Category Archives: Rants

Rants

McAfee virus scan is really annoying

3 Comments

As I work online, I obviously us a computer throughout the day (and often all night and weekends too, but that’s another matter). I also have this hate-hate relationship with Microsoft and Windows, as I find it the most infuriating think in my life. I don’t understand why Windows just has to keep annoying me with its constant nagging about stuff I really don’t care about.

I get daily messages telling me that some program I’m not using has stopped working, and shutting down merely prompts to offer feedback to Microsoft (which I have done in my own colourful way) only for the same damn error to keep happening.

I don’t care about the program, sod off!

McAfee is another thorn in my side. Only today I was writing an article when, in mid flow, the focus was taking off word while I was writing a sentence, only for this message box to force itself onto my screen.

McAfee Virus Scan

I couldn’t give a rat’s arse what it’s about to do, don’t interrupt me when I’m working, only to give me the options of ‘piss me off now’ or ‘piss me off later’.

Where’s the ‘sod off and never bother me again’ button?

Windows is full of this crap and it’s extremely infuriating.

/rant

Complaints, Rants

Carphone Warehouse Manager tells woman ‘sweaty ears caused fault in phone’

18 Comments

I’ve had my problems with Carphone Warehouse in the past, as I mentioned here. I wasn’t expecting so many people however to come forward and post comments about they feel they have been ripped off by Carphone Warehouse.

My post has attracted over 80 comments, some from angry customers and some from angry Carphone Warehouse employees. This woman (Claire Robinson), a Carphone Warehouse employee, even pretended to be a customer to try and fool others into thinking Carphone Warehouse were a company that offered great customer service. The complaints against Carphone Warehouse on this website suggest otherwise.

I have now been contacted by another disgruntled Carphone Warehouse customer who has been told that her phone is faulty because of her husband’s sweaty ears!

Have a read of this response to a complaint email from Carphone Warehouse:

Dear Mr ******

Thank you for your email.

I’m sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the repair you have received and the decision that has been made to the fault with the handset.

When a mobile gets wet, whether it’s from precipitation, humidity or any type of liquid, it causes corrosion to the electronic circuits. This gets worse with time. Often, when the mobile dries out, it will work for a short period of time, anything from a day to several months, but eventually stops working for good.

A fault like this often happens when the mobile hasn’t been in obvious contact with liquids. This is because liquid damage can be caused by a variety of factors, and often without you being aware of it.

Important information

Liquid damage is something that is not covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. Even if you wanted to pay for us to repair your mobile, we won’t because we cannot guarantee how long the mobile will work for if it was damaged by a liquid. If you have insurance for your mobile, you should find out if you’re covered for liquid damage. If you don’t have insurance, then you may have to buy another mobile.

If you’d like another second opinion we would advise you to contact that manufacturer directly on 0845 045 5555. Taking all this into account we will not be able to action your request of repairing the handset free of charge.

I apologise I can not offer a more favourable response. If you need any more help please call our Customer Support team on 0870 087 0168, between 8 am and 8pm Monday – Friday, 9am – 8pm Saturday and 10am – 5pm Sunday.

Regards

Kelly Cole

The customer was told that the sweat from her husband’s ear could have been the cause of the fault to her phone, and they will not be repairing it for her.

So, be warned that if you buy a phone, answering it and holding it up to your ear could invalidate the warranty with Carphone Warehouse. This is almost as good as when Carphone Warehouse told me that their returns policy didn’t apply to phones.

Classic stuff.

Internet, Rants

Student Property Shop protest

Leave a comment

You might remember the posts I made a while back about Tariq Zaman and his Student Property Company in Leeds. It seems that students in Leeds are still upset over the practises of Tariq Zaman and his company, and there is a protest planned for this weekend on Saturday January 30th, between 1pm and 3pm. The protest takes place outside the Student Property Shop, and details can be found on Facebook.

The Facebook page reads:

Finally we have some progress in the fight against Tariq Zaman and his cronies…

According to BBC Watchdog:

‘Tariq Zaman has been named as a HMO licence holder for 18 properties owned by his family. Due to the prosecutions, the council has taken the view that he is no longer a fit and proper person and we are now taking steps to remove his licence completely.

Now is the time to step up and the pressure to tell Mr Zaman to return the thousands of pounds students have reported he’s stolen from them and to alert other students before they sign with either him. Mr Zaman had links with Providence Properties which closed down last year, and the shop front was taken over by the Student Property Shop.

SO COME MAKE SOME NOISE OUTSIDE THE STUDENT PROPERTY SHOP ON SATURDAY AND SHOW THAT THE STUDENTS OF LEEDS HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE FIGHT AGAINST TARIQ ZAMAN.

And of course, invite all your friends!!!

Internet, Rants

HDNL employee to customers: You are all morons

40 Comments

Since my post just over two years ago about how a HDNL driver threw a parcel over  a gate, into a puddle, the post has received over 250 comments from angry HDNL customers, and arrogant, racist drivers who work for Home Delivery Network and insist on insulting their customers. The latest comment is by no means the worst, but the abrupt way that the imbecile chose to call all HDNL customers morons in his opening tirade is indicative of the attitude of the company towards its customers.

I particularly like the badly written line that reads: “Get off you fat arses and walk to the fucking shops”

The comment can be read below, and here, and you can read the original post (with the 250+ comments) here.

HDNL Employee
hdnl.co.uk
a@b.com
86.159.220.35
Submitted on 2010/01/23 at 1:39am

You are all morons. Do not use a 7am-7pm delivery company if you are going to be at work. I got an idea for you… Get off you fat arses and walk to the fucking shops…? Makes sense. If you order something be in for delivery! Hell its not hard people. What are you gaining bitching on this website? Why not just pick up a Thompson Local and ring the depot if you have a problem?? HDNL has a 99% delivery sucess rate, and with customers like Amazon moving more parcels through our network than in the past due to failures by other companies its hard to believe we’re as bad as you lot make out.

Complaints, Rants

Laithwaites Complaints

11 Comments

This complaint with Laithwaites started as just a mild niggle, and one that I thought had been cleared up quickly and effectively by the Laithwaites customer services department… alas I was wrong.

I ordered a case of Spanish red wines before Christmas, and it arrived (via HDNL would you believe) in good time. I was impressed, and a little shocked. When I tried to open the fourth bottle, removing the foil cover, I found that the cork was damaged. There was only half a cork, it was on its side and the win in the bottle had been exposed to the elements since it had been bottled – it smelled very bad.

I phoned Laithwaites customer services team and was mildly surprised to find that they were willing to deal with it very quickly, offering to send me a £10 gift voucher for the bottle of wine. The chap on the phone said it would be with me by the end of the week.

A couple of weeks past, and several decent looking email offers from Laithwaites came and went while I was still waiting for my £10 voucher (which I would have used on one of the offers), to the point where I phoned them on January 5th to ask where my £10 voucher had gone.

Here is the phone call in full, together with the relevant section from the previous call in December where I WAS told that my voucher would be posted.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Laithwaites Customer Service

In this call I am told once again that my compensation voucher would be posted to me, and yet, 10 days later, still no voucher.

To be honest, with Laithwaites customer services being so lackadaisical I’m not that keen on ordering from them again, even if this £10 voucher that I was promised before Christmas does eventually show up.

I paid for 13 bottles in December and have only been able to drink 12 – I still have the damaged bottle as evidence, or for emergencies should the alcohol levels in the house become dangerously low ;).

Has anyone else had any problems with Laithwaites, or had to make Laithwaites complaints?

Rants

BBC Watchdog starts Witch Hunt against Adrian Pengelly

20 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the BBC had ruined Watchdog and had turned it from a hard hitting consumer affairs show into nothing more than a prime time version of Loose Women. I’ve just watched last week’s show on catch-up, and it’s no better I’m afraid… in fact it’s worse.

adrianglastoLast week, Matt Allwright went after a man named Adrian Pengelly who claims to be a natural healer. Adrian Pengelly says he can heal people and animals using his hands. This isn’t an unusual form of alternative medicine and has been around for many thousands for years. I believe someone named Jesus used to do it too.

Now, before I go on I should state I have no opinion of Adrian Pengelly one way or the other. I don’t know whether he can heal, or whether he’s a con man. I don’t know and I don’t care. What I do care about is the way the BBC decided that he was a charlatan and set about chasing him down in something resembling a witch hunt from the Middle Ages.

Firstly, no-one had complained about Adrian Pengelly. This I think is an important fact. He also charges £30 per session according to Watchdog, which they suggested allowed him to live his ‘lavish’ lifestyle. £30 per session seems very reasonable to me. You wouldn’t get a plumber for that, nor a solicitor nor even an SEO consultant!

When you consider that Adrian Pengelly heals with his hands, this is damn cheap.

They then set about trying to catch him out by sending him a horse that had been x-rayed to show it had soft tissue damage in its hoof, and wondered if Adrian Pengelly would spot this. Pengelly examined the horse and said that its knee suffered from tension.

This then prompted the ‘expert’ watching over the computer to proclaim that Pengelly was wrong. Why? Are the x-rays conclusive? Are doctors never wrong? Is this ‘healing hands’ quack obviously wrong because our medical science says so?

No, it’s the opinion of the vet over Pengelly’s. Whether you believe one or the other, you can’t declare one is 100% correct while the other is 100% wrong.

What they did next sickened me. They had a woman who used to suffer from cancer visit Pengelly for treatment, claiming to actually have cancer. Why would anyone in their right mind claim to have cancer, especially when they’ve had it before?

Adrian Pengelly told her that his treatments worked better for people who weren’t on chemotherapy, but insisted he would never advise anyone to stop it unless they were terminal and the chemo was just to prolong life.

This prompted Watchdog and Matt Allwright to miss-quote him and state that he’d advised people to stop chemotherapy, which he didn’t.

It goes further though. Adrian Pengelly is also into ghosts and communicating with the dead, so Watchdog set him up with a ‘ghost house’ filled with special effects to see if he tried to con the resident into believing there were ghosts present. Once, and only once, during this footage did they point out that Adrian Pengelly does NOT charge for this!

How is this Rogue Trader material? He doesn’t even charge!!!

Finally, Allwright was confronted with hoards of people who claimed to have been helped by Adrian Pengelly, and one woman who said she had been cured of cancer. Allwright dismissed their claims as ‘sick people looking for hope’ and summed up that Pengelly was dangerous offering hope to those who most needed it.

This was despite their McMillan Cancer expert stating that hope, such as that offered by Pengelly, helps survival rates and recent research by the University of British Columbia showing that cancer patients showing signs of depression were 25% more likely to die from their illness.

Hope is important in all forms of recovery.

So, the BBC has gone back to the Dark Ages and has started a witch hunt for a man offering alternative medicine because today’s doctors say it won’t work. Is the BBC going after all forms of alternative medicine now? Will they go after hypnotists and psychics next? Perhaps the BBC will go after psychiatrists too; that’s got to be nonsense as well!

Watchdog has become the thing it once fought. Sort it out BBC, it’s disgusting.

British Telecom, Complaints, CSA, Home Delivery Network, Rants

Watchdog has been ruined by the BBC

6 Comments

Those who know me will know that I love a good complaint. I’m renowned for it. Because of this, I’m a fan of BBC Watchdog. I often watch the show and get irate at the companies they’re exposing for their unethical practices and poor customer service.

Indeed, I like to perform my own exposes of companies, such as those that have often annoyed me like the CSA, BT and Direct Line, or companies that have the misfortune of having annoyed me just the once and lived to regret it forever, such as Home Delivery Network and Chester Council.

I’m a fan of Watchdog’s work, so much so that I even aided them with their quest to investigate Providence Properties (a company that didn’t annoy me, but I picked up the torch nonetheless).

However, this new series of Watchdog, which started last night, will have companies like Providence Properties popping the champagne corks. What was once a hard hitting consumer affairs show has been diluted into nothing more than a BBC version of Loose Women.

Did we need to see Anne Robinson and Gabby Roslin harping on about pushchairs? Did we have to watch a 10 minute video showing how many bags you can hang on the back of them before they topple over, despite even the voiceover admitting that the manufacturers tell you not to do it? And what purpose did strapping the buggies onto a bucking bronco and seeing how long it took to launch the doll from them actually serve?

None, none whatsoever.

They then complained about Virgin Media. Excellent, as a customer of Virgin Media I’ve had my share of complaints with them. However, complaining that Virgin Media make it difficult to sort out someone’s account after they’d died isn’t really anything to complain about. People would soon complain if it were made easy, then anyone could phone up and claim to be a relative, stating the account holder had died and they wanted all of the documents and account credit transferred to them.

Virgin Media acted responsibly.

I can’t believe I’m saying all of this, but it gets worse.

The report on sunbeds was completely redundant. It’s not illegal for under 18s to use them, so none of the health clubs were breaking the law. What’s the problem?

Just why has the show been merged with Rogue Traders? I’m not a fan of Rogue Traders because I believe the guy hosting it, Matt Allwright, is out of his depth, as he showed again. He’s in the perfect position to really get people’s back up yet seems to act like a petulant clown. If you want to see how to annoy people, read this website, it’s all there.

Matt Allwright followed some salesman from Craftmatic beds, claiming his technique of making three phone calls to the office was hard sell, and his claiming that the bed will make you look twenty years younger was unscrupulous. OK, if you believe that using a bed makes you look twenty years younger you deserve to be conned, and making several calls to the office to get ‘discounts’ for the client is a sales technique. It might not be pleasant, but salesman generally aren’t.

He hadn’t done anything wrong. Then when the Matt Allwright tried to crash the sales conference and was barred from entry he started acting like a child, ordering the man behind not to trap him in the door or it would be assault.

You’re not supposed to be getting worked up mate, they are!

He’s rubbish and the show has been ruined. Bring back Nicky Campbell and the decent format. If you want someone to do Rogue Traders properly, I’ll do it!

Rants

Vicious vet stabs dog then charges owner to fix mistake

Leave a comment

Buster-300x225Some stories seem too awful to be true, and the story of a vet in Heswall, on the Wirral, definitely falls into that category. A Jack Russell had been brought into the Churchview Veterinary Centre in Heswall to have his stitches removed after receiving treatment for cutting himself when he ran into a wall. Rather than remove the stitches, the ‘trainee’ vet made a further cut in the dog’s side when her hand slipped, slicing the dog open with a knife.

The dog yelped in pain and had to be held down while the new wound, which was parallel to the original wound, was treated by the real vet.

Astonishingly the vets then charged the owner for treating the new wound which they had inflicted!

This is the sort of story that would outrage dog lovers everywhere, and one that should make dog lovers wary of taking their dog to the vets.

Read the full story here, but be warned, it’s not a pleasant one.