BT – You Couldn’t Make This Up

More news on the Dongle. Firstly a message in reply to my query raised through the internet channel. The usual apologies, but confirmation that my BT Broadband Mobile (proper name!) has indeed now been ordered, and that I should get it within seven days. The following day another message, from another advisor, informing me that my item hasn’t been ordered, and that I need to telephone and re-order it! You couldn’t make this up!

More Joy Of BT

In addition to the trials I have detailed with BT elsewhere, we have also been endeavouring to improve the level of service we get through our BT Broadband connection, and in particular to improve the streaming of movies through the BBC iplayer, which is now also available through the Wii machine as well as on the PCs, and which will not run smoothly. I have acquired the BT accelerator thingy to go into the master phone socket, moved the modem from its previous location to be close to the master phone socket (as advised by BT), bought some of those network gadgets that work through the mains wiring and installed them, so that everything, including the Wii, now has a wired connection. All this kit has actually made no difference at all to the BBC iplayer performance, on any of the machines, although I’ve had the fun of putting it all in, which is good for an old fool like me. Having rooted around on the internet, I’ve discovered that the maximum speed available from the local BT exchange here, which we’re about 100 yards from, is actually 512kbps on the ADSL service we have. (Note, please the free use of technical terms). We’re actually getting the fastest speed  (about 450kbps) that we can. This is just not fast enough to support movie streaming for the BBC iplayer, which requires at least 1mgps . So at the moment this investment in new kit has been a bit of a waste of time. The Domestic Goddess will not be pleased. However, the website I went on does say that our local exchange is configured for something called ADSL Max, which looks to be faster (and no doubt more expensive), so I’m trying to find out what exactly this entails. As always, I will keep all my readers posted.

The Joy Of BT

Over the last week or so, whilst I sat here going through my emails in yahoo mail a little advertisement has been displaying on the right hand side of the page advertising BT broadband USB plug-in, commonly referred to as a dongle. This gadget works by connecting to the mobile phone network, being plugged into your laptop, and gives you internet access, in theory, in places where there isn’t wireless coverage. As someone who likes to keep in touch, likes new gadgets, and is an existing BT customer, this seemed to me like a good thing to have in the armoury of options for staying in touch with the Cloud. It has a one-off payment, no monthly charges, and then you load it with credit through your BT account, and you can’t be overcharged as it’s a sort of pre-pay system.So, onto the BT website with my usual sign-on and password, through into the appropriate section, press the appropriate buttons, and one BT broadband dongle is ordered. The system gave me an order number, and an email confirmation, as expected, arrived almost immediately. Delivery within two weeks, excellent. A couple of days ago the paper email copy surfaced on my desk, and I thought I’d check progress on the BT website. After logging in and all that and finding the right screen, the response to the order number was “no trace of your order”, or some such wording.

Wait a couple of days, and try again on the old BT website. I received an identical response. Time to try the “ring this number if there’s a problem” number. At least it’s a freephone 0800 number. After waiting about ten minutes I’m connected to some oik who tells me that I will actually need to ring a different freephone number as this is a BT.com sale, rather than whatever he is doing. So, ring this different number, follow the appropriate responses in the ACD, and get a recorded message telling me that this service has now been discontinued. Back to the first freephone number, another ten minutes queuing and then a different, female, operative comes on and there is interest shown. She cannot find the order on the system, but as it’s BT.com that might be because she is some other part of the organisation. Would I hold on while she rings through to someone else to try and find out what is happening? Of course. After quite long time she comes back, full of apologies, and says that I will actually need to go into the BT.com part of the BT website, and submit a query through their “ask us something” bit. Do I mind doing that? I suppose not. When I disconnect my phone here tells me that I have been on this third call for over thirty minutes, at BT’s expense.

Into the website, find the spot, send the appropriate message with all the stuff. Get an automated response, so I now have a second set of numbers to go with my original order number. That was two days ago, and so far all is quiet.

Now I do know what has happened to the original order, I’m sure that behind the pretty website and automated responses the orders are all actually processed manually, with the data taken off the website by a process called “screen-scraping”. So I think my order is in a paper heap somewhere, which explains why my order number isn’t coming up on the website.

So the next question is, how long am I going to wait for a response before I find my way to the Customer Services (ie the real complaints) people? I rather expect this one to run and run, and will, as always, keep all my fans and readers posted on developments in this saga.

Challenging New Years

For the second successive year our New Year’s activities have been overshadowed by the death of a close friend, and the need to make a long journey to attend the funerals and memorial services.For many years, when the children were small, we lived in what I would describe as a nice suburb of London, and during this period we made a great many friends, mainly as a result of relationships which arose whilst collecting kids from school. In particular there were three other couples, of similar ages to us, whom we felt particularly close to, and time was spent together on holiday, as well as in some very splendid celebrations and activities, over almost seventeen years.

I always knew that the bank would eventually want me to move to the main administration centre in Milton Keynes, rather than let me continue to commute into the City, and I managed to defer this while the kids were at school. Eventually the request came, and we moved away from Essex to a large village in Bedfordshire, so that I could have an easier journey to work. Our contacts with our friends in Essex was reduced, but we continued to maintain contact, and go back and forth to events.

About five years ago, I think, came the news that one of the ladies in our little group had discovered a lump in her breast. We heard from a distance of our friend’s fight with the cancer that eventually got her just before Christmas 2008. By this time I had left the bank and we had moved to the Lake District, a lot further away from Essex than Bedfordshire, and we travelled back for her funeral which took place as 2009 began. It was good to see so many old friends, and during this somewhat philosophical time we all agreed that we should all make the effort to get together more frequently, which we did during the last year.

About a week or so before last Christmas I received a phone call to say that another friend of ours, from the same little group, had died in hospital quite suddenly. He did have some underlying health problems, but this was really quite a shock, and not what we expected at all. His wife is a particularly close friend of my wife, and we felt quite isolated up here away from the situation, and spent a lot of time on the telephone trying to provide some support. So, once again we headed South at the beginning of 2010 for a funeral and memorial service. I was really quite impressed with the amount of support offered to the wife of our friend, in particular the members of the Church where they worshipped have all been very supportive, and it is good for us to know that she will have lots of people around her to look after her during the next weeks and months. It was also good for us, whatever the circumstances, to see so many people we knew again.

So from this original eight, we are down to six, with two people now widowed. This is from a group of people all in their late fifties.

Now we have returned to the Lake District, I find myself in a contemplative frame of mind over all this. We’re both confident our friend will be looked after by friends and family, and are telephoning her regularly ourselves. If either of us here found ourselves in a similar situation up here, would we get the same level of support from the church which we attend here? I’m not sure. We certainly don’t have the large circle of close friends here, and I have to say that this is exercising me greatly. What the answer is I don’t know, and I will be continuing to think about this over the coming weeks.

Review of “Avatar”

We were the oldest people in the cinema, and surrounded by teenagers mainly, although there was one family. I thought that technically, it is the best film I have ever seen, superior to all the Lord of the Rings films, and I’m afraid, even Star Wars. The quality of the graphic creation was actually nothing short of superb, for almost all the film it was easy to forget completely that everything seen was computer created, there were just no visible joins at all. Brilliant.As for the plot, the theme is about humans destroying the place in their quest for wealth (minerals in this case), and the efforts of the local populace to resist them. Shades of the conquest of North America and the plight of the Native Americans came to my mind, I’m sure a more modern viewpoint would be to draw a comparison with the Iraq war. The acting was fast and furious, the flying scenes were quite superb, and the final big battle was really very well done. See this film!

Dark Times

I’d forgotten quite how dreary this time of year can be. One of the nicer things about living up here in June is the fact that it’s still light at 10.00pm, and that even at 11 o’clock or later there is still some brightness in the sky. The payback has, once again, arrived. Coupled with freezing rain, the day is starting to darken as I write this at 3.30 in the afternoon. This morning, as I did a selection of jobs around the house, we had to have the lights on until about 10 o’clock. Admittedly, it has been another foul day, but it does all seem very frustrating. I can understand why our ancestors came up with the idea of the mid-Winter Feast, called Yule, to cheer everybody up with over-eating and too much to drink. It’s interesting that the early Christian church high-jacked the festival for Christmas (no-one really knows what time of year Jesus was born, do they?), and we’ve been stuck with this ever since. At least we are almost at the darkest point, and by the end of the week we will have turned the corner in terms of the winter solstice and starting back to the days of light. I do find this really depressing, but there is one crumb of comfort: I could be further North in Scotland, where it must be even worse.

Trying To Get Linked Up

I’ve decided to abandon, for the time being, the old-fashioned template that I’ve been using for these ramblings of mine. I hope that this will give the impression of someone more switched on, although anyone who actually reads any of this will soon realise that switched on is what I’m not. I think that my total number of readers is probably about three (on a good day). I’m about to take the big Posterous leap and start posting everything from there, and I will be interested to see if the link across to my facebook and twitter accounts will generate any more traffic.I’ve made it a policy so far not to advertise this blog in any way, even to my family, and I’ve just let people follow the trail to the blog (it is there) and it will be interesting to see if more people do find it now.

One of the things I have realised is that those few people who are looking at all this are not from the area where I now live. It seems that the environment in which I find myself is populated by older people who are not so switched on to all this stuff. I must really try and make contact with local people who are on my wavelength. Mind you, I don’t think anybody is on my wavelength!

Norton Symantec ARE Good Boys

Those of you who read my  posting about the Norton Anti-Virus Software people a few weeks ago will remember that I was promised a refund of my incorrectly debited fees in respect of this. I am delighted, and slightly relieved, to report that my credit card statement received today contains the aforementioned refunds.

Bankers’ Bonuses

I have to declare my position here, as an ex-bank employee. As always, there is a bit of story, of someone who joined a bank straight from school as a clerk (called a management trainee, but a clerk nonetheless). I didn’t go to university because I couldn’t get a place and assumed I was stupid (which makes me realise there’s another whole posting about that as well!). So I stayed at the bank, and learned what to do, and made slow, steady progress. Eventually I left the branch network because I was fed up with it and knew that centralisation was coming, and I moved into the head office in London. There I learned about payment processing systems, and computers, and about designing computer systems, and quality implementations (ISO9002 and all that), and lots of other things. In the end I turned out to be quite an expert in lots of areas, and when I left I had a much better job (and a much better salary) than I ever expected when I started.

But I was never an executive, and although I did get the staff bonuses when they were paid, I never received the vast sums of money, the like of which are now being discussed in the media at the moment.  I’m quite disturbed by the fact that the whole country will be paying for the bail-out of the banks by the government (using money from you and me) caused by the government’s (and in particular our Prime Minister’s) incompetence and lack of control. The idea that we (the British taxpayer) should be funding huge payments to small groups of people to prevent this business from going overseas leaves me completely dumbfounded. I just don’t understand the logic of it at all.

A Mixed Approach

I’ve written previously about my technological challenges, and it’s very interesting to see how things are going here. One of the approaches I’ve decided to take for 2010 is to go back to a paper diary system. I’ve dug out my old filofax from wherever, and got the right pages, and have just spent an hour updating ready for the New Year. In the past I’ve tried a combination of wall charts, on-line diaries (Airset), using Microsoft Outlook, and a common use desk diary which we keep in the hall table. I’ve found electronic systems quite tedious, despite feeling that what I’m doing now is a retrograde step.  So I will have to see how it all goes.

On a similar line, I have been persuaded by the local walking club to create them a website, which they wanted in good old HTML, which has involved me going back to Dreamweaver, which I used to use on the drama group’s website before we moved away. I remember that I’d actually got quite good at Dreamweaver (eventually!), in a basic, non-tecchie kind of way, but I’ve found the re-learning stage actually quite difficult.  Using wordpress for this blog and a couple of other sites which I manage has rather spoilt me, and of course at my advanced stage in life, learning anything new does require a little extra effort, and patience has never been my strong suit. I await the final text of what is required from the club committee, and once the website is up I will post a link to it here from my blog.