Archive for the 'fail' Category

Santander Again

Jeez! These people are really, really hard work.

I received a letter from Santander at the weekend telling me that my loan account is in arrears. That was news to me, given that as far as I am aware I only have two savings accounts with them (brought over from Bradford & Bingley).

So I rang them this morning as the letter suggests I should, quoting the account number on the letter and giving them details of my name, address and date of birth. So far so good.

I asked them about this alleged loan account and was told it was a Cahoot one. Now as far as I am aware, this was paid off a year or two ago and I even had a letter from them telling me they were taking my final payment by direct debit.

Now in order for Santander to continue the conversation – so I was told – they now needed me to tell them what my monthly payment was. I have no idea: this was a year or two ago and I only get online bank statements that go back six months or a year or whatever with limited details, so there’s no way I have that information. Fail.

They asked me when the loan was taken out. I have no idea! It was years ago and I moved out two years ago and binned most paperwork as I had nowhere to store the masses of papers I’d built up over the years. Fail.

In that case, they said, they wouldn’t continue the call. If I wanted to talk to them, I would need to write and ask them for the details. So let’s get this right: if I write them a letter with the same details I’d given them over the phone, they’d send me all the details I needed which they wouldn’t give me over the telephone! Shurely shome mishtake?

“No,” I said, “if you’re claiming there are some arrears, you need to send me the details of how and why they arose and how they’re calculated.”

Wunch of bankers!

iPod Integration

A bit of a nightmare, this. The R3 comes with an auxiliary socket in one of the cubbyholes to allow you to connect an MP3 player to it, but all the play or selection functions have to be performed from the player.

When I ordered the car, I also spec’d it to include Mazda’s iPod integration module which is by no means cheap.

And it’s full of fail!

So far, I’ve tried it with three iPod nanos of varying age and although all connect to the system fine, none of them will actually play through the Bose system. And worse still, fitting the iPod Integration Module apparently disables the auxiliary socket as well! So I’m worse off with it fitted.

I’m giving it one more try: with a birthday coming up, I’ve asked for a new, 5th Generation 16GB iPod nano which should – in theory at least – work. We’ll see. Mazda’s Customer Service department did not have a clue when I specifically asked them the question…

Oneplace: Your Guide to Public Services

So the Government has launched its new service, oneplace, so that taxpayers can log onto a site to see how the various public services in their area to see how they perform.

But the irony:

The Oneplace website is busy

Unfortunately the Oneplace website is experiencing high volumes of traffic, please try again later.
We apologise for the inconvenience.

CrapBerry

{sigh}

Another attempt at adding a number to the contacts list on my BlackBerry Curve 8900 ends in an uncaught exception, a useless phone and a reboot that takes longer even than a PC!

This is despite my having gone through the troubleshooting of deleting the contacts database and recreating it from scratch – itself requiring me to install the BlackBerry Desktop Software that I don’t want or need and which itself failed to install properly on my laptop.

BlackBerry = FAIL

Oh and a tip: rather than having to remove the battery to get it to reboot after an uncaught exception, use alt-rightshift-del to do the ctrl-alt-del PC equivalent.




overtone