Posted: December 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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We just got back from the Christmas travelling and visiting, half the week at Leslie’s parents and the other half of the week at mine. Our sister and her family were supposed to be there too but at the last minute her husband decided to go early, so they left about two hours before we got there, so we missed them, and missed the chance to give our neice her christmas present. And it can’t be posted because it’s fragile. *headdesk*

Also discovered that someone we knew from school, a guy who was a couple of years older, was killed in a car accident last week. This news I discovered by chatting with a random stranger while out walking the dog.

Aside from that, it was a nice relaxed kind of Christmas, without a lot of rushing about that we usually do. My haul included 3 Apocalyptica CDs, a fleece jacket, a giant coffee mug, two bottles of wine and some of the usual smellies. I’m actually sitting here wearing the fleece now, and cradling a cup of coffee in the mug, because this house has been empty nearly a week with the heating and hot water off and it’s EFFING FREEZING IN HERE.

But it’s not as cold as it was walking round the sea wall at St Lawrence on Boxing Day afternoon.

(picture by PaulHP - not of exactly the same place but near enough to show what it looks like).

Posted: December 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I’m supposed to have been at work today but I have the dreaded lurgy. It was effort enough dragging myself out of bed and downstairs to phone in sick, never mind actually get on a bus and go in. I’m supposed to be meeting a friend in town tonight too, but looks like that will be cancelled as well. Nasty sinus headache feels like my head wants to explode. Blergh.  Can I just go back to bed?

Posted: December 13th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

I’m at my wits end with Kat, and I don’t know what to do with her.

We were concerned that she’d not received the certificate from college, and have been badgering her to contact the college to ask for a copy. Well it turns out that the reason she didn’t get the cert was because she wasn’t attending, and didn’t even finish the course. And she’d been lying to us all along.

Like she’s been lying about going to the job centre and signing on, which she also hasn’t done. And she hasn’t lifted a finger to look for a job. All she does is mess around on the computer and watch TV. No matter how much I nag her, beg, plead, bribe or threaten, she does nothing. There isn’t anything left I can do that I wouldn’t get put in jail for.

For chrissakes she’s nearly 20. At her age I’d already left home, was working and living independently. This is driving me nuts.

I want to throw her out the house but I know she’d go straight round to her boyfriend’s, and sponge off his parents instead.

So as of today, everything is confiscated. The computer is being packed away. Her laptop, well I’m having that and changing the password on it to something she doesn’t know. The playstation, we are going to give that to a friend’s daughter. If she wants to use a computer to jobsearch, well I’ve told her she’ll have to use the ones at the jobcentre and apply for jobs there directly. But she doesn’t actually want to work at all, her only ambition is to be a sponger for the rest of her life.

And I don’t know what else to do.

Posted: September 29th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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The story so far: About a month ago there was a minor fault on the phone line, so Leslie called BT, and was alarmed to be told “We can’t help, this isn’t a BT phone line.” They told us enough to figure out that it had been passed to another company. A little bit of guesswork (based on marketing telephone calls) led us to suspect Talk Talk, and bingo. We were right. But. Talk Talk wouldn’t talk to us because it wasn’t our name on the account. We managed to piece together the following facts:
1) Someone set up a talk talk account using a different name and address from ours, but using our phone number. The line was switched to the new company without telling us about it.
2) We’ve been using the phone free since May, because all the bills are going elsewhere. (In actual fact about a week after the first incident the phone got cut off completely for non-payment.
3) We contacted Ofcom, who could only advise us to keep trying.
4) One of Talk Talks callhandlers broke Data Protection law by giving us the name and address that the account has been switched to (more about that later).

Whats worse is that our ISP only operates on BT lines (clearly they lie - they’re quite capable of running on someone else’s line, they just won’t). It’s still working for now but if at any time either BT or Talk Talk notify them that the line’s changed hands we’ll lose internet as well. Although for now we’re keeping quiet and its still working.

So… we can’t resolve it with BT, we can’t resolve it with Talk Talk, and I could see no way out. Leslie had pretty much decided that the next step would be to see a solicitor.

And then, yesterday… … imagine how cross I was when I got a sales marketing call from Talk Talk.

Him: “Hello this is (unintelligible foreign name) from Talk Talk. May I speak to the account holder please?”
Me: (chuckles) “And who do you think that person should be, hmm?”
Him: (flustering, clearly unwilling to break Data Protection rules - ironic given that one of their other callhandlers already did that). “Er… the person whose name is on the bill.”
Me: “Okay I’ll tell you who you think that should be. That should be Mr B…. of (address). Well, Mr B does not exist. I’m Mrs M. of (other address) and this phone number has belonged to us for 21 years and my husband has been making complaints to your senior staff about the hijacking of our telephone line for about the past 4 weeks.”
Him: (stunned silence)
Me: “What’s this about anyway?
Him: “Just to talk about updating your services (translates - I want to sell you things).
Me: (evil laughs) “I think you have the wrong fucking number.” (hangs up).

The poor guy must have reported that to his supervisor, because fifteen minutes later, I got another telephone call, a highly apologetic one, from someone who is actually dealing with the case. And, for the first time, real information. Talk Talk have been dealing with Ofcom as well, and apparently the account in Mr B’s name was set up without a signature or any visible proof of ID. I told her that I suspect identity fraud - she agreed and said that the case had already been passed on to their Fraud team to be looked at. She also confirmed that the line would be passed back to BT on the 29th September, she reassured me that we would not be liable for any bills for the 3 months Talk Talk had the number (damn if I’d known that I would’ve used the phone more lol). She also assured me that the phone number and all our details would be completely erased from the database so there would not be any more marketing calls, ever. As soon as it goes back to BT we are getting the number changed for security reasons, and if there’s any charge I think that would be worth paying.

Incidentally we also reported Talk Talk to the Data Protection Agency as well, for giving away the name and address of the non-existant person who set up the account - we know its a fake name and address because the address they used is just 7 doors away down the road. Leslie went round last week to beg Mr B to call Talk Talk and get the matter resolved, and discovered that there hadn’t ever been anyone of the name B ever living there. And they don’t have their phone on Talk Talk. My bet is, this is happenning because banks will accept a couple of utility bills as proof of name and address, and most everywhere else will accept a bank account as proof, so I think its a way of generating fake identities.

The whole thing is just bizarre and insane. But at least it should be all resolved next week.

Posted: September 18th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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It’s not been the best of weekends, even though it’s August Bank Holiday weekend so its a day longer than usual (four days in a row off work - nice).

To begin with, Leslie’s computer started making “I’m dying” noises, and popping up unusual errors on the screen. Turns out his graphics card is failing. Although he was intending to upgrade his system anyway.

Then, yesterday we kept getting dropouts on the internet. It would show we were still connected but bandwidth would go down to zero. Not just in Second Life, but it was showing on the router as well. So he picks up the phone to call AOL about it… and the phone was dead. Then it came back. Then it went dead again. So these dropouts of zero bandwidth are the actual phone line going temporarily dead. A phone call to BT support gave us the mysterious information that our line is not a BT line.

Well, it should be. But, back to April last year we got a mysterious email from AOL saying that as our line was no longer going to be a BT line they couldn’t serve us with broadband any more. Further investigation then, led us to understand that Talk Talk had taken over running the line. A few phonecalls then, including to OFCOM seemed to resolve the issue. At least, AOL continued to work fine, even better than before actually, so we just assumed that whatever had gone wrong, was fixed.

Um, no. So after failing to get anywhere with BT, we called Talk Talk. And yes, our telephone number is a Talk Talk number. Which is registered to a different name and address, since last, oh May. Coincidence not. (The fact that this telephone number has been ours since 1987 apparently doesn’t count). We actually suspect a neighbour and a typing error, actually.

So there are two weird things about this. First, the other customer has been paying our telephone bill since May (not that it would be very high, we hardly ever use it anyway - if I’d known I’d have called California and Chicago). I did think it odd that we hadn’t received our latest bill. Second, the internet still works, so any of AOL’s complaints of “Our service won’t work on anything but a BT line” don’t wash because we’ve had AOL on a non-BT line for 4 months and it’s been running better than it ever did under BT.

Or at least it did work until last night. We still don’t know what’s up with that.. Tried the net this morning and it’s about the same- on and off all the time. .

On the other hand we do still have the mobile broadband thingy which we used while we were on holiday, and it’s easy enough to top it up (it works like a mobile pay-as-you-go). Its not ideal, it would be only on the laptop, and only one of the family could use it at a time, but as an emergency measure it does mean that we won’t be without internet completely if it doesn’t get resolved soon.

And to add insult to injury, I switched on the coffee machine this morning, heard a crack, and the jug’s broke.

Posted: August 26th, 2008 under computers.
Comments: none

Soo… Its been a while since I updated, and I decided that I ought to do just that. Hmm lets see, since we got back from the holiday things have been fairly ordinary. Work was tough - low call volumes and very low sales, and August has started similarly, so earnings are going to be down for a while I suspect. Also our manager is moving on to new pastures in 3 weeks, so we’re getting a new one. Have met her already, she’s nice.

and…

um…

okay that is why I’ve not updated. I’ve actually not got anything to say. Ho hum. My life is so boring.

Posted: August 5th, 2008 under personal.
Comments: 1

U has a flavor. It hurtz me.

ps: AJ, the link for me to leave comments on your blog has disappeared.

Posted: July 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Holiday photos (plus some mixed in from a visit to London in May) are uploaded.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yearofthehorse/

Posted: July 13th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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So we’re back at last. It’s been a mixed sort of week, stressful, and I feel like now I need another holiday to recover from it.

First a brief list of the places we saw, and I’m sure I’m missing something out. There will be photos of our own soon, when I’ve downloaded and sorted them. We were also very lucky with weather, after a couple of showery days at the start of the week we had lovely warm and mostly dry weather. We didn’t see any Golden Eagles (we were told it was eagle country) but we did see wild deer, and Les saw a Red Kite (but I missed it).

Monday - Dundee (and the 2.25km bridge over the river Tay). St Andrews - pretty town, but nothing much to keep the attention of anyone who doesn’t play golf). The Scottish Deer park, which has lots of deer, including the rare Pere Davids deer, also falconry displays, and a small pack of wolves. That was good.

Tuesday - Pitlochry, up in the proper Highlands. There’s a hydro-powerstation and a salmon-run up the river. Lots of walking. Took a side-trip up to Blair Atholl and found a local folk museum which was excellent.

Wednesday - Aberdeen. Which was sunny. Very sunny. A lovely city. We also went in the Maritime museum there, saw a lot of ships, and learned a lot about oil-rigs. Damn glad I don’t work on one of those. Went to a pretty seaside town called Stonehaven on the way back.

Thursday - Perth. Which is kind of like an ordinary English town, really. Didn’t find anything particularly special there except a nice view of the river. It seemed to be a town with more going on at night, but I didn’t have a chance for anything like that.

Friday - Mostly packing and cleaning the cottage, but we did take a trip out to Crieff, went to Glen Turret distillery, which is the oldest malt whisky distillery in Scotland.

Saturday - On the way out of Scotland we stopped at Rosslyn Chapel (which was used in the Da Vinci Code - yes I have stepped on the same holy ground as Tom Hanks. Woo.) Further down the coast we also stopped at Dunbar, where we visited the John Muir museum. I’ve never heard of him before but that man was awesome. We spent Saturday evening in Tyneside, which is where Anad grew up. Saw the Angel of the North, and beach-combed on Marsden Beach.

Today we got to York, where we met with Trueriver from LJ, and said goodbye to Jan (but not before introducing her to such wonders of Northern cuisine as black pudding, Yorkshire pudding, and Spotted Dick).

So, yeah. It was quite a rushed week, and in the end it wasn’t at all the sort of holiday I’d been expecting. But now, I’m looking ahead. Maybe the next trip will be California 2009.

Posted: July 6th, 2008 under travel.
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