This morning about half a mile from home a white van started to slowly pull out from where it was parked. I was parked on the opposite side of the road from me but heading in my direction. I assumed, perhaps foolishly, that he was pulling out slowly to wait for me to pass…apparently not.

He continued to pull out whilst gradually speeding up and moving over to my side of the road to the extent that there was no room for me to pass between him and the parked cars on my side of the road. At this point I was forced to make an emergency stop (which hurt) and then in frustration and anger, and a hope to attract the drivers attention and alert him to what he’d done to hopefully make him more attentive in the future, punched the side of the van.

I am now in even more pain than normal and the van didn’t even stop. Aside from the punching I’d estimate that I have what I could describe as ‘near miss’ incidents at least twice a week.

Having seen several videos on youTube I’m left asking a legal question. If I buy one of the helmet, or handlebar, mounted ActionCams would I be able to submit videos of incidents like this mornings to the police and at least get these idiots fined?

I had my 10M connection upgraded to Virgins 50M service last Tuesday. The engineer who installed it said that the Modem took much longer than normal to connect and once he’d left I found that I had to call up and activate it again, despite him having already done this once.

Since then I’ve restarted the modem, so called Super Hub, on an almost daily basisto try and resolve slow speed issues. Testing on speedtest.net gave me readings between 1M and 50M only minutes apart and various times of day but, probably more importantly test on pingtest.net showed me between 60% and 90% packet loss. Those tests were only valid when they completed, which they only managed to do around half of the time.

At 7pm this evening after an hour of on/off connectivity I restarted the ‘Super’ hub again and from the logs on he hub itself it took around 30 minutes before it got a successful connection. (I was later told by one of the customer service representatives that this was impossible).

When testing showed that my speed and connection quality were still poor I phoned customer services. Over the next hour and a quarter I spoke to 3 representatives and one supervisor.

The first representative I spoke was actually worse than I’ve come to expect from Virgins first line support. He continued to, presumably, read from his script, ignoring my answers to his questions, insisting that I restart my laptop, reset my wifi and reload Internet Explorer despite me using a wired desktop Mac. When he was, unsurprisingly, unable to solve the problem and was unable to answer my question as to wether or not he knew what a ping test was he escalated me (allegedly!)

The second representative I spoke to asked me to unplug my modem so that he could run some tests. 15 minutes later having not heard from him again despite asking, and being able to hear people in the background, I was forced to ring off and call back.

It’s possible that steam was beginning to leak out of my ears at this point.

Having been on hold for around 10 minutes when calling back I gave my details to the next representative and asked him to transfer me through to a supervisor. He asked me what the problem was so I told him what I’d been through so far that evening. He apologised (about the only thing the customer services team seem to be any good at is apologising) and told me the last few things I’d tried.

It would appear that the customer services team actually lie on their call notes as I’d not been asked or told about several of the items that were read back to me. Once he’d asked me to try a few more tests (and I have to say this guy did sound like he had a bit of a clue) he put me on hold for 2 minutes and when he came back told me that there was actually a fault on my line.

Somewhat flabbergasted I asked when this was reported and was told the 4th of January! Yes, I’d been through all this with a know fault that was causing my problem. He was unable to tell me when the fault could be resolved and I then asked once more to be put through to his Supervisor. At this point he told me that he would put a note on my account for a reimbursement (although was unable to tell me how much) and transferred me. This transfer only put me on hold for about 5 minutes.

I explained, again, what my problem was to the supervisor who apologised, again, promised to reimburse me (again without being able to tell me how much) and reconfirmed that there was a fault on the line. Having asked how long it would take to resolve the fault I was once more put on hold (nearly 5 minutes again) and when he returned he told me that the engineering team had told him that the fault should be resolved by the 8th of March!

As the modem had only been installed within the last 7 days I asked for them to come and remove it (there is a 7 day no quibble refund) and reinstall my old 10M line that is apparently on a circuit that doesn’t have a fault until they could actually provide the service for which I was paying. I was then told that he couldn’t book an engineer to come out because of the fault in the local area.

So, in summary I had ‘upgraded’ from a working 10M line to a superior 50M line that was connected to an end point with a known fault and they are refusing to do anything about it….

Upon telling him that despite what his system was telling him he should find a way to make this situation right he apologised (yes, again) and offered to put me through to the complaints department. I said yes and he transferred me through to a recorded message telling me that the Complaints department had closed an hour ago.

At the point I put the phone down and walked away from my computer. Any more dealing with this level of incompetence was likely to lead me to start swearing at some and/or start throwing things through windows.

Should Virgin somehow make good and/or try and resolve this situation I will add the details here…until then I would urge people to use a Pigeon delivery service rather than Virgins broadband service.

This evening I was supposed to be watching a bit of TV, eating a Haggis and drinking a couple of nice whiskeys…instead I’m pissed off to the point of no longer being hungry so dinner is wasted. I would like to apologise for the grammar/tone/spelling and anything else that may be wrong with this post but I am barely able to type (and who knows, I may not even be able to post the fucking thing)

A few days ago (see previous post) I had a poor experience using a companies Live online chat service. The problem there was caused by a lack of information on the part of the operator and, it would seem, their supervisor.

Today I had another question to a different company called Heatmiser related to a timer clock I’d brought. The manual was very, very thin so I went online searching for more information, found their live chat and thought I’d give it a go. Here’s the result.

As I’m typing this post it’s 10.45 and I still haven’t seen any response from them.

Live chat features on company websites can be great for solving small problems and can may a company look really good, pro-active and helpful. When use like this however they just make you look bad and you’d be much better off not having it online in the first place . . .

I have their free iPhone application installed which allows you to download a 7 day timetable for a specific journey so that you can access it when you’re out of coverage (say underground?). The problem I have is that I can find no way of updating the timetable, despite the app continually reminding me that it was downloaded on November the 19th.

After several minutes of frustrated clicking around their website I hit the ‘Contact Us’ link and filled out the form to send them an email asking them. On the last page of this process I was given a message saying why not try out Live Chat. That sounded like a good idea as I felt it was a simple question that I could get resolved quickly.

It took me another few minutes to actually find the link for their online chat and once I did this happened . . . tell me, was I going mad, talking to someone who’s first language may not have been English or just expecting way too much???

(the names have been removed to protect the innocent

Edit: I’ve just been emailed a survey asking me what I thought of the service . . . this is going to be fun

No, what I’m talking about here is something that makes everyone’s blood boil . . . traffic.

Almost everyone that uses the public highways and byways is clearly an idiot!OK, so that may be a slight over exaggeration but there’s clearly plenty of evidence to back me up. I cycle 2 to 3 miles twice a day to and from Cambridge Station, I walk around town when my bike is locked up. I use cabs to get back home or back to my bike after a night in the pub and I drive when I need to go shopping or visit relatives () about the only thing I don’t really do it use the bus on account of anywhere I’d take the bus to I use my bike)

The problem here is that each of the vehicular groups seem to think they own the road (including the pedestrians). Car drivers think everyone cuts them up (which they do), the busses think that no-one gives them any room so they just ignore everyone else on the road, Cyclists think that they’re immune to injury and therefore don’t actually need things like lights at night and just choose to ignore any actual rules on the road (you know, little things like red traffic lights), and pedestrians just seem to look the wrong way and try and throw themselves in front of any moving vehicle.

So what can we do about it? I have visions of licensed people being allocated pink paintball guns and shooting cars, busses and taxi’s that do stupid or illegal moves. With internet enabled devices like the iPhone or Blackberry a brief report could be logged within a couple of minutes then they could be stopped by the next police car that sees someone with pink paint on.

I still haven’t figured out what to do about pedestrians and cyclists, not because you can’t shoot them but because it’s a) more difficult to identify them (no number plates) and b) paintballs actually kinda hurt when they hit you.

This may not be the best or most fully formed plan but thinking about it is helping me blow off steam after I was nearly killed on the way to the station this morning by a car turning left in front of me . . . . BASTARDS!!!!!

Odd that I mention the commute because I’ve just been reminded of this while out buying my lunch . . . what is it with shops insisting on giving out plastic bags for everything? I’ve brought a sandwich and a drink. Do I really need a plastic bag? If you look outside our office near Tower Bridge at lunchtime you will see apparently thousands of people carrying small green plastic bags from Marks & Spencer. I thought they were supposed to be leading the environmental campaign by charging people for bags? No sign of it here. And how much would it take to make you think twice about taking a bag? 5p? 10p? £1?!? All you’re going to do with it is carry your one sandwich about 200 yards back to your office and then throw the things away, ultimately into a landfill . . . aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Should I really get started on the string of smokers camped outside London Bridge Tube station every morning combining with the queue from the London Dungeon and at least 4 newspaper sellers/give-awayers plus fancy-dressed idiots from the London Bridge Experience (wtf!) giving out flyers, all of whom are stopping me from getting home, and in the case of the smokers, all camped about half an inch away from the no smoking area, ganging up to choke me as well!

Yea, probably not today eh.