last additions 2009/10/23

Why do computer motherboard manufacturers put the backup battery in the most inaccessible part of the board? So you have to fight your way past ribbon cables to the disk drives to get at the battery holder and once you've got your hand in there to remove the dead battery for replacement, you can't bloody see what you're doing and there are never any instructions for getting the dead battery out of the bloody socket.

These envelopes, used for sending cheques & paying in slips to the bank via a handy Post Office after Lloyds TSB has closed the local branch, are supposed to be self-sealing. But some bean-counting wise guy decided that he could save money by having the envelopes printed with two narrow bands of adhesive instead of two broad ones. Of course, the narrow bands were printed out of register, so when the bottom flap is folded up and the top one folded down, the two narrow strips of adhesive don't meet. Result, a Sellotape job.

Lloyds TSB Bank plc has abandoned the Trustcard VISA in favour of MasterCard, which means that customers have a new 16-digit number to learn, plus a new 3-digit security code, and the replacement credit card has to be 'activated' before use. A Romiley resident offers the following activation experience from November 2007:

"The woman at the call centre ran me through the usual routine of security information: my name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, and TSB bank account sort code and number. Then she said something in what I'd told her didn't check out and she was putting me on to a colleague. So I spent ages on hold; but on an 0800 number so I wasn't paying for it (except through my bank charges); before a bloke answered.
   "He didn't seem to know that I had been passed on to him or anything about the alleged discrepancy in the security information that I'd supplied. And he was happy to activate the card after asking a token couple of questions; far less than the woman had wanted.
   "All of which leaves me wondering if the long wait on hold is some sort of psychological ploy. Does Lloyds TSB think that someone who isn't entitled to have the card will crack during the long wait and ring off? And that only genuine cardholders will have the persistence to wait for attention?
   "I am now left wondering if the TSB's call centre is as useless as the one for British Gas, which guarantees to screw things up in a different way everytime you ring them. If the activation job was left to an idiot of the calibre employed by British Gas, a pound to a pinch of dogshit that it wasn't actually done, and I'm going to look a proper charlie when I try to use the MasterCard and it's refused by the TSB's system. Probably with a whole shopful of people looking on and wondering if anyone will be brave enough to try a citizen's arrest on the credit card thief."

{Date:} 02/03/2006
{CommentType:} Complaint
{Channel:} BBC One
{ProgrammeName:} North West Today

{Comments:}
North West Today keeps going on about the IRA blowing up Manchester's city centre 10 years ago. But all they did was blow up part of Corporation Street, which was a long way from:
(1) the main shopping area in Piccadilly Gardens and the top end of Market Street,
(2) the town hall,
(3) the newspaper offices on Deansgate and just about everything else in the city of any significance.
Marks & Spencer was about the only casualty anyone had heard of.
The BBC should not be rewriting history to hype up its programmes about events such as the Manchester bombing.

Philip Turner.

Dear Mr Turner

Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'Northwest Today'.

I note you feel it is inappropriate of the News team to refer to the IRA bombing of Corporation Street in Manchester as the "Manchester bombing". The whole point of referring to the bombing in this way is to inform viewers that the team are talking about the IRA bomb that went off in Manchester as opposed to one of the other IRA bombings that occurred in other parts of the UK. The News team are aware that the IRA bomb did not destroy large sections of Manchester.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge you feel the the way the bombing is referred to, by 'Northwest Today', gives the impression that it was on a larger scale than it actually was. Please be assured your comments have been registered on our audience log which is made available to the BBC Northwest News Editors and senior BBC management across the BBC.

Finally, I have attached an invitation, from our Head of Customer Services, asking you to participate in our customer survey. We would welcome your views on our service.

Thank you again for contacting the BBC.

Regards

Tony Brown
BBC Information
__________________________________________________
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ - World Wide Wonderland

Dear Mr. Brown,

Your reply misses my point completely. I DID NOT object to references to 'The Manchester Bombing'.
What I did object to is NorthWest Today's mislead statement that "The centre of Manchester was blown to bits" It wasn't.
My point is that the IRA bomb went off in Corporation Street, which was a relative backwater 10 years ago. Yes, there has been a lot of rebuilding since and the City of Manchester may have refocussed itself in this area in the 21st Century. But the IRA bomb didn't blow up what was the centre of the city 10 years ago, and saying that it did, as NorthWest Today kept doing to hype up a programme about the bombing, is wrong and distorts history.

NorthWest Today may want people to believe that the centre of Manchester was blown to bits - but it wasn't. That's my point and the source of my complaint.

I trust this further explanation will be helpful.

Regards,
Philip Turner.

Thank you for contacting BBC Information. To use the licence fee more efficiently, our online email system now uses pre-formatted webforms. This email address inbox is therefore no longer monitored.

If you want to contact us, or reply to us, please resend your message in the format provided by one of our online webforms. All are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/contactus/; please choose which one applies best to you.

Also available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/ are answers to common questions about our programmes, history, policies and structure, BBC Governors, complaints and documents such as our Annual Report and other reports and publications.

Alternatively you can telephone us on 08700 100 222 to comment, give your appreciation, make an enquiry, or register a complaint.

Talk to yourself, mate, because the BBC isn't taking any notice of your complaints – mainly because the people being paid licence-payers' cash to handle them are incapable of reading and understanding what you tell them.

How long does it take for the ASA to leap into action? Do they, in fact, leap? Or do they move at a pace which make a snail look like a candidate for a speedcam? Judge for yourself as we report the progress of a complain about false advertising laid against the Daily Mail.

The Mail's crime is illustrated in the picture (left). The newspaper's front cover promoted a series of children's books with what looks like either a 400-500 page book containing Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book and a whole lot of other stuff, or an edition of The Jungle Book printed on very high quality paper.
   What the consumers actually got is The Jungle Book as a 160 page slim volume printed on very thin paper, which is placed on the newspaper page for comparison. Clearly, the paper's graphic artist was just sticking front cover pictures on a standard book picture with no regard for the look of the actual product. Clearly, this ads up to false advertising.

After a trip to the ASA's website to lodge a protest, the complainant received the following in an email:

Advertising Standards Authority - Complaint Acknowledgement
Fri, 10 Oct 2003 12:41:57 +0100
Thank you for submitting your complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority. We have passed your complaint to our Complaints team. A Complaints Handler will assess your complaint and will reply in full as soon as possible.
Please quote this reference number in any correspondence: A03-11374

The complainant is now waiting - with decidedly unbated breath - for another communication.

And that communication came from a Mr. Andrew Frost, who is a Complaint Handler, in a letter dated 31st October, 2003. His opinion was that the complaint was unjustified because a book is a book is a book. As long as the consumer gets some sort of an edition of the book in question, the advertisement can show a larger, better quality edition of the book without offending the ASA.
   Which seems to be an open invitation for someone to advertise a Mini for sale using a picture of a Rolls-Royce – and if the customer complains, telling him, with the ASA's blessing: "We promised you a car, and a car is what you got."

Thousands of people have fallen for the legend of the long-life light bulb, which costs ten times as much as a normal light bulb but which drinks 20% of the juice and, the manufacturers promise, last 5 to 15 times longer. Thousands of people have spent a small fortune to buy half a dozen of these wonders, expecting not to have to buy another light bulb again. They have installed the wonders and watched them die months, or sometimes weeks, later. So what do you do then?
   Working from the theory that emails and on-line comment forms often get better results than letters and phone calls, an RLC member went to the General Electric Company's website when one of their 15W [75W equivalent], 'long life' light bulbs failed. The packaging promised a life of 5,000 hours -- presumably of switched-on life. The bulb, at the top landing of a staircase, had failed after 6 months of normal evening and night use between November and May. In fact, it had been in place for 4,900 and some hours, but not switched on all the time, of course.
   The light bulb was found not to be working on 2003/06/04, the complaint was submitted on June 5th, and on June 10th, an incredibly light box arrived at the RLC member's home. It contained a letter dated 2003/06/06 and a replacement light bulb. So the moral of the tale seems to be: buy from reputable firms, complain if the products don't work and hope that a reputable firm will be concerned about its reputation, as GE Lighting clearly is.

Customer Relations Team / First North Western / Admail 3281 / FREEPOST NWW 3483A / Manchester M60 5RP

Travelling from: New Mills Central
Travelling to: Romiley
Train time: 18:02 (@ New Mills)
Ticket type & no.: Cheap Day Rtn 57399
Date of Travel or incident: 2003/05/08

YOUR COMMENTS

I arrived at the station well before 6 p.m. The signal turned green, the train was announced -- and nothing!

The signal went red again, other trains were announced, and we travellers stuck on the platform at New Mills heard not one bloody word about our train.

When I asked about the train at Romiley, the man in the ticket office had not been told that it had broken down, been cancelled, been kidnapped by aliens, or whatever.

So what did happen to the train?

And why didn't someone at Manchester realize that your passengers wanted to know why they had to wait a further 50 minutes for the next one?

Hell of a way to run a railroad, First North Western!

THE RESPONSE

  -- received 2003/05/08

The delay was due to a points failure (infrastructure) and the train was diverted via Stockport -- i.e. it went nowhere near New Mill Central station. First North Western found that 'the severity of the sudden disruption' made it 'difficult to communicate up-to-date information as quickly as we would have liked'.

Under the terms of the Passengers Charter (no apostrophe supplied), the traveller is entitled to a voucher to the value of at least 40% of the fare paid if delayed for an hour or more. The customer in question received a voucher for £1.00, which is compensation at a rate of 43.5% of the ticket cost.

Chaos Theory's classic example is founded on a misconception.

A butterfly flapping its wings in China can't cause a tornado half-way round the world. The event is purely localized and too heavily damped by its environment to have any effect more than a few inches away from the origin. The notion of a butterfly triggering a tornado, or another severe weather phenomenon, is as unlikely as a belief that the positions of the planets affect the lives of people living on Earth.
   Why's that?
   Because the notion of distant interactions implies a sequence of non-elastic collisions, which can transfer energy over great distances in ways which can generate large events. But such non-elastic collisions occur only in a purely mathematical environment, such as a computer programme.
   In fact, the energy released by the flapping butterfly wing is transferred only to local air molecules, which collide with other air molecules and dissipate the extra energy as heat. A very small volume of gas becomes ever so slightly warmer than its surroundings and the energy is lost in the usual random interchanges of objects in motion.

A mere Couple Of Days after the election and Tony Blair gives himself a 47K pay rise while continuing to award to his Cronies, jobs with Fat Salaries paid out of the Public Purse. Then, a few weeks later, his gang votes itself a 4K Pay Rise before disappearing off on holiday for 3 Months. Out with the Bogus Piety, in with Grab, Grab, Grab.
Clearly, Blair does not expect to Fool The People a third time and he has decided to Line His Pockets and plant as many Favours as he can before he gets Ditched. But did we really expect any better of him? Harold Wilson Mark II is Flaunting his true colours.

Isn't it reassuring if you buy something and they tell you: If you have any problems, ring the helpline number? Well, it's reassuring only until you do ring the helpline number and find that it's permanently engaged, like PC Advisor magazine's. Which makes it rather difficult to tell them that a program on one of the cover CDs doesn't work.

Wouldn't it be nice if they could re-introduce the death penalty for parking on the pavement? Maybe not for ordinary motorists. A spot fine of £250 to pay for the damage caused to the fabric of the pavement would be appropriate for them. But for anyone who parks a large van or a monster truck on the pavement, forcing long-suffering pedestrians to risk their life on the roadway, no lingering death is slow enough.