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2005-12-05, late at night
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Tagged:
The blogroll has temporarily disappeared from my site’s sidebar. This is due to some apparent up-cockery at blo.gs: the main page gives a singularly unhelpful “sorry, but the blo.gs service is temporarily unavailable. please try again later.” message. The actual blogrolling feature, however, kicks out some random feeds which I don’t know and wouldn’t necessarily want to have linked on my blog (screenie).
This is a clear violation of the Samurai Principle of “return victorious or not at all”: a corollary of this would be “when someone requests their blogroll, never return them an apparently random list of links”.
Does anyone have any suggestions for alternative services which could provide my blog with blogrolling functionality? Alternatively, I may just have to locate a handy Yahoo! employee and kick them until it gets fixed…
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2005-11-28, late at night
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Tagged:
In my previous post, I said that I may make the occasional post before then should something particularly interesting crop up
. Well, something interesting has cropped up. A word of warning: while I will try to control myself, this post may contain words unsuitable for pregnant women or those of a nervous disposition.
I received a letter this morning from a company named Moorcroft Debt Recovery Limited informing me that I owed O2 the princely sum of £14.62 and that, if necessary, they intended to commence litigation to get it back. This is never a letter one wishes to receive, especially before one has had breakfast, and especially given the numerous unpleasant experiences one has had with O2 in the past.
Such a letter was also rather confusing since, to my knowledge, all my contracts with O2 have been based on a direct debit scheme, so any money owed should have been taken directly from my bank account. O2 had also not got in touch with me about this before, which would seem the sensible course of action.
After phoning O2’s customer support helpline (being transferred in the process between three departments and having to give my details and a description of the problem three times) it turns out that the final payment from my previous contract didn’t go through due to the direct debit ending. A slightly annoying technical glitch, but fair enough. What isn’t fair enough is that O2, despite having my name, e-mail address, home phone number, mobile phone number and home address, somehow didn’t bother to get in touch with me about this and instead proceeded directly to the “get your friendly neighbourhood debt collectors to threaten litigation” stage. This implies either extreme incompetence or a policy of treating one’s customers like shit. Neither would surprise me; neither is acceptable.
Were I a bad debtor, this might have proven an effective method of O2 getting their money back. As it is, it has proven an effective method of O2 losing a customer. This is the last in a long series of straws: when my contract comes up for renewal (sadly not for another 8 months) it will most definitely not be with O2. To anyone considering O2 as a mobile provider, I would strongly suggest that you consider someone else. Anyone else.
Tag search: rant