Corresponding With My MP About the Digital Economy Bill

For a great many internet professional this week saw what can really only ever be described as a travesty of democracy take place in parliament; in an obvious attempt to force through ill prepared legislation the Government held back on normal parliamentary discussion preferring to wait until an odd wee period post announcement of an election and pre-dissolution – the wash-up.

I’m not going to cover the Bill (or Act as it now is) as there is plenty of very well written stuff out there however I thought it worth mentioning the brief discussion I have had with Michael Fallon, our MP for Sevenoaks and Swanley.

I had originally sent Michael an email on Apr 7th at 18:25, the day of the vote requesting details on why he had according to published sources failed like so many MPs to show for the previous night’s discussions on the Bill.  By 19:44 Michael had written back stating the reports were not only wrong, he had in fact attended but that he also had voted against the second reading of the Bill.

Needless to say I apologised for the incorrect assertion he had not and indeed requested the source of the attendance report to be amended.

Today a formal letter arrived from Michael, you can read it below.  And excusing the minor grammatical omission on the first line he makes it quite clear that the Conservative Party Line was against the Bill by enclosing a statement to party members from Jeremy Hunt – who both spoke and opposed the Bill.  Those I have attached also.

Installing Husband 1.0 – A Tech Support Plea

In response to the recently very popular Upgrading Girlfriend 1.0 joke (it’s had hundreds of hits from a forum in Australia over the last two weeks) the following came through on the email – via my Mother-in-Law!

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs such as; Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs , such as NHL 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system.

Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate.

The response…

DEAR DESPERATE,

First, keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system.

Please enter command: ithoughtyoulovedme.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewellery 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, D0 NOT under any circumstances install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

In addition, please do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck!
Tech Support

3UK – Resolution Reached

Okay I promise to try to keep this short(ish) but felt it only fair to actually post a note to say that a resolution has been reached over my protracted escaping from the clutches of the black-hole of customer service that is the mobile network 3.

Quick back-story for those not wanting to read the 2 part monster posts (here & here); I had cancelled, tried to leave, was prevented from doing so and then charged for the privilege of remaining an unwilling Customer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I am a very lucky person.  Lucky in that I have the great privilege of having met and maintained contact with plenty of really cool (and useful) people in the mobile industry.

I made a phone call to a senior 3 PR manager (who was on holiday), recounted the story and by the opening of play the following day the mythical 3 Executive Office was calling me to discuss.

Long story, cut short they were very apologetic, ensured the correct cancellations and credits were applied and sent me on my merry way.  Job done.

So to that lovely 3 pr manager, thank you.

To the delightful chap from 3 Executive, I thank you also.

To the senior 3 director who rang me afterwards to discuss the sneaky, underhand and downright dirty tactics of the UK’s mobile industry as a whole over the number portability – a huge thanks.

As a note: the limp and ineffective Ofcom are releasing their draft paper on number fast-portability in August, which will make for interesting reading.

Halfords Customer Service Comes Through

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was entering the wonderful world of Customer Services this time with Halfords – the UK’s largest bike retailer (they are also pretty well known for tools and motoring accessories).

Simply I had bought a pair of bikes from Halfords, and over the course of a single week had revisited the store twice to rectify simple faults and mechanical failings.  Things that really shouldn’t but inevitably do happen with machinery.  Topping this of was a battle over in-store pricing which had meant I had lost out to the tune of 10% of the purchase price.

Well, despite taking nearly two weeks to respond (rather than the promised 5 days) Halfords CS cam back a couple of days ago.  Not only offering up a decent chunk of store vouchers for my inconvenience but also a straight refund on said 10%.

A great result and one I am really happy with.

Whilst I am honestly trying to avoid my CS rants it must be said they seem to be working for me right now and I can only advise everyone else; if you have an issue ask for help, and if that doesn’t work complain because maybe, just maybe UK companies are beginning to realise that they need to start trying to play nicely in this most modern if cash strapped of ages.

TescoDigital: Fail – The Full (Long) Story

Yesterday I mentioned that my purchasing efforts with TescoDigital over the last few days have been anything but satisfactory.  I gave them the whole day to continue corresponding (which up until my last email at 11am they had been very quick to respond) but nothing so to the world I lay bare the story to do with what you will…

Tue 10th

Email marketing about the new Lily Allen album being available for only £3.97 to download.  Perfect especially in light of i) my already having waited for just this release (don’t judge me) and ii) my new found love of buying music digitally.

09:48 Wed 11th

Followed link in email and signed up for yet another store account (can you believe TescoDigital requires a separate account to Tesco.com?), dutifully downloaded their own branded music download manager (same as Amazons methinks) and handed over the credit card details.

Download manager sparked to life and promptly complained that the download server couldn’t be found.

The infrastructure engineer in me did the usual checks; cables, firewalls; conflicting software, DNS resolution, port sniffing.  Nothing the server was nowhere to be found so a quick email to customer services was in order.

c10:20 Wed 11th

Had a quick snigger at the default subject titles thinking this the most apt and filled out a form just letting them know the error message and asked for a response.

10:47 Wed 11th

A wonderful stock response was forthcoming.  Basically it was the usual “here’s what we say you need, we won’t actually read what you have already written about the problem but could you please tell us everything about your system and restate the problem?”

Having worked with helpdesks in the past I can well understand this approach – it can weed out the silly and repetitive nonsense which takes up so much time.  BUT maybe just maybe on that original contact form if they’d asked for say i) a level of expertise and ii) confirmation that I’d already tried everything they were about to suggest the user experience might have been a little better, the process a little smoother.

Anyway, a quick response just answering those questions as required and…

13:45 Wed 11th

I’m very sorry that you weren’t able to connect to the Tesco Digital website. It is temporarily unavailable as we were doing some essential maintenance and upgrade work on the servers/Tesco Download Manager. This has taken a little longer than we had originally planned. I would advise you to try again later on this evening, please try to redownload from your order history.

Okay so they were having problems.  So why not fess up at the outset and save me some effort!

08:48 Thur 12th

So I waited until the this morning to give them plenty of time to solve their server issues. But, now the TescoDigital don’t seem to know who I am.  What I found strange was that I had actually re-downloaded the stub from their website in my order history.

Needless to say another email to Wayne Hansen (TescoDigital Customer Service Manager) pointing out that something was still broken.

09:47 Thur 12th

Again, I’m sorry to advise this error message was due to the system problems we had on our Tesco.com website yesterday.
I’ve updated your Tesco Digital account to delete this error message, please try to redownload your music tracks from your order history and this should resolve your issue.

So again I try and now the error heads into DRM territory.  Oh deary me.  Now I only chose to use TescoDigital because it quite clearly says it doesn’t apply DRM to it’s MP3 downloads.  Further whilst it does say that you can only download the files so many times and that remaining attempt are indicated on the order page I could find no indication of that usage count. More to the point I have only been downloading the stubs when and as directed by TescoDigital.

Needless to say another email requesting that Wayne actually confirms the problem is resolved before telling me to try again.

10:45 Thurs 13th

And then it happened.  TescoDigital actually failed.  Why do I  think the fail is now and not when the process broke down earlier?  Easy – technical faults happen, it’s a fact of life and I accept that, especially when the provider can be seen to be responsive and attempting to solve the issue.  The fail here was in Wayne’s response;

After 11 emails TescoDigital decide to ditch the purchase rather than fix the problem – despite it being of their own making.  I did respond to Wayne suggesting that as I actually still wanted the album perhaps TescoDigital should just get on with it, but 24  hours later no response so…

13:28 Friday 13th

I’ve just bought the same album from AmazonUK for 97 pence less thanks Tesco with no hassles at all.  Your loss.

Taking GMail Offline

Google Gears finally got really useful for me. With flaky 3G coverage and to be honest a dodgy BT Homehub connection to boot being able to get at my email in an offline fashion has always been handy. But being a Google Mail convert for many years has meant the only real option to date was to use an imap or pop client.

But today my Google Labs page had the recently launched Offline GMail option front and centre.

Right now it’s up to about 2,300 emails downloaded and setup is about as easy as it gets.

Another nicety with Gears (well Gmail and Docs) are the quick and easy desktop icons. Now getting GMail up is even easier.

I suspect I’ll probably still pull everything down into say Outlook to archive stuff off locally (just in case) but for day to day operations Gears should keep me very happy indeed.

Marketing or Advertising?

Which ever camp one sits in one has to agree it is genius.

Moulding Me, Myself and I

The real task for today was firstly to talk to lots of interesting and useful people at Tuttle, as indeed I did. Secondly to spend as much time defining where the value in getting a Barney onboard as a consultant strategist lies. As ever @TonyHall provided a muse. Probing, intrusive and inciteful questioning has me thinking that;

1. I don’t write enough stuff down (@robertobrien – yes I know you have long held that belief),
2. Some of what I talk about needs to be talked about,
3. A lot of what I think needs questioning, not least because I need the challenge to firm up thinking,
4. That I must must must stop worrying about the inconsequential side of aesthetics and get on with the job in hand.

So my mission – along with exploring notions of trust, graphs, semantics and a pile of other stuff – is to write some kind of demonstrable, measurable, quantifiable and costable reason for being. Eek.

Finding my way through the day

One of my most insurmountable challenges these days is in deciding what is and isn’t important on a daily basis. The volume of stuff is so great that prioritisation, and more importantly filtering are starting to come into play.

As an example today I must have had over 30 emails from websites from which I have bought something, commented upon or in some way been foolish enough to have left my contact details with. Now 30 might not sound like a huge number but in my already attention stretched world of social networks and real life conversations, having to wade through those 30 to find the 3 or 4 genuinely interesting emails was a pain.

Now that’s not to say they were spam – Google Mail generally takes care of the 300+ a day obvious spam, indeed at the right time, in the right place the majority of those 30 would have contained something of interest, right down to the third Amazon email this week promoting a product I have just bought from Amazon right back at me!

So what is the answer?

I honestly don’t know. I could grab ANOTHER email address for even more personal emails (got several already) or….. oh sod it. In the time it’s taken me to whine and complain about my lack of time I could easily have browsed those 30 emails. Duh.