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  October 2008

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Today, within minutes of each other, I received two emails.
The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”.
The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”.
Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more?

Tim Trent has written an article about the BT SMS fiasco: Anatomy of a Marketing Disaster.
In it he describes some of the responses that people have been given when they have tried to talk to BT about this service.
This morning, on the Data Protection list, an even better one was unveiled. After sending a s10 [...]

Things to expect if you’re considering eating in the Chelsea Winebar, Belfast, and planning to to pay by card, rather than cash:

your card to repeatedly decline
the staff to seem embarrassed for you, but insist on another card
your second card to also decline
the manager who is subsquently called to explain that their machine doesn’t really work [...]

Recently I’ve been having trouble with my central heating. The timer would call for heat, but the boiler wouldn’t realise this, and so wouldn’t actually give me any.
I’ve had Pipeline Services out to look at it four times in the last month. Each time they “fixed” the problem, only for it to return in a [...]

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 [...]

This is a public service announcement. If anyone is ever thinking of staying in the Hotel Paix Republique in Paris, don’t. It’s possibly the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and I’ve stayed in some terrible hotels.
I stayed there for YAPC::Europe last week; there was two hotels arranged, and this was the more expensive [...]

At the Emerging Technology Conference I heard Amazon staff say several times that Amazon is (or is striving to be) the most customer centric company on Earth. Every time I hear this it irks me more and more because I know that my dealings with Amazon have generally been pretty poor.
I don’t doubt Amazon’s [...]

Apparently it took the US Immigration Service a very long time to accept that, because most of the rest of the world write their dates as dd-mm-yyyy instead of mm-dd-yyyy, their immigration forms should reflect this.
Yesterday, when arriving in Washington, I noticed that hanging in the immigration hall were samples of the forms you have [...]

People who know me know that I spend much more time ranting about really bad service than praising really good service.
For the most part this is because I get much more bad service than good service.
But last week I had a great experience. I left work one evening and discovered that one of the windows [...]

Karen wants to know how to handle being persistently kept waiting by lawyers and accountants.
I have a long standing hatred of this. Especially as I always suspect that I’m probably going to being billed for an hour, even if they leave me sitting in reception for the first 10 minutes.

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