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March 20, 2005
Customer Service
dave
02:51 PM
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You know, when a mistake is made when handing change back to a customer, the correct response is "sorry, I'll put that right straight away", not hysterical screeching and wailing about how I'm trying to get someone into trouble with her boss.
August 24, 2003
UK Financial Planners
dave
03:32 AM
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I've just got a reminder from Windsor Life Assurance that they managed to lose an important document I send to them some months ago (one that I had to get someone else to sign, at some cost to myself) and I must get another copy made and signed. There is no trace of an apology. The document itself concerns the fact that I may have recently left the UK. Well, duh! I left the UK nearly seven years ago. It took them almost six years to realize that the address in Hong Kong to which they were sending letters may not have been in the UK.
I fully intend to send them the information they require, cc'd to their General Manager and cc'd to the UK Financial Planning Ombudsman. I was bullied into taking these plans out by General Portfolio, a shower of criminals, and the only reason I've kept them going is that they may have had value as savings schemes. It now seems as if I'd have been better off keeping my money in a biscuit tin under my mattress.
July 29, 2003
Hong Kongers
dave
12:55 AM
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It never fails to amaze me how blind some HKers can be. I regularly see people waving frantically at a taxi to flag it down, completely oblivious to the fact that:
- The 'For Hire' light isn't lit,
- The Taxi is full of other people
I saw such a group today, just outside the Mandarin Hotel. They looked very indignant when a taxi with four people inside didn't immediately stop and pick them up.
Also, with buses, sometimes the bus is full. My regular ride into work, the No. 18, is frequently very busy in the mornings, and it's not rare to see the bus full sign lit up. Even when the bus is so jam packed full, that the standing passengers have their faces pressed against the windows (and the front windscreen!), there'll be some self-important jerk gesturing at the driver to open the door and let him in.
June 05, 2003
Disgust
dave
12:00 AM
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I'm disgusted: TVB News just showed highlight of the days dragon boat races and completely ignored the races at Stanley. Stanley hosts the one of the biggest festivals on the day with 136 teams this year. Why didn't TVB cover it? Because they'd have to show Non-Chinese competing?
May 26, 2003
Windsor Life Assurance
dave
11:34 PM
Comments (3)
I just had a letter today from Windsor Life Assurance Company Ltd saying how they think I might have moved from the UK and might not actually be eligible from one of the schemes I have with them. Considering that I moved from the UK Six Years Ago!, I am very annoyed about this current turn of events. It seems like whenever I send get a letter from them, yet another different person is involved. Do they have a revolving door policy of firing people who've worked there for more than a few weeks? Is the company so badly run that no one wants to spend more than a few weeks working there? They might now be in a position to refund GBP 10,000 plus of my money which they've been taking from me every month even though they knew I was not in England. (They were sending regular post to my addresses here in Hong Kong.) I sure hope they do, because, from the last statement of my accounts they sent me, it looked like I would have been better off putting the money in a biscuit tin and not investing it at all. Still, I guess it could be worse, I could be poorer for having tried to invest my money, and many people have been.
I guess the moral of the story I'm currently hearing is that big financial firms do not give a Gosh-darn Flying Futz (hey, my mother reads this, ok?) about the people whose money they obtain via high-pressure sales techniques.
April 12, 2003
Sometimes I despair
dave
12:00 AM
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It seems that my alma mater seems to be unable to code up a webpage and instead wants to have an 'under construction' on their site. 'Under Construction' labels used to be popular back in the mid 1990's, when the web was an unfamiliar thing. Now, they make you look like a bunch of Luddites. I mean, for God's sake, the Amish have a web site, why can't a university department?
April 10, 2003
The end of an era
dave
12:00 AM
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It appears that the Concorde Supersonic Airliner is being taken out of service after three decades of service and a glowing safety record. The Concorde was, is, dammit, the most graceful and elegant passenger aircraft out there. Was it years ahead of its time, or are we going backwards?
Imagine being at the end of 1969 again: Man has just walked on the moon, and there are two great new aircraft available: the 747 for lots of people going slowly, and Concorde, for not so many people going very fast.
The Wright Brother's first flight was 1903. Sixty-six years later, we'd walked on the moon, and invented the Jumbo Jet and Concorde. What have we done since then?
March 20, 2003
Where's the Rant?
dave
12:00 AM
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I moved the rant about The Shrub to my Rants Page. It makes more sense to have it over there. WARNING: my rants usually come when I'm really annoyed about something and may or may not be all that rational.
March 17, 2003
Saint Patrick's Day
dave
12:00 AM
Comments (3)
Well, it's Paddy's day again. Please join me in the national Irish pastime, commonly celebrated on this day, of rolling your eyes at those 'Irish-Americans' with their tartan pants and their stories about leprechauns and the 'auld sod', not to mention green beer.
If I'd thought about it sooner, I'd've had some snake soup tonight to celebrate that good old Welsh Roman alleged driving of the snakes out of Ireland. I did have some Clonakilty Black Pudding for dinner, though.
I had a debate on snopes.com about who is entitled to call themselves Irish. One particularly arrogant Irish American refused to accept the fact that he wasn't Irish, and decided that I wasn't Irish either, because I lived further away from Ireland than he did. This is a moronic statement. Pat Young: you are a moron.
March 03, 2000
More little updates
dave
12:00 AM
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to the photography page, the rants page and the style sheet, among others.
January 07, 2000
Happy Rollover/Millennium/Century/Year.
dave
12:00 AM
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(Pedants who object to the use of the words Millennium or Century can just go away now, thank you.)
So, here we are in the new year, century, millennium, even. What I want to know is: where's my flying car, personal jet-pack, protein pills and ray gun? Hey, I've seen the Jettisons, I've seen Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, any number of science-fiction movies and read lots of science- fiction books. Right about now, we're supposed to live in an idyllic techie paradise, have cheap spaceflight, elevators from Sri Lanka to Geostationary Orbit, been contacted by Alien civilisations. On the other hand, we're also supposed to have had a few nuclear wars, invasions by both aliens and communists and been taken over by machine cultures, so I suppose we're ahead a little bit.