In which I apologise for the late blog...
Yes, the blog will be late this week. Sorry about that. This is because I'm say in a service station on the M54 with 200 miles to drive...more tomorrow, hopefully!
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Monday, 11 October 2010
A somewhat better use of twitter as a customer service tool
In which the colour blue features in a negative capacity
Don't get me wrong, I like the colour blue. Blue skies are nice. Blues music is good. My bike is blue. The shower gel I'm using at the moment (well not this very moment, obviously) is blue. The book I'm reading has a blue cover.
On the whole though, blue is not a good colour for mashed potatoes to be. In fact, there are very few foods I can think of that are blue, but tonight my family was subjected to blue mashed potatoes due to the conjunction of my wife being on the phone to me, the potatoes being in a saucepan on the side, teen in training and a bottle of blue food colouring. Quite why he decided that tipping food colouring into the mashed potatoes was a good idea I'm not sure, especially as he had to eat them. Apparently they tasted just the same anyway.
Anyway, on with the blog. Slightly late (and from my phone) this week as I had no internet yesterday, which coincidentally is what this bit of the post is about. I asked on twitter to see if anyone else on my ISP was having problems; I got no response, but then today I got an @ message from Demon Broadband asking if I was still having trouble.
Since they don't follow me, they had clearly searched for anyone mentioning Demon and took the trouble to arrange for someone to call to see if it could be fixed. As it turned out it was probably a BT issue, so they couldn't have done much, but I was impressed with the proactive attitude to trying to sort it out.
I was somewhat less impressed when I tried to call the freephone number I had for their automated service announcements and got a service for reporting smokers in Glasgow city centre bus shelters. I'm sure that's very useful, but it's not exactly helpful if you're trying to find out if your ISP had a network fault. To be fair to them this was because I had an old number on a card they sent me when I set the account up...
Anyway, running and stuff...yeah. I need a running partner I think, I was really struggling tonight (no running since last Thursday) and I only ran 4K.
I would also like to protest at the placement of eateries in the village. On my way to Tesco to buy sandwiches and fruit I have to walk past 2 indian takeaways, 2 chip shops, a pub that does food and a hotel with a restaurant. Can you say "temptation"?
That's it for this week. I shall try to post more later in the week once I'm home.
Apologies as usual for spelling errors and lack of formatting. It's my phone's fault.
Don't get me wrong, I like the colour blue. Blue skies are nice. Blues music is good. My bike is blue. The shower gel I'm using at the moment (well not this very moment, obviously) is blue. The book I'm reading has a blue cover.
On the whole though, blue is not a good colour for mashed potatoes to be. In fact, there are very few foods I can think of that are blue, but tonight my family was subjected to blue mashed potatoes due to the conjunction of my wife being on the phone to me, the potatoes being in a saucepan on the side, teen in training and a bottle of blue food colouring. Quite why he decided that tipping food colouring into the mashed potatoes was a good idea I'm not sure, especially as he had to eat them. Apparently they tasted just the same anyway.
Anyway, on with the blog. Slightly late (and from my phone) this week as I had no internet yesterday, which coincidentally is what this bit of the post is about. I asked on twitter to see if anyone else on my ISP was having problems; I got no response, but then today I got an @ message from Demon Broadband asking if I was still having trouble.
Since they don't follow me, they had clearly searched for anyone mentioning Demon and took the trouble to arrange for someone to call to see if it could be fixed. As it turned out it was probably a BT issue, so they couldn't have done much, but I was impressed with the proactive attitude to trying to sort it out.
I was somewhat less impressed when I tried to call the freephone number I had for their automated service announcements and got a service for reporting smokers in Glasgow city centre bus shelters. I'm sure that's very useful, but it's not exactly helpful if you're trying to find out if your ISP had a network fault. To be fair to them this was because I had an old number on a card they sent me when I set the account up...
Anyway, running and stuff...yeah. I need a running partner I think, I was really struggling tonight (no running since last Thursday) and I only ran 4K.
I would also like to protest at the placement of eateries in the village. On my way to Tesco to buy sandwiches and fruit I have to walk past 2 indian takeaways, 2 chip shops, a pub that does food and a hotel with a restaurant. Can you say "temptation"?
That's it for this week. I shall try to post more later in the week once I'm home.
Apologies as usual for spelling errors and lack of formatting. It's my phone's fault.
Monday, 4 October 2010
An interesting day...
...in which I have what my manager terms a "genius moment".
As you will know if you've been following my exploits thus far, I am currently working away from home. This usually involves getting up at 4:30 on a Monday morning (all together now: "aww").
This week, however, I phoned the taxi firm a bit late in the weekend so I had to make do with an earlier time slot. Since I need a cup of coffee just to be semi-functional in the mornings I had to get up about 4:10AM.
As usual I sat at the PC messing about on twitter and facebook for a bit while drinking my coffee and waiting for the taxi, but when I stood up to go and get my shoes on I managed to trip over the mouse cable, which had somehow coiled itself around my foot like a deadly snake poised to strike. I went flying across the front room, but managed to prevent myself falling.
The taxi turned up and as I was doing my usual last-minute inventory I realised I didn't have my phone. I'm sure you'll be familiar with that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise that something you need is missing and you only have a short amount of time to find it...anyway, I remembered it had been in my shirt pocket so must have flown out in the trip wire incident. I managed to find it under the sofa after a couple of minutes of frenzied searching.
Things went back to normal after that; I got to the station in plenty of time (30 minutes early, in fact), where I sat wishing I'd worn warmer clothes for a bit.
On the London train this week there were no charging sockets, and the train was a bit manky compared to the usual standard, but the journey continued as usual until I got off at Banbury for my first change.
The train was a little late getting in, so I only had a minute or 2 to make my connection. As I got off I heard the announcement saying the 7:55 was departing from platform 2. That's not the platform it usually goes from (it usually goes from the platform I get off at), but I assumed that the train I'd just got off was in the way so they'd sent it to a different platform.
I didn't hear the announcement when we stopped at the first station as I was in the vestibule at the end of the carriage and the speaker seemed to be broken. However, when we got to the next station I saw the sign.
"Coventry".
Hmm. You know the awful feeling you get when you've just done something incredibly, monumentally silly? The sort of thing you know people are going to laugh at you about for years, and eventually needs counselling to get over?
I'm sure you can see where this is going. It is rarely a good idea to get in a train that is going in the opposite direction to where you need to go, but that is what I had managed to do.
Fortunately the later version of the train that I should have got on at Banbury was at Coventry, so I managed a mad dash across the bridge and then a dive onto the "right" train with about 2 seconds to spare. I was an hour late for work but they were all suitably amused by my stupidity.
At Reading (going in the right direction) the train stopped, as trains do at stations. A man got on, went to the loo and then got off again while the train was waiting. That seems like quite a risky strategy to me, but perhaps all the loos at the station were out of order.
My wife was very sympathetic when I told her about my day...once she stopped laughing (which took quite some time) she said "trouble comes in threes so something else had to go wrong yet". Thanks for that, darling. However, I hold that the tripping incident and the phone incident were separate, and that I am therefore now safe.
Anyway, running and stuff. Yesterday I went for a run with Nicky, of skinnyblog fame (see link on left, I can't do them on phone). We did 4.3 miles in about 50 minutes, including having to climb through a hedge to avoid an overflowing ford. That's really pretty good, especially as that's the first time I've done that distance, but I do need to up the speed some to beat the 2 hour mark for the half marathon.
Right, apologies for all the spelling mistakes I've no doubt made and the lack of nice formatting. Phones are not an ideal medium on which to type blog posts, but needs must when you're faced with your own stupidity...
As you will know if you've been following my exploits thus far, I am currently working away from home. This usually involves getting up at 4:30 on a Monday morning (all together now: "aww").
This week, however, I phoned the taxi firm a bit late in the weekend so I had to make do with an earlier time slot. Since I need a cup of coffee just to be semi-functional in the mornings I had to get up about 4:10AM.
As usual I sat at the PC messing about on twitter and facebook for a bit while drinking my coffee and waiting for the taxi, but when I stood up to go and get my shoes on I managed to trip over the mouse cable, which had somehow coiled itself around my foot like a deadly snake poised to strike. I went flying across the front room, but managed to prevent myself falling.
The taxi turned up and as I was doing my usual last-minute inventory I realised I didn't have my phone. I'm sure you'll be familiar with that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise that something you need is missing and you only have a short amount of time to find it...anyway, I remembered it had been in my shirt pocket so must have flown out in the trip wire incident. I managed to find it under the sofa after a couple of minutes of frenzied searching.
Things went back to normal after that; I got to the station in plenty of time (30 minutes early, in fact), where I sat wishing I'd worn warmer clothes for a bit.
On the London train this week there were no charging sockets, and the train was a bit manky compared to the usual standard, but the journey continued as usual until I got off at Banbury for my first change.
The train was a little late getting in, so I only had a minute or 2 to make my connection. As I got off I heard the announcement saying the 7:55 was departing from platform 2. That's not the platform it usually goes from (it usually goes from the platform I get off at), but I assumed that the train I'd just got off was in the way so they'd sent it to a different platform.
I didn't hear the announcement when we stopped at the first station as I was in the vestibule at the end of the carriage and the speaker seemed to be broken. However, when we got to the next station I saw the sign.
"Coventry".
Hmm. You know the awful feeling you get when you've just done something incredibly, monumentally silly? The sort of thing you know people are going to laugh at you about for years, and eventually needs counselling to get over?
I'm sure you can see where this is going. It is rarely a good idea to get in a train that is going in the opposite direction to where you need to go, but that is what I had managed to do.
Fortunately the later version of the train that I should have got on at Banbury was at Coventry, so I managed a mad dash across the bridge and then a dive onto the "right" train with about 2 seconds to spare. I was an hour late for work but they were all suitably amused by my stupidity.
At Reading (going in the right direction) the train stopped, as trains do at stations. A man got on, went to the loo and then got off again while the train was waiting. That seems like quite a risky strategy to me, but perhaps all the loos at the station were out of order.
My wife was very sympathetic when I told her about my day...once she stopped laughing (which took quite some time) she said "trouble comes in threes so something else had to go wrong yet". Thanks for that, darling. However, I hold that the tripping incident and the phone incident were separate, and that I am therefore now safe.
Anyway, running and stuff. Yesterday I went for a run with Nicky, of skinnyblog fame (see link on left, I can't do them on phone). We did 4.3 miles in about 50 minutes, including having to climb through a hedge to avoid an overflowing ford. That's really pretty good, especially as that's the first time I've done that distance, but I do need to up the speed some to beat the 2 hour mark for the half marathon.
Right, apologies for all the spelling mistakes I've no doubt made and the lack of nice formatting. Phones are not an ideal medium on which to type blog posts, but needs must when you're faced with your own stupidity...
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