Thursday, December 22, 2011

Yodelling would have been more productive

"Please call me to arrange redelivery of your parcel" read the message on the little green card I found on my return home yesterday. It was from Yodel. Never heard of them, but a quick Google reveals it's the new name for Home Delivery Network. Sod's law, really. I was only out of the house for an hour. I've been in all week.

I called the number as soon as they opened this morning. 8am. It went to voicemail.

Hello. This is the Yodel service centre at Ashton.

Well, let me stop you right there. Because surely to justify the title "service centre" you have to, you know, provide some service. And I've been calling that number all day and getting no reply, so I ain't seen much service to speak of.

All our operatives are busy dealing with other customers.

Maybe it's just because I've dialled the number over 100 times today, that I have a vision of "operatives" being just one overworked postal worker rushing between the office and the storage depot. The alternative vision jostling for ascendency in my mind's eye was of a depot full of operatives dressed in festive costume sitting around sipping sherry and eating mince pies, telling each other to "let it ring - it's Christmas!"

But if you leave a message and a contact number we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, no you won't actually, because immediately after the conclusion of your message that nice lady from BT comes on to say

This mailbox is full. Please try later.

And close the call. The only option is to ring again. Which I did. Over and over.

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe there was no-one there. But while the majority of calls went to voicemail after 30 seconds, just occasionally one would be diverted immediately, suggesting that someone was on the phone at that very minute. During the morning, such an event would spur me on to dial a few more times, thinking if there was someone at the desk right then, I stood more chance of getting through. In this case, more chance was equivalent to two or three times nothing. Still nothing.

While I ate lunch, I dialled the number constantly for over half an hour with no luck. Then, I got the engaged tone. Back came the nice BT lady to advise me (in case I didn't recognise the engaged tone which, you know, hasn't changed for at least fifty years):

The number you have dialled is busy. To use ring back, key 5 now.

Yes! Ring back! Great idea. I keyed 5.

Ring back is not available on this number.

Well why did you offer it to me then you utter arse?

In sheer frustration I Googled "yodel couriers". I had typed only half of "couriers" when the second suggestion in the list changed to "yodel couriers complaints". Oh dear - that doesn't look good. I followed the first link, to a review site.

First time I've ever known a company to have an average of 1 star (yes, out of 5) after 1203 reviews. That's a pretty impressive indictment. I'm surprised any online retailer still uses them.

My package turned up around 3pm. I never did get through to the "service" centre.

"Ah, Yodel!" I cried as the courier handed over his ruggedised tablet for me to sign. "I've been trying to call your depot all day."

He looked sheepish.

"Wasting your time there, mate."

Tell me about it.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Cat man do.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our cat man promised to send loads more pictures of New Kitteh (name still being debated) between my first visit and the day he's ready to come home. Four weeks later and there hadn't been much evidence of promise fulfilment on the photo front. OK, no evidence. A prompting email provoked a blurry shot taken with a phone along with the promise of more pix "when I get home", a couple of days more nothing and then a brief whinge that emails "weren't getting through."

However eventually, this arrived:
and I think it's true to say he's even cuter now that he was when I first saw him.

Anyway, since we're fetching him home the day after tomorrow, it's suddenly become quite urgent to tidy up all the non-kitten-friendly parts of the house (i.e. ALL of it) and make sure all those tools, boxes, bags, screws, nails, pots of paint, piles of wall plugs, etc, etc, are either put away, thrown away, or behind a closed door.

Good job I finished all the wrapping yesterday!

Monday, December 19, 2011

Recommended just for you

Searching eBay to see whether or not the pile of old tat we've brought back from Mum's is worth selling has had a strange result on my emails:

"You recently searched for these things. Still interested? Grab them now!"
OR
"Based on what you looked at you may be interested in these.."

Things that have appeared in the list, and which I am DEFINITELY not interested in acquiring more of include:
  • bakelite castors
  • Elizabeth & Philip silver wedding coins
  • vintage OWZTHAT cricket games
  • mediaeval style "Jousting Knights" wall plaque
etc.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Of Bosuns, Bosons and Bozos

The hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson has been much in the news this last week, as the particle physicists at CERN pore over the latest outputs from the Large Hadron Collider and believe they may have seen tantalising hints of its existence.

Sticking with my recent theme of poor science coverage by the nation's media, this has largely been reported as a search for a totally different entity. Something apparently called a Higgs Bosun. Now I'm not overly familiar with the subject, but to me a bosun has always been something to do with sailing. The oldest rank in the Royal Navy, more properly rendered as boatswain, and the chappy who supervises the deck crew. He also, optionally, may have a locker. But he's got absolutely fuck all to do with particle physics.

Now I know it's an unfamiliar term, but you radio and TV Johnnies really mustn't use that as an excuse to fall back on something you ARE familiar with. It's a BosON. Phonetically: BOSE - as in the world-renowned purveyors of high quality audio equipment - and ON - as in the opposite of off.

I really don't see what the problem is. You never see or hear of people referring to protuns, or neutruns, or electruns. Surely even the densest of media hacks must have noticed by now that sub-atomic particles generally, with some notable exceptions, have names ending in -on. And that this not pronounced un.

I know I shouldn't really get so wound up about this stuff but, well, I do. It's just not proper.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Last day

It's my last working day of the year today. Hurrah! Even better than that, it will be foreshortened by having a Christmas "do" to attend at lunchtime, which will stretch comfortably into the afternoon. The only "work" that will be done after noon will be setting my Out of Office reply saying I won't be back until January 3rd next year.

Marvellous.

I love the feeling at this time of year. Even leaving aside Christmas (my favourite time of year in any case), the feeling of *completeness* - that work is over for the holidays - is somehow even more liberating than with a regular holiday. Because it's not just over for the time being, it's over for THE WHOLE YEAR.

Mind you, it would suit me if it was over for the rest of my life. Have I mentioned that I'm sick of it? It's at least controversial and this year has occasionally been suicidal (career-wise, for some high-profile bloggers) to diss one's employers in a public forum, so I won't go into detail, but yes, I've had more than enough. It's mainly that which was behind the Great Absence of blogging earlier this year, when I took a couple of months out to get my head straight. What I was really working on was a medium-term plan to get me out of the place for good.

I never expected to be in this place. Metaphorically. My Dad toiled for most of his working life at a job he loathed, just to do what we all have to do - put a roof over us, feed, clothe, etc. I admired that in a kind of disconnected, unempathic way, because at least in the early days I loved my job. I couldn't really comprehend why anyone would carry on doing something they hated just because of the money. That kind of comprehension only comes with experience. Well, now I have both. Experience and comprehension. And a job I hate. Full house. But at least, after 12pm today, I won't have to think about it until... next year.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Supermassive black hole collapses Radio 4

There's been a scientific discovery. One that deserves a modicum of awe, along with a pinch of excitement and a sprinkle of gravitas. Instead, the matter was subjected to the usual treatment on the Today programme this morning. That is, amused disdain and wilful missing of the point.

Oh, those scientists! What have they gone and done now? I don't know. Something about a large hole or whatnot.

Humphreys - and don't get me wrong, when he's up against a politician, that is to say firmly in the middle of his comfort zone, he can still deliver an illuminating interview along with the occasional barbed question or withering put down - is always totally out of his depth when attempting to cover science. In fact Radio 4 in general seems to have a schizoid approach to science in all its guises. Material World's guests have to fight with Quentin Cooper's attempts to squeeze a bad pun into every sentence, while in the same slot on a different day we have to endure, in The Infinite Monkey Cage, Brian Cox and some other equally populist drivel merchant trying to out-do one another to find the needle of comedy in the haystack of current science. Dumb, dumber and even dumber than that, science on Radio 4 is already a joke and recently it's been presented (it seems) by nothing but jokers.

But outside of the science programmes themselves, any current affairs reporting of matters scientific - especially by the channel's headline anchor men - is inevitably accompanied by an obvious embarrassment at their total lack of understanding, or even interest. So their stock compensation for that is to make fun of it, or make light of it. Faced with the news of the largest black hole ever discovered, we get the usual re-runs of guff like "we thought at one time the LHC was going to create a black hole, didn't we? Chortle, chortle." No, we didn't. "Do I remember reading that a teaspoonful of black hole material would be so dense that if you dropped it, it would fall right through the Earth?" Well... where to start. The teaspoon wouldn't be dense enough to pick the damned stuff up in the first place. Even if it could, it would be way too heavy for you to lift, so the idea of dropping it never arises. And so on. Pathetic.

One a related but different topic, the dinosaurs on the Today programme never did, as far as I'm aware, pick up on the story of Kepler-22b.

For the first time, astronomers have found a planet smack in the middle of the habitable zone of its sunlike star, where temperatures are good for life. We can't yet determine if the planet has a surface, but if it does it would have a temperature around 21°C. What we do know is that it's about 2.4 times the size of Earth, orbits its (smaller, cooler than our) sun every 290 days, and is unlike any planet in our solar system. Could be rocky, could be icy, might even have a global ocean. No idea. But at a distance of 600 light-years we won't be visiting any time soon.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

How not to invest £6000

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.