Your call is not important to us...
We’re delighted so many of you have found innovative ways to get rid of irritating telephone salespeople.
Rob Vaudin at Itex was called by a telephone service provider asking if he wanted to switch.
“I very carefully stated to the person at the call centre that I didn’t have any phones in the building. This caused a silence at their end.” And, more important, no follow-up calls.
Martin Kent prefers to say: “just a minute”, as if he is transferring the call, then switches the call to mute. “Come back to the call after a cup of coffee and mutter: ‘is there someone there?’”
He also suggests that embellishments are possible, such as “just a minute, there’s someone at the door” or “the sprinklers have gone off”.
Any more suggestions, please mail them in.
... and neither is your email
On the subject of unhelpful companies (travel section), Daren Pickering at LJCreate has discovered that Virgin Holidays is staking a claim to be market leader.
After he booked a holiday with them, Virgin sent Daren a confirmation email. “If you’d like to add anything further to your booking… you can email us at reservation.services@virginholidays.co.uk,” it said.
Daren took them up on the invitation, only to get the reply: “Experience has shown us that trying to advise on holiday arrangements by email is not the most efficient service for you, our customers, which is why we will not be responding to emails.”
It offers him an 0871 number instead, because you, their customers, are obviously too important to pay anything less than national rate at any time of the day.
Be my guess
Raj Patel at Control Equipment has some information as to why the Add/Remove Programs dialogue box provides such wildly inaccurate information as to which programs are “frequently” or “rarely” used.
Or rather this developer blog link http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/09/178342.aspx that Raj provided us with does – it seems that the lack of information that Windows keeps about which programs are installed means that Windows has to guess.
As the blog says: “The guess that Add/Remove Programs ends up making can often be ridiculously wide of the mark due to coincidental word matches… Yes, this is all lame, but when you are forced to operate with inadequate information, lame is the best you can do.”
“It makes you wonder what other components of Windows actually use the ‘finger in the air’ approach. Can we trust the Disk
Cleanup application, or Disk Defrag?” Raj asks.
Long and winding road to call costs
We may have inadvertently given you the impression that BT doesn’t make it as easy as it could to discover the call rate for a call from the UK to the US. Some of you might have suspected this was a deliberate tactic.
But we hear from regular correspondent John Loader, whose search for such information inspired this thread, that BT has now provided him with a simple internet link if he wants to look up the cost of a call – so obviously we shouldn’t be so cynical.
If you want to take advantage of BT’s laudable commitment to transparency, all you need to do is type this simple (?) URL:
http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=15718&s_cid=con_FURL_personal/pricing/international&com.bea.event.type=linkclick&oLName=link.searchresults&oLDesc=personalpricinginternational
...and you too can see exactly how much cheaper international calls are when you use Skype.
Error messages
In this week’s blatant pitch for publicity, online recruiter fish4jobs analysed 500,000 CVs to look for common mistakes and then tell us about them.
If you’re unemployed, this may not seem a terribly constructive use of time for an online recruitment site, but at least those of you who supplied your CVs to fish4jobs know that for once someone has actually bothered to read them.
Among the mistakes: email addresses with names such as “bigboy” or “hotstuff”, people who work in a “busty office” or want to work in “pubic relations”, and a few candidates who even managed to spell their own names incorrectly.
Any of you who have made (or witnessed) similar mistakes, do share them with us.
The sun sets on proper language
It is never too late to bring you the Office Angels’ survey on office jargon, and the latest “essential office buzzwords” that hopefully you will not be hearing in 2008.
Alongside “thought grenade” and “let’s sunset that”, we have “information touchpoint” as a replacement word for a meeting, and “little ‘r’ me” meaning “reply to my email”.
Beside the startling idea that a recruitment company finds any of this rubbish essential, we are curious to find anyone who works in
a place where thought grenades are genuinely lobbed, ideas are sunsetted, and you really have to attend information touchpoints – especially if the person saying the words frames them in air quotes.
Let us know – or, as one of the buzzwords-to-avoid puts it: “Open the kimono”.
Secret service
Richard Moran was signing up to an online storage service called Livedrive and, in a flash of madness, decided to read the terms and conditions.
However, he was saved this tedious job when he clicked on the page link at www.livedrive.com to find that: “You are not authorised to view this page.”
“The terms and conditions must be strict if you need special authorisation to view them,” he says. “I am concerned that when I come to recover my files I won’t be ‘authorised’ to do so.”
Sheer magnetism
Keep your “out of office” ideas coming in. Andrew Jones at Mainline Digital Communications suggests: “Thank you for your message, your credit card has been charged £5.99 for the first 60 words and £0.45 for each word thereafter. We will contact you once your payment has cleared.”
John Foggitt at SPSL suggests: “I am out of the office and the email server is offline so any messages will be dealt with by the refrigerator. They will be stuck to the side by a strawberry-shaped magnet and will be dealt with when they fall off because the magnet is temporarily removed to attach a new message.”
True words and jests, etc – this would probably accurately reflect the policy of most large companies for dealing with incoming email. More please.
Dead clever
On a similar but unrelated subject, David Evans at ABBYY Ltd adds his favourite technique for terminating an unwanted sales call.
“Say: ‘I’m sorry, he’s not here. May I ask: were you a close personal friend of his?’ When said in slightly hushed tones and with dignity, I think it sets the bar for any further communication at a fairly impressive height.”
If anyone else has a proven technique for messing with telephone salespeople, let us know.
Hanging on the telephone
John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services has, after last week’s adventure trying to find the cost of a call to the US, had an answer from BT as to how you find it.
Courtesy of the chairman’s office at BT, this is how to find the price:
“Once logged on to BT.com, Click on At Home, Click on Products & Services, Click on Compare Call Plans (Listed under the Icon Phone), Click on Pricing. To the right of pricing is a PDF for residential call prices. Open the PDF, pages 9-13 of 28 give the international charge bands (left-hand column). Page 19 of 28 gives Chargeband and International Call Prices for non BT Together customers.”
“If you log on to your telephone provider’s web site, which is also an international IT development and management company, how many clicks should it take to find out a simple price?” he asks.
“What is wrong with a search box where I can input: ‘how much will it cost to call the US’?”
No point going off half-cocked
It seems the British police have not been reading Backbytes: after last week’s story on Geoffrey Fryatt, who spent three hours threatening to blow up “half of Brisbane” using his TV remote control, armed police in Stoke confronted mechanic Darren Nixon outside his house – having tailed him as he rode home on the bus.
He was handcuffed, DNA tested and fingerprinted because a member of the public had seen him changing tracks on his MP3 player, and decided it was a gun.
Initially Darren did not respond to the police challenge because he had his earphones in. So be careful when carrying hi-tech devices. You have been warned.
Grandad: what did you do in the war?
“My grandfather, Harry Lamin, could take part in the competition for ‘oldest blogger’ that you are about to start,” writes Bill Lamin from Pool Business and Enterprise College. “He has just registered his millionth page load.”
In our experience bloggers are often a bit barmy, so they are good entertainment. But Bill has fixed the competition, so you’ll have a hard time getting the better of Harry and his blog at wwar1.blogspot.com.
The blog publishes letters, 90 years to the day, after Harry sent them from the World War One trenches. And as Harry was born in 1887, it looks like we will have to compile a top five.
We would like to hear from any other senior bloggers, and we promise we won’t call you barmy – unless you are.
Parallel worlds
At the end of January we asked the important question: “Is there a comparison site for all the price comparison sites?” You guessed it.
“The answer is ‘yes’,” says Bob Grahame. “The Money Saving Expert web site regularly compares various types of price comparison sites.”
So, if you want to compare sites such as Reestit Mutton’s Bargain Basement and Fixture Ferrets, search on the site for “shopbots”.
Bad connection
And so to Buy As You View Limited, where there is an infrastructure crisis.
The helpdesk has recently received a heartfelt plea for assistance: “We do not have enough network connections in our office as you are probably aware and one of the girls was using one of these cables. However, over the weekend this has been removed from the PC and therefore it is unable to connect to the network,” said the emailer, who we will refer to only as “Jaclyn”, so her workmates know who she is.
“Obviously, being a very customer-focused team, we immediately sent one of our members to dig one out from our stores,” says Bleddyn Dudley-Burton, who received the request.
They might have had a hard time locating it – Jaclyn was asking for “a wireless network cable”. Luckily the story has a happy ending.
“It turns out they were on the same shelf as the tins of tartan paint, the glass hammers and the skirting board ladders,” he says.
Out-of-office is well out of order
One of our anonymous readers has forwarded a list of out-of-office replies, which may or may not be urban myths.
His – and our – favourite was: “The email server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again,” with the corresponding multiple attempts to reboot and email.
It has inspired in us a desire to raise the humour standard of the average out-of-office message. Any suggestions for an out-of-office that will get the message across but not get you fired? It would be even better if your example has been road-tested in real life.
Airline security takes a dive
“Unfortunately our systems are not responding,” says British Airways’ web site to our reader Ken Richards, in one of those messages that says so much more than it intends. “We are unable to process your request at the moment.”
Frustrated, he experimented by logging on to ba.com using Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox at the same time. As he predicted, BA’s systems were permanently unavailable to Ken when he used Firefox and permanently available to him with IE.
“Curious that you have to use a less secure browser to book tickets online with BA,” he says.
Out of control
If BA decides it approves your choice of browser and lets you book tickets on its web site, don’t fly to Brisbane – where the heat is obviously having an effect on one resident.
Last week Geoffrey Fryatt was arrested by paramilitary police after spending three hours threatening to blow up “half of Brisbane” using a small electrical device that he was holding in his hand.
When he was sentenced to a year’s probation, he complained that it would interfere with his plans to do voluntary work overseas.
Although the developing world might have many problems, Geoffrey obviously has some of his own – the hi-tech widget that was about to devastate his city turned out to be his TV remote control.
Pense-wise, they are pense foolish
In the old days, policemen were all six feet tall, children played football in the street, and BT employees knew how to spell.
Our regular correspondent John Loader emailed BT to ask how expensive it was to call the US, because he had trouble finding the call rates on the web site.
The reply: “On landline telephone the call charges are: Day time: 15 pense per minute and call set up fee which is 6 pense. Evenings and weekends: 10 pense per minute and call set-up fee which is 6 pense.”
On the other hand it’s not all bad, John. In the old days they might have spelled your reply correctly, but you’d have been a bit more than a quid poorer after a 10-minute call to the States. That’s the price of progress.
Spa-ing partners
Rob Hall at Northallerton College noticed the advertisement in last week’s Computing for a product called “The Climate”.
In it Steve relaxes with a brunette, a blonde and a bottle of champagne in a hot tub, having protected his server room “releasing heat energy into free space and being an environmental nightmare”, whereas Wally “is sharing resources with the dog in a small, easily heated bathroom, has a pile of beer cans ready for recycling and is drying his clothes at the same time – far more environmentally aware”.
See, your cubicle doesn’t seem that bad after all.
“Wally even has his own low-budget and environmentally friendly version of a bubble spa because of his dog,” Rob adds, rather too vividly.
Beware of the Viking invasion
On occasions we have pointed our stern finger at those who send too much direct mail. But how much is too much?
Don’t ask Richard Hallas’s father Geoffrey (below), the man who orders the paper on which the local church magazine is printed.
“During 2006, he noticed the quantity of Viking catalogues dropping through the door seemed to be on the increase, so decided to keep track of all the ones that arrived in the whole of 2007,” Richard says.
The answer: 63 catalogues, “including no fewer than 10 copies of the extra-thick quarterly full catalogue.” With 10 quarters, it must have been a long year at Viking.
“A millennium ago, the Vikings besieged us with longboats and spears. Today, the machines of war appear to be a sea of colour-printed catalogues,” says Richard, rather melodramatically, but we understand.
Can anyone beat 63 Viking catalogues? And can anyone at Viking tell us how many catalogues you send every year and – more importantly – how do we get you to stop?
Dire log
Several of you have investigated your add/remove programs dialogue box to see which applications are used “rarely”, which are used “frequently”, and when they were last used – because no one we ask has the faintest idea.
The results are, to put it mildly, inconclusive. Less charitable people than us would suggest that Windows appears to be making it up as it goes along.
“Investigation of the software list on my work PC shows that I have not run an application since 3 December 2007 (and that was a media player), and the only two programs used ‘frequently’ are an image editor and Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D,” says Michael Raven at East Riding of Yorkshire Council.
“Perhaps there is a patch to Windows that would show work-related programs as being frequently used?”
Paul Moorby at Chipside has a copy of Battlefield 2: Deluxe Edition which was apparently last played in 2070, which looks like the PC has got mixed up between what’s happening inside the game and in real life.
We hope Paul hasn’t suffered the same problem.
An orfol eyeful
David Cartwright at Korana Technology informs us of his own “IT hell house” story from his time at the University of East Anglia.
“One of the halls of residence was called Norfolk Terrace. The ‘N’ and the ‘k’ magically disappeared one day.” You crazy students!
