Sound is not sound

Websites that launch into sound when you open them up are very annoying. Don’t these people know I’m at work? (and I can’t turn the sound off on my computer because the control is disabled).

Pensions

Alright, everyone’s crapping on about pensions. One option is said to be a rise in taxes. But the pensions crisis is stated as being “not now, but in 15 — 20 year’s time”. Right. Fine. And who trusts the government to put all that nice tax revenue on one side to pay for my pension when I need it? Bollocks. They’ll bloody spend it, along with all the other money I give them now for things I don’t use and then when I’m old and grey and need the health service and the public libraries and the bloody bus pass and a fucking PENSION they’ll have to renegotiate and be, like, “Oh sorry, circumstances have changed, ALL the people who could conceivably be suited for/inclined to do any work are old bastards now, cos unfortunately no–one half–respectable or intelligent could afford to have kids over the last 30 years, due to all the taxes. All pensions are cancelled, back to the office”. So bollocks to raising my taxes because I don’t want to save enough towards my old age. Someone’s going to spend my earnings but I say it might as well be me.

Full disclosure: I invest in a personal pension in order to maximise free money from my employer and from the government.

Bad dog

Amusing feel–good story about a bad dog.

Pictures

Some new pictures are up on virtual traveller from the Athens Olympics.

NTL suck

My broadband has been down for a fortnight and attempts to persuade ntl to remedy this situation have so far been utterly fruitless and frustrating. I have spent a total of approximately 5 — 6 hours on hold and have wasted one day at home waiting for an engineer who did not show up. After numerous calls to find out what was going on, someone left a message on my answerphone saying “we cancelled the engineer because, as someone should have told you, unfortunately broadband is not available in your area so there’s no point sending an engineer out”. The fact that I’ve been happily paying for and using broadband in my area for two years notwithstanding, apparently.

Absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel at present. Clearly, no–one gives a fuck about my problem and the current technique seems to be to deny all knowledge of the complaint each time I call up, requiring me to reinitiate the complaints process with the same total lack of results. Utter, utter, bastards. I am rapidly reaching the point of just canceling the direct debit to precipitate some contact from the credit control people, so I can at least have the opportunity to explain that I have no service and will not be paying for something I am not getting.

Do not deal with these people.

UPDATE 07/10/04: Finally all fixed by a friendly and helpful engineer. The box that was causing the problem was several blocks away and apparently the fault would have taken out broadband access for the whole area. The engineer said he was disappointed not to have found about about the outage earlier, since he was responsible for the area and didn’t like to think that it had been out for long. We said that we’d been trying to get a message through for some time, obviously without success. As a professional member of the ntl team, the engineer was obviously unable to comment about efficiency and attitude of the call centre staff.

UPDATE 22/10/04: Came across this survey in Which? Magazine showing the percentage of customers of various broadband providers who expressed themselves very satisfied with the service:

Surprised that it’s even as high as 30%, to be honest.