Understanding Nothing

Once upon a time lots of singles would be released with lots of extra B-Sides. It was quite common that a single release would comprise of 2 CD singles, each with 3 bonus tracks, a 12″ with another 3, and a 7″/cassingle with yet another, thus hooking fans and collectors into purchasing all 4, but giving an album’s worth of otherwise unreleased tracks. Even if they didn’t expect you to buy the vinyl, you’d still get 6 new tracks with the 2 CDs (which were often imported back into the UK as an EP from the US).

These days it seems you’re not allowed to do this. According to the Offical Chart Rules [pdf], now only 3 versions of a single can count towards the charts, and you can only have 3 distinct tracks on a CD single (although you can have alternate versions of the main track).

Also, no individual release can be over 20 minutes long, unless you only have different remixes of the same song, in which case you can have any number of them, as long as the total running time is no longer than 40 minutes.

But of course none of this could possibly contribute any understanding whatsoever to the declining sales…

I would like to nominate the Student Loans Company as having the worst phone interface either.

I got a letter from them last week stating that I have overpaid my loan, and that I “may” be entitled to a refund, and should call them.

You are presented with 3 options: “If you are calling on behalf of a borrower, press 1. If you want to change your bank details, press 2. Otherwise, press 3″. So, if I’m a borrower, am I calling on behalf of me? Do I press 1 or 3. I went for 1. Wrong. I was politely informed that due to customer confidentiality they couldn’t talk to me, and disconnected my call.

Next time around, I pressed 3. Now I had to enter my “automated response ID”. If I don’t know what it is, I can press 1. Of course, I have absolutely no idea what one is, or even why I might have one. So I pressed 1. Now I was informed that it was an 11 digit number which would be at the top of any recent correspondence (why they couldn’t have just said that without needing me to press 1, I’m not entirely sure).

So I checked my letter, and there was no such thing on it. There was a “when you call us quote the following reference – REF.” that just ended there with no reference whatsoever, and there was the loan account numbers from my 3 loans (all of which are 11 characters long, but contain letters as well as numbers). So I pressed 0 to just get an operator. 10 minutes of being told that I’m still in queue later I hung up.

Next time around I tried my most recent loan account “numbers”, and was told it was invalid. Then I tried the earliest one, and hey presto, got put into presumably the same queue with the same annoying voice telling me that I was in a queue every 30 seconds or so. Ten minutes later I hung up again.

I think I’ll just write instead. And probably make a Data Protection request too…