Andy Cunningham

I’m with Nigella Lawson on this one. Vegetarianism is like exercise. It’s very good if someone else is doing it.

I sit near customer support where I work, and I spend all day listening to people badgering customers for call reference numbers, licence numbers, serial numbers, and other trivia.

I’ve just wasted 90 minutes of my life speaking with Sky’s customer support who were polite, full of corporate doublespeak, and totally useless.

When a customer phones up with a problem, he doesn’t care what is licence number or viewing card number is.  He certainly doesn’t want bullshit about how the Sky satellite decoder is made by a third party who make crappy unreliable electronics and should have paid £70 a year for a service contract.

I don’t want to spend 45 minutes on hold before I speak to someone.  I don’t want an IVR system.  I want a person.  Someone who speaks English passably for preference, but I work in such a multi-cultural world that it’s no challenge to deal with someone who has English as their seventh language.  I can’t passably function in any other language – and I’d learn another language if I could figure out whether Mandarin or Malayalam would be more use.

I don’t want to speak to someone who repeats everything I’ve said.  It’s not polite.  It’s not helpful.  It just gives me time to think of sarcastic come-backs.

How would you like if it I repeated everything you said back to you in a normal conversation?

So you think it’s stupid to repeat everything you just said?

Please. throw out the corporate bullshit.  I’ve worked on the other side of this particular fence.  I’ve run a (small) call centre.  I’ve faced high level customers spending hundreds of thousands of pounds who aren’t happy.  Don’t think your two days of call centre training can fob me off.   I know all the excuses.

“High call volume” is a emphemism for “too few staff on tonight”.  “We’re sorry for the inconvenience” is a sop to stupid people.  If you were actually sorry, it would be “I’m sorry, and I’d like to arrange for a credit for your account by way of apology”.   And if you can’t answer my call, don’t insult me by telling me how valuable it is.  If it was actually valuable (i.e., revenue generating), you’d be a hell of a lot quicker to answer.

Just answer the phone by the fourth ring with a real human being.  And then transfer me in one go, with no waiting, to someone who has the skills to help me.  You’ve got my phone number from the IVR, so don’t ask me for it, or my name, or my mother’s inside leg measurement.  You know all that.  Stop messing me around and help me.  It’s what I expect when I’m paying for a service that isn’t being delivered.

Well it makes as it pretty obvious that the decline in global piracy is the cause of global warming.

well. if would be funny if it wasn’t so accurate.

This picture was taken in Berkshire, on the 7th April.  This is the most snow we’ve seen all year.  In April?

Global Warming?  I don’t believe it.  It’s just a scam dreamt up by people who think we should all live in caves, and loved by the governments who use it to justify higher taxes.

No, really.

As reported here,  anecdotal evidence for global cooling has increased, and now the latest data from the main sources of global climate data backs this up: over the past year, the global temperature has dropped by between 0.65 and 0.75 degrees centigrade, the largest single drop in a year, and enough to wipe out the alleged effect of global warming in the last century.

A couple of things come to mind here.  First of all, the whole global warming debacle is over less than one degree in the last century?  Just get lost.  Go.  Desist. Leave me alone.  Stop confusing me with someone who cares.  That ain’t global warming, that’s noise.

Secondly, if the temperature can drop that suddenly in a year, the effect we’re having on the planet is tiny.  Even if the eco-nutters are right, the sum total effect of global warming in the last century has been wiped out by, oh, I don’t know, being at the bottom of the sunspot cycle?

D,oh!

We live in a country with over-immigration, youths whose only qualification on leaving school is an ASBO, spiraling oil prices, punitive taxation, appalling public transport, and over-stretched public services.

So what do I find you’re most worried about?

It seems it’s how I carry home my shopping.

You are the worst kind of micro manager, obsessing about the little issues with no regard for the wider problems facing the country.  You extract ever increasing amounts of taxation (income tax started at sixpence in the pound, what are you doing with the other 38%?) , jump from bandwagon to bandwagon, giving little or no thought as to how to make the lives of the people of Britain better and more prosperous.

The only thing that’s even more shameful is that the Conservatives can’t even field a credible opponent to your woeful inadequacy.

Once again the BBC writes an article where there’s unnecessary emphasis on the driver in the wrong driving a 4×4.

This article mentions “Range Rover” four times. The fact that the driver of the vehicle was suspected of being under the influence is mentioned only once, and the fact that the victim was illegally driving a quad-bike on the road whilst underage and therefore with no licence or insurance is only mentioned once.

It must be heart-breaking to lose a child at Christmas. Doubly so when it’s your own fault.

Oh, and the article adds insult to injury by referring to Brake as a road safety charity, when in fact they are an anti-car propaganda movement.

Those of us who understand road safety, rather than using it to promote anti-car claptrap, already know this.

What’s the first thing you do when you see a scamera?  Take you eyes off the road, look at the speedo, and hit the brakes just in case you’d slipped a few mph over the limit.

See what happens when people do that?

We’ve got to get these idiots off the roads, folks.

Thanks to Barrie from Bridgend for the photo.

Over at Twenty Sided Tale, Shamus Young has an excellent rant against

“the evil retarded pedophilic inbred cannibal Nazi liars at 2kGames. I will not be satisfied until the company is driven out of business and the involved parties are all conscripted into forced labor working in a malaria-infested South American turd mine. The company headquarters should then be burned to the ground and the ashes gathered up and disposed of in the same manner as depleted rods from a nuclear power plant. The building site will forever after remain a barren scar on the face of the world, since no life could hope to grow where…”

I don’t know what pissed him off quite so much, but it’s a good rant.