Is there nothing Google can't do?

I've been driven up the wall by British gas over recent months. A quick summary of events: 1. They sent me incorrect bills. In the case of the gas bill, it had the wrong tariff and did not include a credit of £129. In the case of the electricity bill, it had the wrong tariff. 2. I called on 10th July. They said that there was a computer problem, confirmed that the tariffs had been set up incorrectly, and said it would be sort out and they would send a revised bill. 3. No revised bills arrived. They sent me a reminder. 4. I called. I went through the whole thing again and was told again that it would be taken care of. 5. No revised bills arrived. They sent me a rather insulting “red reminder”. 6. I called again and they assured me that no further threatening letters would be sent and that the matter would be resolved. They asked me to send a copy of the tariffs (apparently they don't know what they are) to their amusingly entitled “Customer Care Team”, which I did. 7 I (stupidly, in retrospect) posted a letter with the tariffs enclosed. 8. No revised bills were received, of course, a few days ago I came home to find notices of disconnection. 9. I called their ridiculous customer “service” number, only to be told that (as usual) all of the representatives were busy and that I would have to wait 30 minutes (at my own expense) to speak to someone. Since I had no alternative but to tolerate this appalling state of affairs, I had no choice but to sit with a phone against my ear—when I had considerably better things to do—for 59 minutes. Correct: I waited 1 hour to talk to a customer “service” representative, who said that he couldn’t hear me properly because of a bad line but would call me back right away. Which, naturally, he did not. 10. I called back and spoke to someone who said that there was nothing she could do but have a manager call me back in the morning. Naturally, they didn't call. 11. I called back to get a fax number os that I could send a letter detailing the problems together with (another) copy of the tariffs. They gave me a fax number which of course turned out to be incorrect. 12. I called back next morning and and a woman told me that my account was not on the right tariff (which I knew), that the letter I had sent would take at least a month to process, and that she could not stop the disconnection process. 13. I asked her to transfer me to the debt department, where the phone rang continuously for several minutes without being picked up. 14. I called back and spoke to someone who gave me another fax number which, like many of the other British Gas numbers, is never answered. At this point, I decided that I was wasting my time calling "Customer Service" and that since my electricity and gas were going to be cut off I'd better do something. I turned to the mightiest weapon in any modern person's armoury... Google. Bif! I googled and found that customer services are based in Manchester. I called directory enquiries and got the number. That got me through to a reception desk. The person on the desk said that there were no fax machines in the customer service department. I said that I had an important letter to get through to them and the person on the desk gave me the e-mail address of someone in the department. Bam! The address was in a particular format x.y@x.com so I googled "head of customer services" and go straight through to a page with the relevant clown featured GETTING AN AWARD FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE!! I guessed (correctly) the e-mail address and I sent the contents of the letter as an e-mail. Pow! Since the e-mail didn't bounce, I knew I was on to something. I googled the name on the bottom of the letter threatening to disconnect me and deduced the e-mail address. I send an e-mail with the same complaints (and slightly more invective). Blam! Within a few minutes I had a call back from a nice lady who sorted out the problem. Moral of this story: if one of the faceless and unaccountable fat cats discovers a message in their inbox, they will get someone to do something about it. Don't waste your time calling their disgraceful customer "service" number.

Helping GSE

The Great She Elephant has a questionnaire on blogging and public relations, so if you have a few minutes could you pop over and help her out with it. Thanks.

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Is it called Chinglish?

On the tube today I sat next to a family from China. From body language I thought they were a couple with her Mum and Dad. Mum was wearing a chic (I'm not really sure what chic means: perhaps I should have just said tailored with no sleeves) black summer dress and lots of jewellery. On the dress in big gold letters it said "Judging The Street Fashion 80s Will Back". It struck me as odd, because I mean it was gibberish but I kind of knew what it sort of meant. English is a fantastic language.

Crime and punishment

I must have still been asleep, but I'm sure I heard someone on the radio this morning reporting on the newly-released crime figures and expressing surprise that crime appeared to be going down "yet the prisons are bulging". Clearly they don't teach logic as part of media studies courses nowdays. It's a shame, because I also heard on the radio that there are twice as many people doing media studies at university than there are people doing engineering (amazingly, there are also more people studying philosophy than engineering: I mean, I can understand doing media studies in the hope that you';; end up getting paid a fortune for not doing very much for the BBC, but philosophy?). The figures (start tracking them down here) also show that murder is down 12% while attempted murder is up 20+%. Clearly, even our murderers are second rate (and getting worse). Cue favourite line from Robocop: "Attempted murder! It's not like he killed anybody.".

Technorati Tags: security

Black sheep (no!)

I'm reading "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) at the moment. It's not as good as I thought it would be from the reviews, but it's mildly interesting. He keeps going on about the "black swan" effect (that no matter how many white swans you see, that doesn't mean there are no black swans). Hence I was genuinely amazed when I saw a black swan on the River Cam today...

WAGs

OK, so I said no more travelogues for a while, but I'm back in Turkey. I'm having a beer with the chaps on top of the Swisshotel Bosphorous in Istanbul. Look at the view... Afterwards, we went to a fabulous restaurant: Tugra and had dinner looking out over the water. It wasn't that peaceful though: the Turkish football league champions, Galatasaray , were having a celebration ball at the same place. There was a lot of very nicely, and very expensively dressed, WAGs (wives and girlfriends). It was a bit like watching the filming of an episode of Footballer's Wives and therefore quite exciting for dreary middle-aged businesspersons such as ourselves. Excellent night out, and the baklava was unbelievable.

Technorati Tags: football, puppy, travel

Southwest Trains are totally hopeless and I hope they lose their franchise

It took me half an hour to get on a train at Woking. I got there in plenty of time so I would be early for a meeting in the city. But when I arrived at the station there was a queue for tickets stretching all the way to the door. It was clearly going to take at least a quarter of an hour to get a ticket and that would mean missing a couple of trains. There were plenty of people like me standing around being pissed off but what can you do? The guy in front of me had had enough and started to walk over to the ticket barriers so I went with him.



We asked the guy on the gate to let us through saying that we would buy tickets on the train or when we got to Waterloo. He was a total jobsworth and absolutely flatly refused to let us pass and said that if we went through the barrier we would be subject to a penalty fare. I can't imagine what penalty could be worse than having to travel on SWT but there you go. Anyway, we were forced to go back into the ticket hall. I don't understand why we can't just wave our mobile phones and get on the train like they do in Japan. All of this Victorian messing around with bits of cardboard is a joke. By the way, when I told the guy on the gate that I thought it was absurd having a ticket line stretching all the way to the door forcing people to miss trains., he said, essentially, 'tough'.



In order to try an avoid the still enormous lines, I went to investigate the ticket machines. Both of the ticket machines weren't working. Here's an SWT person trying to fix them while we were standing in line like lemons.



Actually the machines aren't terribly useful even when the are working. They appear essentially unchanged since the first world war. You have to feed notes and coins in to get a ticket out. Since I never have enough cash on me, and even if I do the machines will only take exact change or won't take my notes at all, they are essentially useless. However, a little while back someone had mentioned to SWT that credit cards had been invented half a century ago. On the entire station they have one machine capable of taking credit cards, but it's never working. Today, as usual, it was broken again. I'm starting to wonder if even SWT are sufficiently incompetent to have this machine broken all the time and I'm beginning to suspect that they've actually switched it off. It doesn't take chip-n-pin cards you see (the chip-n-pin switchover had only been known about for five or six years which clearly isn't long enough for SWT to plan for it) so I expect people use fraudulent cards in it all the time.



Meanwhile, the line was still huge. I went to try and find out the problem. I think I discovered it right away. The "help" desk was closed and there was no one there. This meant that the ticket line was clogged up with people who wanted to find out information rather than buy a ticket. Now we recently tried to find out the price of a train ticket from Woking to Newcastle. Despite being intelligent people with considerable experience of electronic commerce and online travel purchasing, we found the railway websites utterly incomprehensible. It's no wonder people find it easier to actually go to the station.



Here are the people trying to find out if you can take live toads to Inverness, and if so what might be the best route. These queries take about a hundred times as long as buying a ticket. Even the most rudimentary queueing theory simulation would reveal the disastrous consequences of allowing them in the ticket office. As only two of the three ticket windows were open anyway, an intelligent solution might've been (apart from installing modern ticket machines that accept cards) to have one window for information and one for tickets. But no.







They're still there while I missed yet another train.



I finally got on a train at 11.17 and even then I had to stand up all the way to Waterloo in boiling heat surrounded by unwashed young persons coming back from the Isle of Wight pop festival (festival, pah!, listening to Coldplay whining isn't a festival, I remember Glastonbury back when it was worth going to and I saw Led Zeppelin at Knebworth etc etc).

Does anyone know how you vote against a train company retaining a franchise?

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