phillsacre.me.uk

This is a quote of mine from an earlier post:

The whole experience has made me realise, though — I never want to have someone come round the house again on a sales-oriented call

Guess what we did on Tuesday night? That’s right, have a salesperson round!

Let me explain a little bit. The people who previously owned our house bought new windows and doors from Zenith Staybrite. Although this all occured way before we moved in, we were aware of it. A couple of weeks ago, someone from Zenith rang up to say that someone had seen our windows and doors, and decided they were going to make a purchase from Zenith. Apparently this made us eligible for a discount on any more work that we wanted done, which I believe is fairly standard industry practice (typical referral scheme, nothing dodgy there).

Anyway, he asked if we wanted any work done, and all I could think of was the front door: we are the only house (bar one) in our road which hasn’t had the door moved out to be level with the front of the house. Doing this would give us more hallway space and would generally be more convenient. I said as much, and the guy said they would send someone round to look at it on Tuesday evening.

It turns out that the person who arrived was actually a salesman. I was expecting someone more technical! He was a little bemused really – we didn’t actually need to be sold anything exactly. All we wanted is for the door to be moved, and just wanted a quote to that effect. The door is a good one – only a few years old – and so there really is no need to replace us.

And to be fair to him, he did call up his manager and ask whether this would be possible. (I should be quite clear that this guy was great all the way through – we didn’t get any pressure from him. The main problem came from the company itself, but more on that later). Apparently it wasn’t, and we were told we would have to buy a new door!

So, we went through the procedure, we chose the door that we wanted and had it priced up. The actual price came to over £5,000! Strangely enough, we weren’t too keen on that price ;-) But, surprise surprise, Zenith Staybrite could do it cheaper than that. Because our house is close to town, we check pretty much all the boxes (the salesman’s manager said that we had pretty much everything except for an airport near us).

He asked to talk to me, and then offered me a best price of about £2,500. In fact, he as good as told me that they were pretty desperate to get our house because we were in such a “convenient” location for them (even if no-one actually walks past our house because we’re in a cul-de-sac off of an estate with only one entrance and exit. But still).

Having learned from our mistake with Solar Home (see the linked post above), I basically said that there was no price he could offer us that would make us take it up that night. (a) we couldn’t really justify spending that much money on a door when we already had a perfectly good one, (b) I just resent being blackmailed like that!

So, that was the end of that. So we thought. We’d been getting missed calls from a number we didn’t recognise. Eventually they rang at a time we were actually in, and it turned out to be Zenith. They said that they were “doing some work in our area”, and were willing to reduce the price a bit more. Although they weren’t completely sure what the price would be, it would be “under £2,000″. This smacks of a sales tactic to me – they’re only based in Chelmsford for goodness’ sake, it’s not like they need to stay in a hotel in Colchester to do the work! Needless to say, we’ve declined their offer again. Something about it smacks of desperation, which actually is inclined to put me off rather than make me say “oh, what a deal! This is unmissable!” It’s reverse psychology, except that it’s working against them.

It did remind me of why we decided never to have salespeople round though. I think the problem was, we weren’t really expecting a salesperson! Hopefully this is a pretty rare situation and so won’t happen again. But if it does happen I know what to say – “No thanks, I already have a penguin”. (Well, perhaps I won’t mention the penguin part. But something similar).

What we might do with the door is get a local builders to come and see if they can do something about moving the door. It seems bizarre to actually buy a whole new door when the existing one is perfectly good, and still pretty new. Even if it’s a similar price, it will at least be more environmentally sound and support local business (if we manage to find a decent local builder).

*phew* apologies for the length of this rant, it’s been a while since my last one!

They should have just tried being me for five minutes :(

Ok, so that’s a huge exaggeration. But I’ve not had a good time of it recently with the car, i.e. getting it repaired. The story so far: in late February, someone reversed into the side of my car while it was parked. This buckled and dented the door. I rang up and made an insurance claim.

On Monday, the car (finally, after more than five weeks) went to Colchester Accident Repairs. They initially said that it would take three days to repair the car, I rang them up today and they said they were working on it and it would likely be Monday or Tuesday. Ok, well, that’s inconvenient but I guess I can live with the hire car for another few days.

The hire car, by the way, was delivered to me at the garage on Monday morning. They rang me up this morning and said that they were going to be needing it back. WHAT?!!! Apparently someone made an administrative error and he had down that I was due to finish with the car on 30th March, not that I was due to pick it up then! Why they ring me up three days afterwards with this I don’t know, but still. I (politely) told them to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and they’re not going to pick the car up today – but I might be driving round a car which is uninsured.

Grrrrrrr.

The hire car itself is nice though – it’s a 2007 VW Passat. It’s got a pretty good engine on it so is more nippy than my Saab. And because it’s diesel, you get a fairly decent MPG (although I must say the petrol guage has been a bit more mobile than I thought it would be). It also feels lighter – I think the Saab is built a bit like a tank!

So in general I like it. Still would like to get my car back though, the VW is nice but it’s just nice to be in your own car. Hopefully not too long now (I’ve been saying this for ages, but I really don’t think it will be now…)

Everybody stand back, this is going to be a serious rant. I’ve virtually got steam coming out of my ears right about now!

Can anyone believe NuLabour and their stance on ID Cards? I simply cannot believe some of the crap they’ve spouted about it.

Apparently “Wacky” Jacqui Smith said (on cards being available from 2012): “I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.” What The Heck? I haven’t yet spoken to anyone who is in favour of ID cards. Now, to be fair, I should mention that other countries have ID cards and it’s not a problem – it’s the UK version of ID cards that I don’t like.

The whole “Linking up everything to a massive database” thing.

When was the last time that a government IT project – such as a massive database – went well? NEVER! That’s when! Have the government proved that they can responsibly administrate large amounts of data without it going missing? Most emphatically, NO!

In short, no valid argument has been put forward for ID cards and yet they are still (despite massive opposition from the likes of NO2ID) going ahead with it.

I tell you, if ID cards go ahead as planned I will seriously consider moving. Well, either that or blowing up the houses of parliament. This just reminded me why our government should never be trusted: they are our elected representatives, and yet they continually and willfully ignore our opinions and steamroll ahead with their own plans, no matter what the arguments are.

Your uppance will come, NuLabour. I just hope it’s soon…

Well, when I say “my” PC, I mean, your PC. That’s right – you in the blue shirt. Quick! Everybody! Over to that guy’s PC!!! NOW!!! … *ahem* um, sorry, got a bit carried away there.

One of the mildly annoying things about Virgin Radio is the adverts they run. They’ve been repeating one a lot recently for a website – GoToMyPC. Basically, the idea is that you can access your PC (work or home) from anywhere with an internet connection and a web browser. On the advert, they have Peter Jones (of Dragon’s Den fame) talking about how it makes life easier if you’re on the move – you don’t have to worry about carrying around USB keys with loads of stuff on etc.

There are two things that annoy me about this advert.

The first thing is, remote access software is hardly a new idea! They present it (on the advert at least) as if it’s an amazing new thing. Well, Remote Desktop has been built into Windows now since Windows XP, Terminal Services before – in other words, quite a long time. VNC has been around for… oh, years and years.

Ok, so someone has made a website to hook up Citrix remote access so you don’t have to worry about NAT and such like. Fantastic. Except that you have to pay for it, and the same technology is readily available – for free – if you’d just spend ten minutes getting it set up. I remember using an in-web-browser version of Windows Remote Desktop a few years ago – the technology is there!

In the advert, they also don’t mention a few of the other caveats of the system:

1. The computer you want to access must be switched on and connected to the internet while you’re away;
2. You need to be on a pretty decent connection to get it working well. I’ve used a variety of remote access systems (PCAnywhere, Citrix, RDP, VNC) and all of them sucked on slow connections. I know these are days of ubiquitious broadband, but I think the advert leads people to believe that they can use their home PCs as well as if they were sitting at it. Not always the case, even these days.

This brings me to my second point: they’re taking advantage of people’s technophobia. I admit that it’s quite a good idea in the sense of getting rid of hassle, but by the time you’ve downloaded the software and installed it (and paid around £12 per month for the privilege), is it really much quicker than setting up Remote Desktop access? Or asking someone more knowledgeable to set it up? People just aren’t aware that there IS another way, which is kind of the problem.

One of the biggest issues in IT today is lack of education: people need to know about viruses, malware, scamming, firewalls – all of stuff, if they are to be safe on the internet. It seems to me that setting up remote desktop would be an ideal way to learn about some of it.

Setting up a website where you can just download some software and it “just works” seems to me to be exacerbating the problem. Why bother learning when you can just pay for someone else to do it for you?

Hmmm, well, I guess that’s the way capitalism works. Still… if anyone wants a hand getting remote desktop set up (if you’re using Windows), or getting VNC set up (if you’re using Linux), give me a shout, it will save you some money ;-)

The traffic around Colchester during rush hour is getting ridiculous. Take this morning, for example.

Time it would take to drive to work without any traffic: 25 minutes
Time it took this morning: 1 hour (I set off at 7:45 and got in at 8:45).

I just find it really frustrating sitting in traffic, not doing anything – at least when you’re waiting for a train you can sit and read. And, of course, with all the new flats and houses they’re building in Colchester the situation can only get worse!

Ah, it’s being so cheerful that keeps you going…

I do believe that there are a couple of things they could do to improve the traffic situation a bit, mainly strategic placement of traffic lights. If they put some lights on a couple of roundabouts, I reckon it would help with traffic flow going from town out towards the A12 in the London direction. Or at least make it a bit fairer.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to get my bike license…

Last week, someone from Solar Home rang up and asked if we were interested in Solar Powered heating. Anyway, as we are interested in Solar heating, we had someone come round to visit yesterday. It wasn’t the best of evenings…

He arrived at 7:00PM– early enough to prevent us having dinner, meaning we’d have to wait until later to eat. Wouldn’t really have been an issue, except for the fact that he stayed until 9:00! He also managed to upset one of our next-door neighbours by parking in front of her garage, which really didn’t impress her (murphy’s law: if you choose one garage out of five to park in front of, someone WILL want to use that one and not one of the other four). Still, you just shouldn’t park in front of garages really and gone somewhere else… the guy was fairly nice but to be honest hearing the guy have a bit of an altercation with our neighbour outside (after she’d come round and knocked on our door asking if we had a car parked there) did put a bit of a dampener on the evening.

Aaaaanyway. Like I said, the guy seemed to be nice enough, but he wasn’t a classic salesman: he didn’t exactly do much other than read through the booklet from Solar Home. It’s what my lecturers used to do, and it annoyed me then: I am perfectly capable of reading something myself! Don’t bother reading something out unless you’re going to add to it (in this case, phrasing what the booklet actually said in a slightly different way does not count as ‘adding to it’). Basically it took about an hour and a half to go through this booklet, at an agonizingly slow pace, when we could have gone through it in – probably – around half an hour. This is a tip for anyone doing this kind of work: just give me the information I need to know! Don’t read it out to me, I am perfectly capable of reading myself. Be brief, you don’t have to assume that it takes me five minutes to digest the fact that your workmen are certified (lunatics?) or whatever.

The worst was yet to come, however. I can take being treated a bit like an idiot (to be fair, I probably give that impression by looking gormless most of the time). The problems came when we started talking about pricing. The guy gave us three prices (one for using our existing hot water tank, one including a new hot water tank, and one including a new tank as well as linking it up to the central heating). The prices that he quoted us were more than we were prepared to pay, as of yesterday (the most expensive was around £12,000). We told him this. He then called up his boss, told him, and got us a new price. This actually happened a couple of times…

The thing is, we weren’t actually trying to drive the price down. We weren’t haggling. We were saying no – we just don’t have the money right now to pay for something like that, and I’m not prepared to go with the ‘pay monthly’ option (i.e., basically take a loan out with the British Credit Association or something like that). We managed to get the price down to less than 50% of what we were originally quoted, which is pretty impressive, without actually really trying to!

After his final offer, which we turned down (again), it was about 9:00 and I basically said that we’d reached an impasse, that it was late, and he should probably be going… which he did.

The whole experience has made me realise, though — I never want to have someone come round the house again on a sales-oriented call. It’s a waste of time, and at the end of it you get blackmailed into making a decision you potentially don’t want to make (i.e., “buy the product now or you won’t get this discount”). I understand that a sale is much more valuable to a company than someone saying “we will actually buy it at some point in the future” – but at the same time, we will go to green power in the future (Solar Power does look very good), and probably at full price, just not right now!

By the way, I should probably mention, I don’t want to cast aspersions on Solar Home’s product itself, we were quite impressed with it. This rant was more about the common methods used by sales peoples, as I’m sure it doesn’t just apply in this individual case!

My car insurance is currently with AA Insurance. AA as in, The AA – the Automobile Association. They sent me a letter through last week to tell me that my insurance is up for renewal, and that they’d found a cheaper quote for me (it looks like they use a variety of insurance companies). They also gave me the option of renewing my existing insurance, or going with this cheaper quote.

So, I thought I’d renew my insurance online (like I’ve done before). The AA have got a new website (or section of their website) for doing just that. Unfortunately it’s the kind of thing you have to register for, so I tried to register…. it’s rather confusing.

Apparently you have an account with them, and you can add different ‘items’ – i.e., different services the AA provide. So you can have an online account with your car insurance, home insurance, all registered to your one account. Unfortunately the site requires you to add an item before you actually register! This seems a little counter-intuitive to me… surely you should register your username etc first?

Anyway, the actual page to add an ‘item’ is confusing in itself. There’s a field there for your ‘reference number’ (which varies depending on what service you’re selecting – for car insurance it could either be your policy number or your quote reference number). You also have a drop down list for the type of item which you have to select, which contained both ‘MOTOR INSURANCE’ and ‘MOTOR INSURANCE QUOTE’. So, I tried registering my current policy number. No dice. I tried registering using my quote reference number. Nope, sorry. I tried just about every combination I could think — nope, couldn’t get the darn thing to recognise me!

It didn’t actually help that the quote reference number contained an ambiguous character which looked like a “|”. I’m sure it couldn’t have been – it was probably just an ‘I’ – but it’s still a bad typeface which doesn’t clearly distinguish letters, particularly if it’s all in upper-case!

I still haven’t managed to renew my insurance – I sent off an email to the AA, hopefully they will get back to me soon.

Sorry this wasn’t very much of a rant, I’m probably more annoyed than I sound here ;-)