Target: £2500.00
Current Total: £560.55
Miles Run: Not sure, but I’m getting less out of breath

Anyway, thank you to everyone who’s donated so far. Update below.

Target: £2500.00
Current Total: £455.55
Miles Run: Ssshh.. still not counting. Maybe next time.

If we hit £500 before the end of the month I will share some embarrassing training photos with you all.

In case you missed it, linky here!

Target: £2500.00
Current Total: £200.55
Miles Run: Better not to ask
Hours in Gym: Likewise

I have along way to go before I hit that fundraising target, so please, please, please help out if you can by donating here.

Over the course of the year I have a couple of events planned to raise money, which will be hella fun, I promise. Keep your eyes peeled!

On the face of it this sounds great, but you know that I’m a cynic. A few things spring to mind, so I’m jotting them down here.

1. When CDs were en vogue I didn’t read the lyrics in the insert, look at the artwork, buy magazines to read people’s opinion of the band etc. The MusicDNA proposition doesn’t offer me anything that warrants the fuss of changing my entire collection to the new format.
2. The BBC article here quite rightly points out that the iTunes LP format is already a contender in this field. Coupled with the fact that MusicDNA does not [yet] have any buy in from major record labels I would wonder whether the format would have any real commercial success. That said, it is an open format, which has to be a good thing.
3. Illegal file sharers will do so whether the file is in an MP3 or a MusicDNA format. People just don’t want to pay for things.

Gavin’s post talks specifically about the inhabitants of France’s banlieues. The translation given for this is ’suburb’, but that doesn’t do it justice. The connotations of the word in French are very, very different. Forget picket fences, large gardens, close communities. A banlieue is likely to be littered with high rise blocks, with poor access to public transport, high unemployment etc.

As Gavin puts it:

The debate of what it means to be French, and what can be done to maintain a French society, is very different in this environment. These are people who are marginalised by mainstream French society in many ways.

Gavin goes on to say that at the moment there are no concrete proposals from Besson and states that more generally, on an international level, societies are asking themselves the same questions.

Do we expect people coming to our country to change their culture to fit in with us, or do we permit enclaves filled with different beliefs away from the mainstream? The former is very Borg-like, and the latter reminds me of several episodes in recent history where difference was actively fought against.

My view on this is probably quite clear already, but I’ll point out the obvious anyway.

When we as a society learn to understand and accept difference, and not just pay it the lip service that ‘tolerance’ demands, we will be in a far better position to understand what it means to be British, or French, or American, or whatever. We are not all the same, and there will never be one single way to define a modern nation.

What I believe is that blindly forcing jingoism onto people, whether national or immigrant, leads to only one thing. It leads to people recognising within themselves that they do not meet the norm you are expecting of them and quietly becoming more and more marginalised.

I have, therefore, decided to document my experiences in the hope that others will see this and avoid like the plague.

A few comments before I begin:

» The products that Tiscali offers are actually very good. I have no quibbles with the TV, broadband or phone.
» The service that Tiscali offers is, in my opinion, terrible.

In the beginning

In November last year I moved to London and towards the end of the month I got my BT phone line sorted and then went to Tiscali to set up my package. The sales guys were very helpful and so I took out the package, with provisioning due to take a couple of weeks.

Shortly after this I received a letter advising that they would need to push back the installation date, so I called to make a new appointment. The new appointment date, a few days after the original one, came and nobody turned up. So, again I called Tiscali and they advised that they had not arranged for a visit.

Slightly annoyed at having stayed home all day to deal with this, I arranged another visit. This time I needed to work from home to enable this to happen. Again, the day came and no engineer visited. Again, I called Tiscali and was informed that the visit was not arranged because of a system issue of some kind. The agent I spoke to gave the impression this was commonplace.

Finally, with some degree of cajoling, an engineer came (!), set me up and went on his merry way. We were finally up and running.

I was genuinely annoyed with the service I had received (it was I who had to call Tiscali to sort everything out, I was inconvenienced etc) but saw no advantage in complaining at this point. After all, the service was finally installed and that should have been the end of it.

Then came the bill

In January I noticed that BT had taken a payment of nearly £150 from my account. I logged in to my account and the bill was a cancellation charge for terminating my contract with them early.

This came as a surprise to me. When I took the package with Tiscali I had explicitly asked about this and was advised that they would be taking over the billing of the line but that nothing else would change. There would be no charges associated with the change apart from their installation fee.

I called Tiscali to see what was going on and was advised that it was not their problem as BT had billed me incorrectly. BT, however, said that Tiscali had cancelled the contract and taken over the line. As such their charge was valid.

So, once more on the phone to Tiscali. Once more the indication was given by the agent that this was a common issue and that I should email them the details and a copy of the bill and a refund would be provided. I duly sent an email to complaints@uk.tiscali.com and awaited a reply.

Nothing.

So, again I called them and they advised that even though I had received an acknowledgement from them that the email was received it was, in fact, not received.

So, again, I sent the email as they requested and waited.

Nothing. This happened three times before an agent agreed to raise the complaint for me over the phone. To back myself up I also raised it on their online help area as a question in the hope that at least one of these would result in someone looking at my issue.

Dealing with the complaint

Of course, after over a week without a response I contacted Tiscali to see what was going on. They advised that they had the details of the complaint but couldn’t provide the refund until they had a copy of the bill from BT. This is the bill that I emailed to them several times AND attached to the complaint using their online system. This is the bill that I could see attached to the complaint right in front of me whilst on the phone to the agent.

Finally they realised they did have the documents they needed and then promptly passed the issue to another department.

I was assured that the complaint would be dealt with within 10 days and the refund would be arranged.

This didn’t happen. I called them again today and was told that the refund had been refused on the grounds that they could find no notes on my account to suggest a refund had been offered or, indeed, that I had been advised that there would be no charges for taking out the service.

The frustrating thing is that had Tiscali provisioned the service in the timescale they originally quoted the BT line would have been cancelled within the cancellation period and no charge would have been due!

Next steps

Now I need to escalate my complaint to the customer services manager, then to their complaints department, then to a regional manager, then to the ombudsman. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

A few suggestions

Tiscali, if you are reading this, here are a few suggestions on how you could have done this better:

» If you are dealing with a complaint make the effort to call your customer a few times. Every single contact I have had with you has been initiated by me, and every time I have been informed that you have taken some kind of action or required some piece of information that I should have been made aware of.
» Listen to your call recordings. Your agents don’t note accounts with every single thing they say so using these notes as gospel just doesn’t work.
» Work on your processes to make sure that complaints go to the right person first time. Bouncing around between departments is frustrating, especially when it is made clear in the beginning what the issue is.
» Make sure your advisors know what they are talking about. Had your agent been honest about the way the service was to be set up I could have easily budgeted for the cancellation charge or decided to take a service elsewhere.

And now..

And now I escalate my complaint, hope beyond hope that they deal with it and end the matter. Either way I will be posting what happens here.

When people say this they mean it in a nice way. They are saying that they feel it is easier to identify with me because I am more like them. I understand that completely. There is no intent to offend in what they are saying.

You know what I’m about to say, though. It does offend.

What is actually being said is this: My view of homosexuality is of a closed stereotype, where a gay man is camp and enjoys pink things, and a lesbian wears vests and has short hair. Any deviation from this view is to be commended.

Whilst I am not offended at a personal level by the intent of what is said, the subtext to this kind of comment gives away just how much work still needs to be done in addressing the perception of LGBT / queer communities in the eyes of others.

Public Perception

Things like this probably do not help. I am not the first to call it out, either.

I watched this this for the first time on Friday night with my family. What I hadn’t realised until watching it was that this is not the only character playing on the camp stereotype for comedy.

This is not comedy for subversion, to highlight our social ills and get people thinking about how they view homosexuality. Far from it. This is hopping on a growing trend that legitimises this world view.

A Little Sense

I am not a killjoy and I recognise the role of satire / irony in comedy. What I am pointing out here is that we are not in a place yet as a society to start collectively looking gay stereotypes as comedic in this sense. Why? Because the public perception is still that this is the norm in gay culture. It isn’t viewed as a bad stereotype to have.

Until we start to see a more representative, slightly more serious view of the LGBT / queer community we will not see society’s values changing. In the meantime this so-called comedy on our screens will only serve to reinforce the negatively held beliefs that people hold, whether they hold those views consciously or not.

END RANT.

The problem: show mm:ss as mm.00.

For example, 1 minute 15 seconds would be 1.25.

The solution? If your time in mm:ss format is in cell A1:

=A1*(24*60)

Then, format that cell to ‘general’ and there you have it- the solution to a problem none of you will ever have! It keeps me busy, though.

With a poet named Rives. Watch his stuff on YouTube here, and enjoy two of my faves on TED (which is my addiction this week, as you may have noticed) here and here.

Ignore the ‘American meddling with the world’ feel to some parts of the video, because the story itself is a good one.

Also, I pretty much recommend most videos on the TED website. Watch ‘em!