Monthly Archives: January 2011

General, Internet

Phillip Schofield calls out MrDaz

Leave a comment

Last Friday I travelled down to London for a filming of the gameshow The Cube, hosted by the silver fox himself; Phillip Schofield. While there, sat on the front row might I add, Schofe (as he likes to be known on Twitter) asked that any audience members who had an Internet enabled mobile and a Twitter account tweet at him, and he’d read them out.

The Cube

Well, I couldn’t resist an invitation like that so I did. The trouble was, as the Silver Fox is so popular on Twitter it was hard for him to find tweets at him from people who were there in the audience, as opposed to just random tweets telling him how great he was, or how much someone loved him.

Nevertheless he found one from an audience member, MisterDaz 😉

It’s a shame I didn’t record it with the phone too, as having Phillip Schofield announce MrDaz would have made a great video for the site. I’ll know for next time.

As for the show, it was a celebrity episode with Julie Hesmondhalgh (Hayley Cropper) from Coronation Street. I won’t tell you how well she did, because that would spoil it, but she was a lot of fun!

Complaints, Rants

Awoken by Virgin Media Complaints Feedback

5 Comments

I was rather abruptly awoken this morning by the phone ringing (a very loud phone at that) which caused me to jump up believing I’d overslept and was late for work. I was sure I’d answer the phone and be questioned about my tardiness.

But no. When I picked up the phone I heard a beep, before a recorded voice stated something along the lines of:

“Hello. You recently contacted Virgin Media to make a complaint. We would like you to give feedback about…”

I hung up. I was not late for work. I had not overslept. My alarm was not due to sound for another 30 minutes.

So Virgin Media (NTL in disguise), you want feedback do you? Here’s some feedback; don’t call me early in the morning, with a recorded message, asking for feedback on a previous complaint. It might, and say might, not have been quite so bad had the call been from a real live human being, as opposed to a pre-recorded track played down the phone. However it wasn’t. You woke me, with no thought for how it would impact on my day, and you couldn’t even be arsed to have one of your own staff do it – you instead had a soulless machine do it for you, while you lay in bed dreaming of profits.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with your infernal robotic voices when we call you for assistance, trying in vain to get our TV to show on-demand at peak times, only to be placed on hold for Christ knows how long. Now you have your damn recorded messages calling us at all sodding hours of the day to extract some form of automated revenge on customers who have shown the audacity to make a complaint in the first place.

Virgin Media! You have the impertinence to call me with a robotic sounding message in the small hours of the day! You have started a war you cannot win sirs, I assure you of this!

Rants

£600 on Christmas presents spent by woman on benefits

3 Comments

OK, so I watched The One Show last night. I’ll fess up, I wouldn’t normally but as I haven’t got a housemate to blame it on any more I can’t really get out of it, I watched it – let’s move on. On the show, a single mother on benefits explained how she’d spent over £600 this last Christmas on presents for her toddler. She bought crap such as a ride on electric bike and a ride on electric quad bike (he couldn’t decide between them so she bought both) and a train set.

The mother said she’d bought her son everything he’d wanted, which actually meant everything he’d pointed at on the TV and in the Argos catalogue (her words, not mine).

The report showed the toddler in his room, which was full of the stuff he had Christmas (as the proud mum explained, only the bed was not for Christmas) and he honestly didn’t know what to do with it all.

The woman even stated how she wanted to spend more but her mother stopped her.

Naturally she couldn’t afford all of this crap, and she already had debts to pay off from catalogues, so a debt consolidation expert came round to see her. He explained how she could pay a nominal amount each month and write off her debt after a year, which would also affect her credit rating. However she was a proud woman and wanted to pay it off herself, rather than feel that she’d somehow avoided paying it… with her benefit money of course.

You can probably tell that this has somewhat annoyed me. I’m not the best with money (not by a long shot) but I am getting better. However, at no point have I squandered money such as this while on benefits, and at the same time having a series of debts that I couldn’t pay.

Shouldn’t basic economics be taught at school so situations such as this don’t arise? Then of course, as people such as this mother are able to spend ludicrous sums of money while on benefits, and then simply write off their debt, perhaps it’s not economics that should be taught, it’s ethics.