Is That You Darling ?

Despite being blissfully retired, I still find myself being drawn to TV or news articles which are technology based. It’s just a fact of life. I did, after all, spend 30+ years in the IT and telecoms business, so I suppose it’s natural. I have bookmarked ‘The Telecoms Register’, which is a website giving all the low down on Telecomms companies and one of the things I miss about BT is the internal news websites which were very informative. I watch the Gadget Show and Click with Guy and we always watch engineering and technology documentaries. Sad, I know but with technology advancing all the time it would be remiss of me not to know the latest gizmos on the market which could change or improve our lives.

Take this morning’s revelation about transmitting holograms – amazing. The possibilities are limitless. Some are wonderfully salacious (and maybe I could be first into the market here – remember you read it here first – see number 5 below) whilst others are merely wonderful. Read on.

I was at a BT Conference (sorry annual jamboree) somewhere in Europe a few years ago. It’s terrible. We all go to these annual events and as soon as they finish we’ve all forgotten where they were for obvious reasons to do with free bars etc. The only thing which helps us remember, are things we brought back with us. So every time I get my crystal glasses out, I remember some of the details of the Prague trip – you don’t want to know! When I look at my wallet (not often these days – it doesn’t have anything in it – aaaah) I think of the trip to Barcelona. Again – you don’t want to know. This morning’s news revelation took me straight back to that fabulous, cultural European city of   ………….good old Birmingham. Yup – it was one of the Sales Conference highlights. I jest. The conference was awful and as I’d already decided to leave BT, I spent most of my time trying to avoid the formal sessions and negotiate my release. I did however attend the opening session which comprised an amazing piece of technology and a senior director who cried on stage. I couldn’t work out why he was crying – maybe he’d heard I was leaving - but it was all very pathetic and probably rehearsed (I’m such a cynic). Anyway, back to the technology. The lights went down, a hush came over the 2000 people in the room and the loud rock music started filling the room with a sound you can only dream of getting on your home hi-fi. Strobe lights filled the room (no doubt to allow the bosses to weed out the epileptics) and the stage curtains pulled back to reveal our Chief Executive. So what ? After he’d finished his short opening the lights went out and he disappeared from view. But almost immediately, they came back on on the other side of the massive stage and he was now over that side. This happened a few times and we were beginning to think he was some sort of magician, appearing and disappearing at will. And then amazingly, the lights came on fully and he was on both sides of the stage at the same time. It was a hologram. The effect was amazing. It was like there were two real people.

So this morning’s news that we may all be able to use holograms in future to allow ourselves to be represented at the place we are making a phone call to, made my mind dive off into all sorts of weird and wonderful areas. So come with me on my hologram trip.

1. You wake up after a troubled night’s sleep and your mother-in-law is standing at the bottom of the bed – aaaaagh!
2. Guy and Kitty don’t need to go to school any more. They can stay at home all day and just send a hologram to their school – aaaaagh!
3. You’ve just woken up, somewhere in Europe, the morning after the last night of a Sales Conference. You’re still in your suit, you’ve been sick and it’s quite obvious a huge party took place in your room. You look up and the wife is staring at you – aaaaaaaagh!
4. You answer the phone at home to kindly refuse a dinner party invite because you are ill (which you are not – you just cant stand them) and your hostess suddenly arrives in your living room.
5. And finally, taking a little joke we used to play on unsuspecting guys in BT to the next stage. We’d leave them a message asking them to phone one of their customers and when they’d got through it was a sex chat line (we’d fixed the number so they didn’t know) – just imagine. We’re all sitting at our desks and suddenly this ‘gorgeous’ naked female appears in the office uttering unspeakables. Great !!!

Go on – think of a few yourself. 

The Con With Cam Belts

Now ladies, this is very technical so if I were you, I’d run off and make a cup of coffee or do your nails.

Guys – what a con. I’ve got an Alfa Romeo Spider (see picture), 1997, only 48,000 miles on the clock and one of the most beautiful cars ever made. Crap to drive on bumpy roads but thankfully, France spends loads more than the UK on their tarmac so it’s not too bad to drive over here. Bought it for about £6k some 7 years ago and apart from two minor faults, one fixed with a hammer, the other with a £15 new part, it’s been flawless. I don’t actually do too many miles, maybe about 3k per year, so now it’s almost fully depreciated and worth about £2k, it’s a real pain to find that it needs a repair which will cost about £800 – 40% of the value of the car and which, as it is inside the engine, may not actually need doing at all but if it suddenly goes – well – crash, bang, wallop – end of Alfa.  

It’s the cam belt. When Alfa started producing the car, they said the cam belt needed changing every 72k miles, which is bad enough, but after numerous failures, they reduced this to 36k miles.

Now just think of this. You’re a rep. You’ve bought yourself a new Spider and do about 25k miles a year running up and down the motorways. After only 18 months, you need to spend £800 on a new bit of rubber…..which might give way at any time. You’re in the lap of the gods. It’s like buying a new telly and being told by the Comet sales guy that you’ll need a new tube in 18 months time! It’s ridiculous. I feel so bad about it I was thinking about getting a petition together but I’m not an activist, so I’ll leave that to someone else, but what a complete rip-off.

If any ladies are still reading this, the cam belt is a rubber belt (on some cars it’s a chain) which makes sure the car’s internals all go round and in and out, at the prescribed timings. If the belt breaks it’s like…..well the nearest comparison is like throwing an aerosol can into a food processor. Initially, there’s some scraping and metallic noises but after a few seconds, there are explosions and the food processor grinds to a very nasty halt. In the case of a car, or more specifically, my Alfa, the valves would slam into the pistons, the pistons would hit the cylinder block and the whole engine would seize up within seconds…..and all this because a piece of rubber, probably not costing more than a few pounds, decided to break. When you think of it, it’s amazing that any piece of rubber lasts more than a week or two in such circumstances.

It’s a real dilemma. As I say, the car’s worth about £2k to anyone else (to me it’s worth more but £2k is all somebody would pay for it) so should I run it and risk it or should I just ‘bite the bullet’, pay my £800 and relax. But relax about what? There’s no guarantee that the new belt will be any better than the old belt. Indeed, the new belt might put a strain on other engine components and the car might grind to a halt within weeks of the ‘repair’.

It’s not just Alfas which have this problem although I think the 36k miles between changes might put the Alfa at the top of the list. Just type ‘cam belts’ into Google and watch the replies stacking up. It’s incredible that with all the high-tech gizmos on a car these days, much of what happens is actually down to a bit of rubber (sorry – that sounds like life itself !!!).

Reluctantly though, methinks I’ll have to get it done cause with my luck, I’ll be bombing down the road one day, the rubber belt will disintegrate and the engine will seize up. Bill = £3k. More than the car is worth. I’ll also have to pay £100 to get towed to the nearest Alfa garage. I’ll have hours of frustration at the side of the road and will have to get a taxi home.

Maybe the £800 is not so bad after all.

Letter To My Bank

Dear Sir or Madam (it was a Madam who replied the last time), 

This is a rather detailed and therefore lengthy letter so I would suggest a comfy chair and a cup of coffee. This is what I did yesterday morning when I sat down at 9am to apply for a limited offer fixed-rate deposit with my other bank. It was exciting. Just like Xmas had come early. Here they were, offering me 6% gross for 1 year when you only pay 3.8% gross.  For a person who relies on his savings to pay his pension, it was almost too good to be true. How prophetic! 

I started their on-line application process and was at the bit where I had to fill in my debit card details when I realized it would be prudent to move the amount of money I required from my e-saver to my current account. I signed onto the Abbey internet site and did a ‘move money’ transaction. At the last minute, after accepting everything I keyed in, I got an error message saying the ‘service was temporarily unavailable’. Now call me paranoid or what (paranoid isn’t really my name) but in these days of banks failing, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Abbey didn’t actually want people moving money around, even if it was cleared funds and all they were doing was moving it between accounts in the same bank! 

What fuelled my fears was that I’d had the same problem a few weeks previously when, before setting off to enjoy myself in Glasgow (I now live in France as you may have noticed from the letter headings) I’d tried to move the princely sum of £604.99 to my current account so that I could withdraw the money once I had hit the bright lights. After returning from a wet and wild weekend in my beloved home city, I had noticed that the ‘move money’ transaction had not happened and that my current account had gone ‘all red’.  I called good old Bangalore but got no joy so I called the Technical Help Desk and after a 20 minute call which cost me 20p a minute (0845 numbers are charged at a premium in France – how bizarre – eh ?) the girl kindly moved the money manually, said ‘there was a problem with the system’, it would be fixed and she agreed that I would not be charged interest for the inconvenience caused. 

Now I have to say that although I was only trying to move just over £600, this was at the time when major banks were failing faster than you could say ‘Fannie Mae’ and so my suspicions were aroused then. So how do you think I felt yesterday when, having been bombarded with messages for the last 6 weeks about the ‘financial strength’ of the Santander Group, who, having said their Tier 1 Capital Ratio (look it up) was quite robust thank you, they dived off into the market to raise the not inconsiderable sum of €7.2 billion! But hey, anyone who understands Tier 1 Capital Ratios doesn’t panic easily and so I got another cup of coffee and picked up the phone. 

Yup – you’ve got it. I got Bangalore again. I now feel that I know the city, I’ve spoken to them so many times recently. When people ask me where I’m going to travel to in my retirement, India doesn’t come into it. Been there, done that…albeit only on the phone. I ask them about the weather. Their families. What they’re having for lunch. I ask about that call centre agent who, when upset with the language of his customer, decided to get his own back by changing all the details on his accounts. Read on – is this what happened? Was this a case of Ranjiv’s revenge? 

Anyway, I digress. After only a 15 minute call this time (again at 20p a minute – I’m totting it up), Sanjiv decided to put me on hold. Nope. Line went dead! After calling poor old Sanjiv some names he wouldn’t recognize, I decided that I’d call the techies, the Sheffield accents are nice and I usually get through. After another 20 minutes, the girl agreed to move my money manually. There was still “a problem with the ‘move money’ system”! Great, all fixed – try to make a debit card payment to my new, super-duper high-interest account – transaction failed because of some problem. I call the techies again (10 minutes this time). This guy (I don’t take names – you never ever get back to that person anyway), said the problem was that I was trying to move too much money at once. There was a ‘floor limit’.  He couldn’t tell me what the limit was, but to try decreasing amounts until it worked. ‘Couldn’t he give me a clue’, I begged. ‘Couldn’t we play a little game until I guessed the number’. ‘Nope – not company policy’. 

I tried several transactions of decreasing values which all failed. I tried to pay a debit card transaction of 99p. Failed! This time, my new bank (very helpful by the way) gave me a message which said that the details on my card did not match the details I was giving them on the application form !!!!!! 

Called the techies again. Another guy, who seemed to know what he was doing, spent about 20 minutes looking at various things and decided that my name was Timothy, not Thomas. This was the problem. This is where déjà vu took over as I’d had the same problem last year when all my addresses and the names on my accounts changed, inexplicably, from Thomas to Timothy. Several dozen calls and a long letter later and you’d changed them back and kindly credited my account with £50. The guy said he’d change them all back again and that it would be sorted within minutes. I could finally get to open my super-duper, wizzo new account. Nope! After several attempts to make a direct debit payment the system still wasn’t working. It was now getting dark, I’d missed lunch and was feeling faint. That’s not all I was feeling. I imagined what hands round a neck feels like as you slowly strangle the life out of somebody – anybody! 

I call my new bank. It’s now too late to open my new super-duper pay-loads-of-dosh account so I collapse in tears. This is all too much for a pensioner who is known to be rather keen on controlling his finances to the nearest penny. I compose myself. Better get my money moved back into my 3.8% interest e-saver account. I sign on again. Go to ‘move money’ and do the transaction. Aaaaagh – ‘transaction failed – service temporarily unavailable’. I beat up the cat, kick the computer printer (it’s at my feet) and tell the kids on the phone they can walk the 5 miles home from school. To say I’m pissed off is a huge understatement. 

Another call to the techies (20 minutes). By now I’m crying. The girl is very sympathetic. Asks me to sit down and take some Valium and says I have been busy! She can see all the failed transactions. I plead with her just to return my money to my e-saver and I’ll go away. ‘Just some security questions’ she says very slowly. 

The final outcome is that she managed to move my money back to my e-saver. She even asked me to verify that it had happened by looking at my PC but it was sadly lying in bits on the floor by now. 

In summary, I spent approximately £20 on calls yesterday. Lost approximately £550 in interest by not being able to switch my money and probably lost several years off of my life expectancy. I will have a large vet’s bill for fixing the injuries to the cat and my PC will need repairing. My wife of only 6 months, is divorcing me and the kids have still not returned from school. Life is a bitch then you have to deal with The Abbey! 

Finally, I apologise for not having gone to the effort of getting the name of an actual Abbey person to write to, but having tried in the past, it would be quicker for me to research my family tree back to the 15^th century. 

Yours sincerely,

 

No Wonder Pensioners Panic

I got an e-mail this morning from a bank I use, offering an interest rate of 6% gross. Now as I only get 3.8% gross from my existing bank (The Abbey) this extra 2.2% is not to be sneezed at, especially as I rely on savings interest rates for my pension.

I started about 9am, after I’d completed all the housework J had asked me (told me ?) to do. I started filling in the forms online and half-way through realised I’d have to transfer some funds into my current account from my savings account in order to start up the new account with the other bank.

Easy-peasy. Just go online and use the ‘move money’ tab on the internet, which worryingly did not work a few weeks ago, but I’d received reassurance since then that it had been fixed. Nope! Not fixed. An error message saying the service was unavailable. The previous time, I’d been told it was a ‘technical problem’ and was easily fixed and as I was only transferring a small amount then it was not a problem – they did it manually.

This morning, because it was a larger amount, I immediately came to the conclusion when it did not work, that the Abbey did not want people moving money around, even between their own accounts. I called the Abbey hoping against hope that I would not get their Bangalore ‘Help Desk’ but I did. As usual, we went through all the problems I’d had and after about 10 minutes the guy said to hold on, he’d be back. Nope! Line dead. I was furious. The Abbey don’t have ‘normal’ numbers for people to call them, they only have 0845 numbers which cost about 20p per minute from France so I’d wasted about £2 already and I’d have to call back. This time I called the ‘technical help desk’ which has its own 0845 number and although still costing 20p per minute, at least you get somebody who doesn’t have to stick to a script like they religiously do in Bangalore.  

The girl was helpful but could not see a reason why my ‘move money’ request did not work. This is where I started to get a bit stroppy and it was also the point where if I’d been an 85 year old person whose life savings were with the Abbey that I would have started to panic. I’d read during the week, that despite all the positive press recently about the fact that the Abbey is one of the world’s best capitalised banks, it was still raising more money to protect itself from ‘any downturn in Latin America’. Add this slightly more pessimistic news to the fact that I couldn’t do anything with my money and you have CONCERN. Not PANIC, just CONCERN.

Eventually the girl transferred my money manually but only after another £4 telephone call.  Great – now to get on with transferring it to the new bank.

Back online. Filled out a few forms and pressed the button. ‘Sorry – we cannot complete the transaction……….your details do not pass the security tests’.

Back to the Abbey where another technical guy took my call and eventually found out (after another £6 on call charges) that my accounts were not in my name and that’s why the transaction failed. Now this is a bit of déjà vu – last year my accounts changed to my son Timothy’s name ( so using ‘T’ worked but using Thomas did not) and after several calls and a stroppy but humorous letter (both probably costing about £20) I got an apology, £50 and an assurance that it would be fixed. 

It was, for all of about 6 months. The guy apologised, changed all the details on the system and said my transaction to the other bank should now work. 

It did not! Cue glass of wine and a long long scream. Hence the picture.

The Institution

Tears of frustration welled up in Guy’s eyes. He’d been due to be released 10 minutes earlier but the huge black warder, a mountain of a man, was determined to prolong his agony for as long as possible. Guy would not be allowed out of the institution until his parent had signed his release form and furthermore, understood the terms of his release. Admin completed, the large green gates, which the warder guarded with a zeal bordering on sadism, slid apart on their well greased runners. They did not make a sound. The only sound was me muttering under my breath. Guy wasn’t in any sort of trouble. This was just me trying to get him out of school early!

My kids will go pale when they see the title of this blog posting. It’s about their school and the one thing they hate, is to be exposed to school outside of school hours. They don’t dislike school amazingly enough, it’s just that the several hours a day they spend there, having their brains exercised, is quite enough thank you.

College La Sine is about 10 minutes away from our house and generally Guy and Kitty will catch either the 7.30am or 8.30am bus. Apart from Wednesdays when they finish at lunchtime, they will be ‘released’ at either 4pm or 5pm, so it can be quite a long day.

I used the word ‘released’ in the last paragraph deliberately as kids are not allowed out of school unless they can prove that they have finished for the day. A rather large black bouncer guards the gates and this is not to stop trouble (nobody would dare) but to check the kids’ school agenda (or diary) to establish if they can be allowed out. To be released early they must have either a teacher’s or a parent’s signature.

The school have also recently introduced the  ‘system from hell’ as far as the kids are concerned. It’s an IT system, accessed via the internet which provides a daily, let me repeat, daily, performance view of the child’s progress. It lists all their tests and their marks, the work they do in particular lessons and also their homework for the current evening. No more little fibs about ‘having no homework’. It’s all there in the ether.

I first saw the systems the school employs when we took Guy there for his first day. Each child registered their palm print on a biometrics system and thereafter, each lunchtime they have to place their palm on a reader which detects if the child is due a school meal – i.e. they’ve paid. It also alerts the school if they have paid for a meal but have not entered the dining room. A letter is then sent to the parents the following day. Strangely, the children are not allowed to take lunchboxes to school. They either go home (or at least leave the school premises if their agenda says they can) or stay and have the school 3 course menu.

In some respects it must be like a prison for the kids but they get used to it and as far as the parents are concerned, if a child is due to be at school, they will be at school. No chance of them sneaking off to Vence about 10 minutes walk away with their mates for a coke and a sandwich at lunchtimes, never to return to their lessons.

The only way to ‘escape’ the system, is not to go to school in the first place but again, as soon as the register is taken, and it is taken three times a day, if a child is detected as ‘missing’ the old letter writing system bursts into action and the parents will know the following day and a response is required. It is virtually foolproof. I have however, worked out a few wrinkles in the system but, of course, Guy and Kitty read this and it would be remiss of me to give them ideas but it wouldn’t surprise me if Guy hadn’t already hacked into the school systems (he is after all on the techie committee) and sorted a few things.

Fast Food - Slow Building

Yup – we’ve got McDonalds here. I think I’ve even seen a few Subways. Don’t think we’ve got any Prèt a Manger though – something with an obviously false French name would never make it. McDonalds even serves beer and so becomes a bit more adult friendly. It’s main attraction though is as a place where kids are handed over from one parent to another after divorce. Quite sad really that probably more than  half the kids there on Friday nights and Sunday evenings are from ‘broken’ homes but hey, they’ve got to meet somewhere neutral.

But back to the point. Wander through the streets of Nice and it is quite different to say London where in one street you’ll have several sandwich shops and a few fast-food chains. The French, you see, don’t really like sandwiches for lunch. Despite the almost religious zeal with which the French buy their baguettes, sometimes visiting the boulangerie three times a day, they much prefer a sit down lunch. That’s why a 2 hour lunch break is still quite common over here. At lunch time in the Midi and the Sport (local bars/restaurants) you’ll see many working men, some in overalls and others in suits, just sitting on their own having lunch. It’s a national way of life. The two hour thing even in southern France isn’t to have a siesta and get away from the midday heat. Oh no – it’s so they can stuff themselves in the middle of the day.  

When our builders started constructing our new house, the first thing they did was to make a shelter. Quite a substantial place it was too, to the point where J actually thought it was the start of our new abode! A corrugated tiled roof, room enough for the three or four guys who were doing the building, a few benches and electricity cables run in so they could listen to their radio………over their two hour lunches. Antonio, the main man would go home every day for lunch. A drive of some 20 minutes each way. Not a long drive in UK terms but it would be maybe 10 miles. It would have been much more efficient in every way you could think for Antonio to stay around the place and have a sandwich but off he went every single day, back home to his missus where, no doubt a three-course lunch awaited him.

The other thing the builders did was to make a ring of large stones which I thought was some sort of religious ceremony until I saw the grill being placed on top. This was to be their barbeque. And then, on the first day on site, Phillipe, the youngest of the three guys was spotted up in the terraces, rummaging around the undergrowth. He came back down with a handful of green stuff and then started cutting branches off one of our hedges. It turned out that he was up in the terraces looking for wild thyme and wanted the branches off our hedge because it was rosemary. Further inspection a few minutes later, after the bbq had been fired up, literally, saw some prime cut lamb chops being carefully tended and smothered in herbs. The smell was delicious, particularly as J served me up a cheese sandwich that day – I remember it well!

And so for the next four years, the bbq would be lit, the meat would be brought out and carefully cooked and the salad would be prepared with oils and a variety of nuts and other accompaniments and they’d sit down and just eat their lunch. Never talking, just eating and listening to the radio. Occasionally I would take them over a beer or a bottle of wine and salivate at what was cooking. Shadow also made a bee-line for the builder’s hut on a daily basis, just about 11.56 as he knew that in about 30 minutes time there would be some tasty tit-bits from his friends, the builders.

My abiding thought though, and one which shows my complete disregard for French culture, was that if these guys had had a Subway or a McDonalds close by, then my house would have been finished about 9 months quicker. C’est la vie….as I keep saying.