im gonna find out your address you little douchbag, you can bet it.
rip another post from my glasto blog and i will come to your house and rip ypur fucking head off
i shit you not kid
—–
steve jones
stevejones3185@googlemail.com

Thanks for your email Steve. Well, I tried to respond to clarify what you thought I’d “ripped” and to ask for a link to your blog, but I received a “mailbox not found” bounce-back so I guess you gave me a fake email address (and probably fake name).

So, I decided to have a little dig about. Seeing as you’re the only person who used my contact form on October 6th at 9:15pm, I know your IP address is/was 86.4.227.172, you use BT broadband and you’re probably based around the Runcorn area.

I’m also fairly certain you use Windows Vista, and you’re using the Chrome browser (version 3.0).

So I had a quick look through your route through my site and came up with this:

• 21:08 – Homepage
• 21:11 – About Me page
• 21:12 – Glastonbury page
• 21:12 – Contact Me page

Which suggests to me that you must have seen something on my Glastonbury page. So based on that, I’d like to know which of the following I stole from your site (bearing in mind you didn’t click any of the links and so don’t yet know what the pages contain):

• The text at the top of the page
• The picture of Rob
• The sitemaps
• The line-ups

So seeing as you didn’t manage to give me a real email address, feel free to send me another email but this time elaborate a bit – we both know nothing on my site has been ripped from anywhere, but I’d be interesting to see what you think is yours. Or if you really want to stand by your claim, why not post a comment below so everyone can see it?

Oh, and a quick proof read of your message next time wouldn’t hurt. Failing on words like “your” just make you look like a bit of a tit. Petty I know, but its just another reason why I’m not sure whether I should take you seriously or not – 12 year old trolls aren’t really worth my time. *

* Edited 21st October 2009

This time, its the Post Office Credit Card and their god awful customer services who, I’m now convinced, don’t know their arse from their elbow.

I decided to get another credit card. My new(ish) job means my income is a lot healthier nowadays, so rather than pay monthly interest I figured a new credit card and a balance transfer would be the way forward. At about the same time, a guy in the Post Office handed me a flyer advertising 9 months 0% interest on purchases, balance transfers, etc on a P.O. credit card. Sounded like a good deal so I applied – I assume I was accepted because they they sent me through the letter requesting all my ID and credit expert alerted me to a credit check on my account.

Now, the one bit of ID I was struggling with was a bank statement – I’m an online banker so I use paper-free billing – save the planet and all that, eh? But thankfully one of my accounts (I have 3) still sends statements every 6 months – its not my main account, but its a current account. And seeing as the letter I received asked for…

Current Account Bank Statements detailing a minimum of 1 months transactions and dated within the last 3 months.

…and the account statement I had was for a current account, I didn’t think it would be a problem.

But no. Or at least not according to the letter I received a week later, telling me that I had sent the wrong bank statement. I called them up and was informed that I need to send through a statement for my main current account – ie, the one my wages went into. OK I admit that in hindsight this makes perfect sense, but then the letter didn’t ask me for that specifically.

This is where it begun to get messy. I pointed out that my application would likely expire before I could get a bank statement ordered and sent in, and was advised I could print one off from my online banking…

Send it to us with a cover letter explaining you don’t get paper statements and it should be fine.

Wow, how cool is that? Except I’m not as naive as I used to be (thank the equally clueless Fitness First for that). So I hung up, waited a while, and called back to ask the same question. The person I spoke to then tells me:

No, you can’t just send it in – its needs to be stamped as verified, which you can do at any of the main Post Office branches.

So I hang up. 2 stories in 24 hours has killed all confidence I had in their ability to stick to a single story, so I ring a third time:

No, we only accept originals. We can’t accept printouts.

Sigh. Just….sigh.

So I decided to opt for the third response, seeing as it was the most strict and so most likely to be accepted, and so I ring and order a bank statement.

Annoyingly, my statement doesn’t arrive with the 10 days max they quoted me and a call to them confirms they have no record of my request. At least they didn’t charge me though, which was nice. I take the opportunity to phone Post Office again to confirm I’m not too late with my application, and I’m told:

No, it should be fine. Just send the documents in, I’ll make a note on your account.

As is now standard, I call them back and ask the same question:

Yes, we’ll still accept your ID. I can see a note on your account to say you’re sending them in.

The same answer twice in a row! Woo-f**king-hoo! So I ring to order another bank statement – and today, 5 days later, it arrived.

And that leads me to the friday just gone. They forgot to include the freepost envelope mentioned in the letter when they wrote to me, so I rung for the address. The girl paused for a second and tells me:

I can see you applied back in September. Its too late, we won’t be able to process your application you’ll have to wait 3 months to reapply.

I fed back to her what I’d been told by the previous customer service agents, and she said fine and that she’d just read through the notes.

Ahh, they will have said that we may still be able to accept your application. Its not definite.

Contradicting herself within a 20 seconds timeframe? That has to be some sort of record.

So now I’m done – I’ve had enough. I get off the phone, call back and ask to make a complaint. Ironically, if I’d spoken to the guy who made a note of my complaint in the first place I could have saved myself £5 on a bank statement and a lot of time. As I was listing the things I’d been told, his response to most of them begun with:

Ah, now I know thats not right, because…

You get the idea. Post Office customer services are f**king useless, blah blah. I know I’m starting to sound like a bit of a broken record but it seems every company I speak to gives me something to moan about. In all seriousness, I’m actually a hard guy to annoy – I mean, I still use Fitness First (!!) even after all the crap I went through with them – which reminds me, I have to write the final blog post in that series… :makes a note:.

So anyway, I’m just waiting on a response from whoever deals with the complaints. I don’t expect they’ll offer to process the application, but thats irrelevant because my line of thinking is: If they mess you around like that before you become a customer, what sort of nasty surprises do they have planned for you after you sign on the dotted line?

</rant>

Disclaimer: Quotes may not be 100% accurate to the letter as I’m recalling them from memory and these conversations span back 2 months, but if they’re not spot on then they’re pretty damn close.

To anyone joining the story at this point, this all relates to a couple of posts Ive written before now – one detailing how Fitness First illegally created a Direct Debit to my account without my knowledge, and the other talking about how after continued phone calls, Fitness First continued to deceive me – be it through lies or incompetence, who knows? Whoever trains the staff needs a serious slapping though.

Last month I rung in up to 8 times, many of which are detailed in the previous post. After posting that article, I rang in again at the end of August to check again whether they’d got the amount right. Again I was told £30.50, but was assured that the system does not update itself until the start of the month – meaning that either a) This man is a liar, or b) Every person I spoke to up to now is a liar/incompetent. Either way, I was told it would go through OK. I wasn’t particularly optimistic, so I rung ****, the call centre manager who rang me in the first instance after the Fitness First press office somehow caught wind of my original article (perhaps the fact that I now rank top 50 in a search for “Fitness First” on Google may have given it away). I got his answerphone, telling me he was off work until Tuesday 26th – (amusing, because I called on Wednesday 27th!) I left him a message, he didn’t call me back. Classy.

Which is why I’m not surprised that it’s now the 12th September and I still haven’t been charged for this months membership – even though I now have 2 Fitness First direct debit agreements showing on my online banking. How long before the letters/text messages start up again?

I’d like to point out that now, I’m done. I’m struggling to justify giving money to a company that couldn’t give it a shit about its customers. If you’ve read the entire story up to now, you may even be surprised to hear that I haven’t raised my voice once. I’ve worked in customer services in the past, and I know how depressing it is to be shouted at for things that aren’t your fault (but rather the fault of the company), so I’ve stayed respectful and tried at all times to sort things out amicably, rather than just venting my anger. And the recordings of calls they apparently make “for training purposes” will prove that!

So my plan is to quote Andy on his original offer. He said I could quit on the spot, and I said I was happy with Fitness First as a fitness club, and that if he could sort this, I would be happy to stay. 2 months on things clearly still aren’t sorted, so I guess that means the offer still stands, right?

So now its time to phone again. I get the feeling it could be a bit of a long one, so I’m posting this now so everything I’ve typed up to now isn’t lost in a sea of anger when I next get off the phone.

<sigh>

See also:

• Fitness First are liars, thieves and commit Direct Debit fraud
• The Fitness First debacle part II – apologies and refunds, but they still can’t get it right

So of course, I entertained the possibility this could be a bug. She had her confirmation email in front of her, with her randomly generated password, yet she was still unable to log in. I asked what error she was seeing:

It says I’m invalid. It won’t let me in.

Invalid? I hadn’t seen that error before. I asked her to try again, same response.

The passwords were generated on the fly in xxxx-xxxx99 format, emailed out, then MD5 encrypted so I couldn’t check to see if the password was wrong in the database. I checked to confirm she was looking at the right email and it seemed she was… even though she confused me by telling me it “says something about Leeds” (I still haven’t worked out what she meant).

She then went into a rant about the password, pointing out how confusing they are…

Its got a dash in it. The last guy kept asking if I had the right dash, I don’t know! Theres, like, so many different dashes.

Really? I would have thought seeing it printed in an email would give away what sort of dash we were looking for… not to mention the fact that there is, in fact, only one dash on a keyboard. And don’t even get me *started* on copy and paste…

So, after checking through some code for her error message (or any relevant error with the word “valid”) I was running short of ideas, and having tried generating her new password reminder emails with no luck I asked to read her email and password out to me. I try to login, and get the following error:

You are not yet verified.  Please check your email.

Ummmm. What? So I ask her – does it say something on your screen about not being verified?

Yeah, valid, verified, whatever

Whatever?? You sit there shouting the wrong error message at me for 20 minutes when its on the screen in front of you, and… whatever??? Frustrated wasn’t the word – I was more pissed about the fact that she’d wasted 20 minutes of my “bug fix” day on a non existent problem. Incidently, I left the office at around 10pm last night. Grrrrr.

Ahhh, maybe I’m just naive in thinking that when you’re using calling a low-cost phone number to call customer support for a website provided free of charge expecting technical support, the least you could do is make the effort to not waste my time!

But the real kicker is that while I was on the phone to her, I realised exactly why when you ring up a major company’s customer support line with a technical problem, they talk to you like an idiot and do everything they can to stop you speaking to someone technical. People like this are the reason why when I ring AOL I get filtered through 3 different departments before I get the guy who knows what TCP/IP is.

And… deep breath.

</rant>

If you’re a regular reader (hi mum! ) you’ll already know about the whole debacle whereby Fitness First thought it was perfectly acceptable to re-setup a Direct Debit I’d cancelled 3 months before. In which case you’ll probably remember I wasn’t best pleased… in fact, I thought it was pretty shitty.

Well it seems Fitness First agreed… I received a call from *** at their head office on the 4/8/2008 after a link to my post was forwarded to him by a member of their press office. The basic gist of this conversation was a number of apologies (which I appreciated was a nice gesture) and, more importantly, resolution! He agreed – no, he offered to “refund” me the £30 I was charged as a result of their actions, plus he offered me 2 months free… the month I missed while in dispute, plus this month. I’ll be honest – I was relatively happy. In fact that I hardly said anything during the conversation, I just listened and agreed. Maybe that was partly down to shock? Either way, all seemed good.

And so after clarification, I was told that the debt had been wiped and I would be able to go back to the club within the next hour, so I gave him the correct details to restart the direct debit. Even so, I decided to leave it a few days to give them a chance to not piss me off again.

Whats happened between then and now has been, ummm, comedy?

The next contact with Fitness Fitness was on the 6/8/2008 at 15:05 when I received a text message:

Dear Member, to avoid additional charges on your membership account, please call us on 08452710770 urgently.

<sigh>

I initially decided to ignore it as it was probably a mistake… surely. So I was a little confused when I got home and found 3 letters on my doorstep, all marked “Fitness First”. The gist of these letters is as follows:

#1. We are refunding you £30
#2. Confirmation of setting up a new direct debit
#3. We were unable to process your debit debit this month… please contact us immediately.

Seriously?

On top of that I notice the Direct Debit had been raised to £30.50 a month from the previous £29. OK, its not much, but after all this bullshit its come down to being a matter of principle.

So I rung Fitness First member services. Again. The girl I spoke to advised me that there was a note on my account that the debt would be wiped… BUT it was still showing as valid, so she assured me she was removing it there and then. Great. With respect to the Direct Debit, I wanted to know why the charge had been raised without any prior notice – after all, that’s what this has been all about all along – going behind my back and trying to pinch money out of my account without asking me if its OK. To my surprise she put me on hold, and came back to tell me she’d spoken to **** again (the guy I spoke to originally) who had told her that due to the issues I’d had, they were willing to reduce my membership back to £29.

I decided to be optimistic and take their word for it. Hopefully now, this would be over.

But no. On the 12th I receive another letter “reminding” me I’m still in arrears (with a couple of coupons to bring a friend with me for free – nice) and then 13/8/2008 I receive another text, essentially the same as the one they sent 8 days earlier. And so, i rung again.

Again, I’m assured the debt has been wiped. He also told me that the last letter had been generated on the 6th (even though the last one I received was dated the 8th) and todays text message must be a “crossover”. A 5 day crossover? For a fucking text message? I could have typed the message with my nose and it still would have taken less than 5 days. I also asked, since he was so sure that the debt had been cancelled, whether he would guarantee I wouldn’t receive any more texts/messages. He wouldn’t.

At this point, it stops being funny and turns into a “shake your head in disbelief” moment.

This friday gone (22/8/2008) I receive another letter, dated 13/8/2008, to confirm my direct debit has been set up – again. This particular line made me smile (emphasis mine):

Consequently, your monthly debited fee of £30.50 will recommence on the 01/09/2008

lol. So, the result of my phone call was that someone re-set up the direct debit… for the exact same amount. Then sent me a letter to rub it in!!

And now, to cap it all off, I have 2 Fitness First Direct Debits visible on my online banking.

So I rung Fitness First AGAIN. Turns out it is still showing as £30.50, but the notes on my account clearly say it should be £29. I asked him to get it sorted. 3 people have now promised me resolution and failed, lets see if the 4th has any luck.

I’m struggling for ideas now on how work through this incompetence and get it fixed. For the first time I’m actually considered quitting and just paying more to go to the Virgin gym up the road, simply because I don’t think they deserve my money anymore. Either way, unfortunately, they have my bank details so the best I can do is just keep an eye on my bank account and make sure they don’t take more than they’re supposed to.

So… its not over yet. Lets see what happens, eh?

See also:

• Fitness First are liars, thieves and commit Direct Debit fraud
• The Fitness First debacle part III – So now you *don’t* want my money?!

Around 3 months ago now I cancelled my Direct Debit to Fitness First – not because I was quitting, but because I was trying to phase out the bank account the debit was taken from. Once that was done, like a good boy, I rung them to let them know I had cancelled it and gave my reasons why, and they were fine with that. Great.

The next month I went in and paid over the counter. All was good.

Until about the 7th of this month, when I received a letter from my bank to inform me of a failed Direct Debit charge to my old account. WTF? I take a look, and the Fitness First DD has reappeared.

A quick call to my bank confirmed that the Direct Debit had been recreated, by none other than Fitness First. This, apparently, is perfectly fine as long as they inform me they’re going to do it. I received no such warning (of course I didn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t have let them use an account I knew would be empty, right?)

And so I ring Fitness First in Leeds. They can’t help me, I need to speak to head office. Great. I speak to head office, and I’m told the only people that would set up a direct debit is the club themselves… You can probably imagine how I’m starting to feel by now.

I ring fitness first, and get the same guy, who straight away tells me that the woman I need to speak to is on holiday for a week.

“You have no-one else there that can talk to me about Direct Debits?”, I ask.
“No, only ****** and she’s away till next week”, he replies.

What a way to run a business. Oh, but it gets better.

Next week I ring back, she’s ill. I ring back at the end of the week, she’s still ill. The next week I leave it for fear of being driven to insanity, and when I ring back on the friday, she’s gone for the day. Sigh.

Finally, the next monday I get hold of the elusive ****** – one of the most clueless, unhelpful muppets I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I explain whats happened and point out that due to their unlawful attempt to take money from me, I am now a £30 bank charge down. Her instant response?

“Banks can’t charge you”

A few seconds of silence followed while I tried to process this. “What do you mean?”

“Banks can’t charge you, it’s illegal”

Deflection, a great tactic. Take the blame away from yourself and pass it onto someone else. This may have worked, had I been an idiot.

“I think you’ll find” I responded, with possibly a hint of smugness in my voice, “The courts have decided that bank charges should be governed by contractual fairness rules, and now the office of fair trading are deciding whether or not charges are fair or not. Its not illegal, and regardless I don’t think you should be trying to palm the blame off for your mistake”.
(recited from memory so may not be a 100% accurate quote – although ironically, I’d been reading up on the bank charges court case just a couple of nights before )

The next 15 minutes of conversation were a blur. The conversation went back and forth, with me pointing out as a result of her actions Fitness First had broken the law and that I should be compensated for my loss, and her saying she couldn’t “refund” me because they hadn’t actually taken anything. It escaped her (about 10 times) that I wasn’t asking for a refund, I was asking for 1-2 months free membership to cover the cost of the bank charge, the multiple phone calls and the trip to the bank to get it all sorted.

Needless to say, the call ended with her offering me nothing. It did sound hopeful briefly when she went to speak to her manager, but she came back to tell me they weren’t going to give me anything (in as many words).

And so I ended the call. I called the head office back, hoping that someone there would be intelligent enough to realise that they were about to lose a £30 a month paying customer for the sake of their blatent idiocy.

But no, unfortunately the people there were no better. I was offered a Fitness First “freeze” discount – which meant I would get next months membership for £8 – providing I paid up the month I’d missed. But lets be honest, what sort of offer is that?

And now its got to my final effort. I’m trying to arrange to see the manager of the club to see if she has the gall to try and justify Fitness Firsts actions with me face to face. But unfortunately, after leaving several messages with the front desk she still hasn’t called me back.

And so there you have it, Fitness First in Leeds are liars. They commit Direct Debit fraud and refuse to accept responsibility, and when you catch them with their fingers in the cookie jar they’ll try and palm off the blame. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll repeat the same bullshit until you’re too angry to continue the call. And if you do have the patience to continue the call? They bring out the big guns – they basically tell you to f*ck off. A little harsh, but technically true. I’d like to think this was a one-off, but the crap she was feeding me almost seemed a little too scripted.

So if you’re a member of Fitness First and you decide to cancel your Direct Debit, keep a close eye on your bank account. You may end up getting a nasty surprise a few months later.

See also:

• The Fitness First debacle part II – apologies and refunds, but they still can’t get it right
• The Fitness First debacle part III – So now you *don’t* want my money?!

I use Thundbird at work – I’m on ubuntu so it was an inevitability. But my home PCs have always been dominated by MS Office, so Outlook was always the client of choice. But now, with the damn thing losing IMAP connections constantly, taking about a minute and a half to check 5 mailboxes, and freezing all-the-damn-time… nah, its not worth it, for the sake of my sanity I’ll move to Thunderbird.

The only problem now is to decide get myself a new calendar, task manger, contact manager, notes system, and find something to sync my Nokia contacts with. <sigh>

Oh yeah, and work out why Windows Explorer keeps breaking and restarting itself every 20 or so minutes.

Microsoft, what did I ever do to you?

I love Glastonbury cinema. After the musics done and its wind-down time, sometimes its perfect to go and crash in front of a film on a huge outdoor screen and drink another 3 litres of pear cider.

And so, post 1 of 2 regarding Glastonbury line-ups – the cinema listings!

A few good ones this year. Not quite as excited about the lineup as I was last year, but the news of them replacing their 35mm projectors with new HD projectors showing films on HDDVD and Blu-ray is very welcome. The only problem I had in the past was how grainy the picture looked from a distance, hopefully this will be an improvement!

Also, the Bourne series should be pretty good on the big screen. I’ll see if I’m coherent enough to stagger up there to see any of them!

Last year, I also released a spreadsheet version of the lineups which proved to be popular, so I’ve thrown together another one this year – you can download the Glastonbury 2008 Lineup spreadsheet here, with full listings for all the major music stages and cinema fields.

And so, arranged into alphabetical order, here are the cinema listings…

(official listings are here – hat tip to glastonburyfestivals.co.uk)

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/justice/article841077.ece

Things like this are what can make a person disappointed in Britain. If this is true (assuming this isn’t bullshit made up by their editorial team – it wouldn’t be the first time), then the implication is that 99 out of every 100 sun readers think the death penalty should be a viable option when sentencing for certain types of crimes. I don’t know whats worse, the people that picked up their phone and spent money to vote that human beings should be institutionally murdered or the Sun for validating this “news” by printing it.

What sort of logic dictates that to punish someone for taking a life, you should take their life?!?!? Dear GOD am I the only person who sees the hypocrisy in that?!? (well, me and 610000 other people in Britain according the Suns stats… )

If you want more info on how much of a joke the Sun are, buy todays paper and marvel at how they’ve stretched this sensationalist bullshit over 5 PAGES.

The truly unbelievable part is the wealth of “experts” they wheel out to quote. All families of victims of murders – except Mark Wright, son of Steve Wright, who was apparently “abandoned” at 2 years old – all, arguably, making a judgement based on emotion rather than logic. Does the Sun see this as acceptable behaviour? I can’t help but think that contacting the relatives of a murder victim for a quote is a little on the sick side.

Incidently, I used to read the sun when I lived with my parents. The last time I ever took it seriously was before the Beckham-Loos “scandal”, where they dedicated pages 2-11 to it. Yep, 9 whole pages.

The Sun – its rags like you that make me glad “old media” is dying. Harsh, but true.

p.s. Sorry for the rant

Looking around on the web it looks like they’ve had a few problems recently with traffic spikes – a high profile case being during the MacWorld keynote speech, leaving god knows how many people in the lurch. That was a couple of weeks ago – is this an ongoing issue?

Twitter was built using the Ruby on Rails framework – something I looked at about a year ago wondering if its something I should spend some time learning. Brilliant for knocking out web apps quickly, but – as it appears – awful for scalability. One example is the fact that its only designed to allow connection to a single database per Rails installation. And if what I read about Twitter getting up to 11,000 requests per second is true, its no wonder they’re struggling. (that link is to a comment on an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, which has since been deleted from his blog…). The common solution for fixing speed problems is “throw more servers at it”.

They must forsee these problems happening – wheres their contingency plan? And with Pownce coming out of Beta and Jaiku being bought by Google, how much longer are people going to be willing to put up with such a poor delivery of service?