Category: Rants

Posts where I’m ranting about someone or something

Things to do when you are unemployed

Well I’m still sort of offically employed : my last pay cheque arrives this Friday but I’m laid off.

So I’ve been using an old Toshiba Satellite SA30 laptop running Ubuntu and its OK but its only a 640*480 display and it was getting a bit unreliable. You know when the disk drive starting making twanging noises that its not a good sign.

So I went and bought a new Toshiba Satellite : a L300D-13S. Very nice, 3GB RAM 150GB HD, widescreen, AMD Turion X2.

All well and good but it comes with Vista Home Premium. What a pile of crap.

How can something like that take so long to boot up for Gods Sake. It takes forever to get to the password screen. It drove me mad, and dont even try to work out why applying system patches is rather like watching paint dry underwater.

So I decided to dual boot it with Ubuntu which at least uses the 64bit extensions rather than the 32bit Vista.

So I got that working after fighting with the partitioner and everything was fine. Until I booted back into Vista when the Wireless card didn’t work. Couldn’t get it working so I guessed I’d somehow screwed things up. Rebuilt it using the recovery DVDs which I’d made. Wireless came back for a bit then stopped again.

So I go round and round in circles. Ubuntu works fine on the Wireless. Vista works once then craps out on me each time.

So I dig round and what do I find. Its nothing I’ve done wrong. Its Vista being a total pile of shite.

I used WEP encryption with a 128 bit key on the home wireless. OK I know its crap but its better than nothing and the old 11b PCMCIA card in the SA30 didn’t like WPA.

Of course some moron at Microsoft screwed the WEP encryption on Vista and it looks like it just doesn’t work with 128 bit keys and truncates them at 64 bits. I did seem some advice that says “Upgrade to a Vista compatible wireless router”. I’m sorry? I end up buying a machine with an O/S that I have no choice over and now I’m told to upgrade my router to something that works with Vista because someone somewhere didn’t code something properly.

So I switch everything over to WPA and accept that I’ll have to use a cable to connect the old SA30 to get stuff off it.

Everything is fine until I really push the new laptop which then gets DNS failures and the only fix seems to be to restart the Wireless Access Point. So I drop back to WEP and it seems to be OK but of course Vista wont play. Then I manage to get the same problems under WEP. So I do some digging round and find that my new laptop is running IPV6 which seems to cause problems with the router.

So I turn off IPV6 on Ubuntu and its OK now so tomorrow I’ll put everything back on WPA and see if it goes wrong again.

OK so the Ubuntu stuff is not good – quite why it comes with IPV6 turned on by default I do not know but I’m sure it will be fixed soon. The router is old and I guess it can be excused not working very well. What is totally wrong is the fact that Microsoft can’t cope with WEP using 128 bit keys on Vista. OK I know WEP is broken  but that is NOT the point. WEP is a standard and once again Microsoft have decided that that they know better.

When Endowments go wrong

Back in 1993 I bought a flat in Cheltenham, a nice flat it was too. OK when I bought it it didn’t actually exist and was just a muddy swamp but I saw it being built. I stood in it when it was an empty shell with no internal walls and over the weeks I saw it grow from mud into a nice first floor one bedroom flat.

It cost £39,377 a tidy little sum in those days. I took out a mortgage with Barclays and the financial advisor “sold” me an Endowment policy to repay the mortgage. The premium was £51.56 a month and I was assured that this would pay my mortage off. All seemed well for the first few years, the first progress report showed that it was doing so well it would actually exceed the £39,377 I needed.

But then, like the wayward child who stops doing well at school and ends up staying out all night drinking, my policy went off the rails. A small excess turned into a small deficit, which turned into a bigger deficit.

By July 25th 2008 with 10 years left to run and having given them £9280.80 my policy had a value of £10,967.91

So I’ve paid them £9280.80 in installments and they have turned this into 10976.61 which means the wonderful people at Legal General, those people who know the stock market have increased my investments by 1687.11 in 15 years.

Over the course of 25 years I would have paid them £15,468 and the last estimate my Endowent could “at worst performance” figures produce a return somewhere between £14-15K.

So I’ve cashed it in today. I’ll take the money and stop pouring money down a hole. I would have been better off just putting £51.56 in a bank account every month for the past 15 years.

Someone, somewhere hates us

Early Friday morning (about 01:55) our car alarm went off.

I went down stairs and found that the windscreen had three holes in it. I deactivated the alarm and went and phoned the police and gave them all the details.

Got up in the morning and got a new windscreen booked for today.

Also booked a hire car because we were supposed to be going to Wigan for my parents Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Found that there is also a hole in the roof. The psychopath who smashed the windscreen also rammed a screwdriver or similar pointed object through the roof.

So I phoned the police and updated and did sort of say that as I’d phoned 999 in the middle of the night (which is what the police had told me to do) I was a bit surprised that no-one had been to see me yet.

Police came round and talked to the neighbours and one of them heard our alarm go off, heard a car door slam and saw a white car leaving the estate at speed.

So the scum who are targetting our car aren’t even locals.

Police want to know if we’ve upset someone. We haven’t as far as we know but as the previous residents of this house are still telling places like Morrisons Supermarkets that they live here when they are stealing petrol from them it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve told someone they owe money to that they live here and we’re being picked on. So if you’ve got a grudge against a member of the Green Family who run pubs.. THEY DO NOT LIVE IN MY HOUSE AND THEY DO NOT DRIVE A SAAB 93.

Of course my insurance company are being total bastards. Tesco say that the two events although they are obviously linked are totally separate and so that is TWO claims. Each claim has a £300 excess on it and will wipe out 2 years of my no claims.  Taken separately they probably wouldn’t count as enough to write off the vehicle but together they would.

So come February I’m moving away from Tesco car insurance because they’ve frankly taken the piss with my car insurance once too often.

Oh No. Not again!

Those were the thoughts of the bowl of petunias in The HitchHikers Guide to Galaxy when it suddenly came into existance miles above Magrathea.

Oh No. Not Again was what my wife and I said when we came out of the house this morning to find that someone had vandalised the 93.

Not the windscreen this time.  Much more damage than that. They’ve taken a screwdriver to it by the looks of things.

The whole passenger side is damaged. A big deep scratch following the line of the front wheel arch, several scratches on both doors and a large scratch and a deep gouge on the rear wing. They’ve even taken the screw driver to the passenger door window and scratched that deeply and its special heat reflecting glass. As the car is metallic silver its not something I can patch up so someone will be picking up a very large bill, and knowing my insurance company who seem to find any excuse they can for not paying out for anything (I’m sorry – the sun came up this morning so we can’t pay out) it will be me picking it up.

The police will be coming round this evening to look at it but have already admitted that “There is nothing they can do to stop this happening again”. Well there is – they could actually start treating the scrotes round here as criminals rather than giving them a little slap on the wrists and saying “Don’t do that again”

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part 3

Well they processed the refund sometime in the past couple of weeks. It appeared on the Credit Card statement we got the other day.

I still have heard nothing from them, not a sausage, not a peep, not a word. OK so they processed the refund : its only take them 5 months. I guess actually expecting the lazy tossers to actually contact me and tell me they were doing it is too much to ask. As for apologising to me for being fucking incompetent and saying they are sorry….. ha ha ha.

Not the sort of Customer Service an Airline should have – makes them look like a bunch of cowboys!

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part Two

Early in June after battering my head against the wall over the fiasco with United Airlines and their inability to refund money they took from us I found that their refunds department now had an email address rather than a fax number( which they didn’t want to let people have). You CANNOT phone the refunds department… oh no, that would be too easy. So I sent them an email explaining everything and giving details so that they could process the refund properly and give us our sodding money back.

They never replied, hell they never even acknowledged that they had received the email.

So I sat and waited.

It’s now July 10th and they haven’t done a thing.

I notice that their refunds department now no longer has an email address on the website. So they now CANNOT be contacted by any other way than snail mail. I think this says a lot about them – their refunds department is not contactable easily or in any dynamic way at all.

So I’ve now written a long letter to their Customer Services department. Not that I expect them to do anything.

Next step is the president of the company : Glenn F. Tilton. I bet he doesn’t have an email address either, or maybe I should try Graham W. Atkinson who is “Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer”

United Airlines have basically committed fraud against us – they have stolen money from us and refuse to return it.

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies

I’m not in a happy mood at all.

At about 6am on Thursday February 28th we got a telephone call from Kathy’s sister telling us that her dad had died unexpectedly.

It was obvious that Kathy, at least, needed to get back to Maine as soon as possible.

To try to make things as easy as we could we wanted a flight that took her directly to Portland, Maine, rather than leaving her at Boston and having to take the Concord Trailways bus.

United Airlines seemed to do this so we decided to book with them. Rather than use the internet Kathy phoned them. United then took lots of details, such as her fathers full name, the funeral home he had been taken to and the name of the director of the funeral home. We assumed that this meant she would get some decent treatment from United or a decent air fair.

How wrong we were. The ticket was £499 (more than it was if we’d bought it on line).

We should have realised then, as previous experience of United had shown, that it was all down hill from there.

They promised us the E-ticket would be in the email soon. Nope.. after hassling them several times it actually turned up at 2pm on Friday 29th

So Saturday morning we drive over to Heathrow. We get there and United say they need the credit card that was used to buy the ticket (i.e. MY credit card) to confirm the ticket. So Kathy gives it to them.

She goes through security and I go home.

By the time I get home which is 5 minutes after the plane has taken off the United Airlines website shows that it will be landing 30 minutes late in Washington due to “operational reasons” at Dulles. On the plane they tell Kathy that it will all be fine. A couple hours out from Washington they admit they will be late but it is OK as the connecting flight to Portland is also delayed

So Kathy gets off at Washington and gets through immigration and customs and makes it to the gate to find the flight has closed and she cannot get on.

So she has to try to get on the next flight. Which she manages to do.

That flight is then delayed.

She arrives at her parents’  in Augusta at 03:30am EST –  a mere 26 hours after leaving Cheltenham.

So we think the crap has ended there.

No…

Mid March we get our credit card bill:

4 March : United Air US Ticket Mailed 15.00 US Dollars 29 Feb
4 March : United Air US E-TKT 871.42 US Dollars 29 Feb
5 March : United Air UK Heathrow 499.30 29 Feb

Only the 3rd transaction is the ticket we got emailed to us. The other two are phantom transactions invented by United Airlines. I mean who the hell would buy a ticket on 28/29th Feb for a flight on March 1st and ask for it to be posted – and how the hell do you post an E-Ticket?

So I phone them. They try to blame it on us booking on line. I explain that we phoned them so its all down to them. They agree a refund.

We keep an eye on the credit card… no refund comes through. They usually come through in a few days.

I phone them on Monday and I’m assured that they did process it on March 22nd but it could take “two billing cycles to come through”.

Wednesday evening it appears on our credit card.. a refund from United Airlines – for £218.30 . Now I knew the dollar was weak but how the hell can $886.42 turn into £218.30.

So yesterday I phone them … you just phone their customer line and ignore all the push button options until you fall off the end. I’m told that they cannot do anything that I need to contact the refund department. I loose it – I explain the whole situation that the fault is ENTIRELY United Airlines as they did everything and that frankly the way my wife and I have been treated by United in this whole farce is enough to put us off ever flying with them again. After about 20 minutes they tell me that they’ve pushed it forward to their refunds department and to phone back tomorrow for an update.

So this morning I phone and get someone who says they can’t see anything on their systems. Eventually they do and say “its gone to the refunds department” and to phone back “the end of next week”.

Is this really the sort of treatment you should expect from a company like United. They have basically ripped us off and kept nearly $900 of OUR money for in excess of a month and they don’t seem to want to give it back.

Fly United : fly the friendly Skies.

I don’t fucking think so.

Cheltenham – not a nice place to live

Got up this morning and found the 93 has been vandalised again

So in the past 8 months:

93 – smashed windscreen
93 – dents in the roof from some scrote running over it
95 – smashed windscreen
93 – smashed windscreen (and this time they left the rock behind in my front garden)

Cars parked on the road, only third party, no windscreen cover (thanks a bunch Tesco for lying to me)

£400-500 per windscreen.

So that £1500 paid out in the past 8 months to repair damage that the police show little interest in.

I report it- they want to know if I’m White English. I ask them is it going to make a difference to how they investigate it?

I think I manage to persuade them that as no other vehicle has been damaged its targetted against me or my cars or my wife.

Don’t expect the police to do anything  – they’ve no teeth any more and the scum who do this sort of thing aren’t afraid of them.

Can’t afford to repair the cars so will have to get rid of them and buy something cheap and nasty that I can do fully comp insurance on and if that car gets worked over then I’m going to be raising hell

Differing levels of Vandalism

A week after I phoned to police to tell them that our 95 had been vandalised I get a letter through the post from Gloucesteshire Police.

Its depressing reading – says so much about what our police force has become:

————

Offence : Criminal Damage to property valued under £5000 – vehicle
Date Reported : 03/12/2007
..
..
..
The offence you reported has been recorded within our computerised crime reporting system…..

To date our investigations have failed to identify the offender. Nevertheless we shall continue to review the matter.

————

So its been logged on their computer – wonderful. Did it really take them a week to do that? Actually No. It took them 2 days to log in into the computer (or print the letter) as the letter is dated 05/12. Then they posted it – two days AFTER they had printed it, and it arrived on the 10th (they did at least not waste money sending it out first class!)

So how do we interpret “Criminal Damage to Property valued under £5000”. Does it mean the property is worth less than £5000, does it mean that they did less than £5000 worth of damage?

Its sodding vandalism – my personal property has been vandalised. But apparently the severity of the crime is linked to some odd concept of commercial value. Would it be more of a crime if my car was a £350,000 Ascari and they’d smashed the windscreen, or it would it be more of a crime if they’d mashed the mirrors and slashed the tyres on the 93 at the same time.

Its my car – its how I get to work, its how I go shopping. But to the police it is simply an item of monetary worth.

As for the “we have failed to identify the offender” well, to use an american phrase: no shit sherlock. It happened on a quietish side road, where we hardly ever see policemen. The scrotes from Whaddon roam round the neighbourhood causing trouble all over the place. The police do nothing and then the sodding council gives Whaddon a million pound community centre which I’m sure they’ll torch to the ground soon.

Still the police have more important things to do than chase criminals – its learning Polish All this from the police force whose Chief Constable – Dr Brain (just got to love that name!!) says will have to cut services as they are short of money in next years budget

Oh well

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Now playing: Bif Naked – Nothing Else Matters
via FoxyTunes

Why Do People…

vandalise other peoples property?

Heading out today after the frost had cleared I noticed that the windscreen on my Saab 95 Estate has been smashed. It was OK when I parked it at 6:20 on Friday evening but I didn’t use it over the weekend and the weather was so bad I didn’t notice it as I was dashing in and out to my other car over the weekend.

Some low-life has wacked the windscreen right in the middle of the drivers side – windscreen is broken beyond repair so I’ve got to get it replaced.

This is the second time that I’ve had a window smashed in recent months. The previous time it was my other Saab (a 93) which was wacked on the passenger side.

The cars are usually parked on opposite side of the road and in both cases the vandalism has been on the road side of the vehicle – so I guess they just drive (or cycle) down the road and smash windscreens as they go.

The police have been informed but what can they do – the yobs in Cheltenham seem free to roam around doing what they like and the police seem incapable of stopping them.

So that’s another expense I didn’t really want – especially coming up to Christmas.

So thanks a bunch who ever did this. Serves me right for living near the cess pit that is Whaddon I guess