is the “unusual expenditure” anything to do with the two TiVo boxes I’ve just had installed? “Ah yes, that’ll be it. Not sure why they sent you a letter in that case”. You don’t say. Does everyone upgrading their service get a letter warning them that they’ve been spending too much money, I wonder? Right, so that’s sorted. Are my services still “restricted” (whatever that means) then? “Would you like to talk to Collections about it?” No I blummin’ well wouldn’t. It’s been nice talking to you. Get your house in order (I add, silently).

UPDATE: I’ve closed comments on this article because I don’t want to become a clearing house for people with bad experiences of Virgin Media customer service, such as the examples below. Who knows, maybe by the time you read this, Virgin Media will have got the staff and system resources they need, and may be a paragon of customer service virtue.

One of the tasks which the organisers of the 2012 Olympics will have looked forward to the least will have been the ticket distribution. With demand inevitably set to outstrip supply, and in an age where everybody believes they have a “right” to whatever they want, the process was always going to generate world-class quantities of bad feeling. However, the whinging which has occupied so many acres of newsprint has been anything but Olympic standard, culminating in this pathetic piece by Allison Pearson in the Telegraph this week. The gist of that article was: “I applied for tickets to some low-profile sports and got them! What an awful job the organisers have done! I hate them, I hate them!”

This completely unhinged rant, widely derided in social media, actually asks the question: “How can three million first-round tickets have gone to just 700,000 people?” And the answer is, Allison, to do the maths. People bought tickets in fours. Can you imagine what the Polly Fillers of this world would have had to say if tickets had been sold singly? Some people did get more than one lot (including Allison Pearson), but that was probably because at least one of their successful applications was for a sport which didn’t sell out.

Yes, I was lucky enough to get something. Not the men’s 100m final or anything like that, but at least it’s something. I put it down to doing a bit of homework beforehand, and playing the game. Here’s how.

The most common complaint I hear (from people I respect) is that the system favoured people who could put many thousands of pounds in their bank account. I don’t believe that’s true. What many people aren’t admitting is that they wish they’d applied for a lot more tickets, because they now (and only now) realise they didn’t have much to lose.

Imagine that a ticket to an event cost £100, and four times the number of people applied as there were tickets available. So if you just put in for one event, you’d have a one-in-four chance of getting one. If you put in for two events, you’d have a 44% chance of getting one, and a 6% chance of getting two. If you put in for three events, you’d have a 58% chance of getting one, etc.

Now, the problem was that the organisers said you had to have the money in your bank account to cover the tickets you’d been allocated. And people said: “I can’t apply for more than X, because that’s the most money I can have in my bank account when they come to take it”. But they weren’t playing the odds. In the example above, supposing your limit was £200. If you took the attitude that you couldn’t put in for three tickets, because you couldn’t have £300 in your bank account, you were assuming that there was a chance of you being successful with all three allocations, and ending up with nothing because you couldn’t fund it. In reality, that was never going to happen. The chances of you being successful with three applications out of three, in the above example, are 1.5%. Yes, it would be infuriating if it happened, and you hit the jackpot with a massive success rate. Imagine then ending up with nothing! But that was never going to happen.

That’s why I put in for 15 events, at a cost of something like £8,000. Whether I could afford to pay for them or not is irrelevant, because there wasn’t enough money in my bank account to cover more than about 8, even if I’d been lucky enough to have got that many. But I worked out that the chances of getting more than 8 out of 15 were so tiny that it wasn’t a situation worth worrying about. Trust me, if I’d got the lot I’d have gone to my grave regretting that I didn’t raise the cash to have covered the allocation. It’s not as if it would have been hard to shift them on to friends and family. However, by putting in for 15 events, my chances of getting at least a couple were very strong. And so it proved. I could quite comfortably cover the cost of the tickets I ended up getting.

The other widely heard complaint is that the system seemed to have been set up to encourage people to apply for more tickets than they might have done otherwise. You don’t say. Guess what? Olympic Games don’t traditionally sell out, not even in the most sports-mad countries. One of the organisers’ highest priorities from the outset will have been to fill every grandstand, even at the lowest profile sports. Not because empty seats would look embarrassing, but because of the ammunition it would (rightly) give the people who don’t think that this country should be hosting the event anyway (and that’s another argument for which I might even have some sympathy). I have genuine respect for sales techniques which extract the maximum results by sheer ingenuity, where the 3G mobile spectrum auction remains the high water mark.

I dread to think what things would have been like if the Olympic tickets had been sold on some sort of “first-come first-served” basis. Apart from handing an unfair advantage to the quick-witted and computer-literate, the chance of the IT infrastructure being able to cope would have been about the same as my chance of getting tickets for the men’s 100m final. Which I’ll be watching, quite contentedly, on TV.

Some of the band members – most notably front man Damian Darlington – have previously appeared in the “Australian” lineup, and long-time fans have every excuse for finding it all a bit confusing. But let’s not get hung up about this. These are tribute bands we’re talking about. And as with all tribute bands, the only thing which matters is: do they deliver a suitably authentic experience, now that we’ll never again see the band they’re paying tribute to live in concert?

Of course they do. What did you expect? The Australian Pink Floyd Show (and now Brit Floyd too) have always take the tribute act one giant step further by recreating the unique Pink Floyd stage show, with its memorable visuals. Couple that with a greatest-hits set list that you wouldn’t get from the real band even if they were touring/speaking/alive, and it’s a corkingly good night out for fans.

No, it’s not Dave Gilmour himself studiously picking out those guitar solos, or Roger Waters spitting out those grumpy lyrics (actually it looked more like Nick Clegg and Keith Allen up front). But we don’t come for the original artists; we come for an evening a bit like one with Pink Floyd, and we get it. The musicianship and vocal stylings are extraordinarily good, and more than adequate facsimiles for all but the real musos. In fact – as with most tribute bands – you get something closer to the original album versions than you probably would with the real band, who might well decide to wander off-piste into “live versions”, for better or for worse.

People come to Cambridge Corn Exchange from further afield than normal regional venues, because downstairs is usually standing, exactly as a rock gig should be. So it was a real disappointment when those who’d bought standing tickets were contacted before the gig to be told that “the promoter had decided” it would be seating throughout, and here were replacement seated tickets. I don’t know how many people sent them back, as was offered, but the venue was advertising the event heavily right up to the day, and it wasn’t quite full. Still, they did give us seats right down the front, which was an interesting experience.

There weren’t too many surprises in the set, from the opening “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” through to the “Run Like Hell” encore. We were given a handful of songs from every album from “Meddle” onwards (except the quietly-forgotten “Final Cut”) and I think the only song I’d not heard a tribute Floyd play before was “Pigs”, a relatively mediocre song which came over much better than I expected, once it got going, at least. Not a patch on “Sheep” though, which occupied the same pre-interval slot when I saw them once before, but which – sadly – didn’t get an airing tonight. “Echoes” was terrific, marred only by a stream of people coming back in late from the bar and finishing their conversations, and “Comfortably Numb” was – as ever – spectacular.

So the big question is probably “are Brit Floyd as good as The Australian Pink Floyd Show?” and on this showing, I’d have to say yes. Perhaps the only thing they need to work on is their stage presence and personality: “TAPFS” always seemed to be enjoying themselves, and even had a decent bit of banter between the songs. Brit Floyd were a lot more stiff, and need to chill out. People want great musicianship from the band, but they don’t want the whole thing to be too serious.

The Unthanks performing Tom Waits’ No One Knows I’m Gone, Junction 2, Cambridge, 2 April 2011