Sunday 9 December 2012

Partridge in the past tree

In the news this week was the possible demise, due to bad wether this year of Grey Partridges and Turtle doves. The Daily Telegraph contribution to this sad conservation story was an article and then in the Sunday Telegraph Stella colour supplement a recipe for "Roast partridge with red wine and juniper berries".




The recipe starts with Ingredients list "8 Grey or red legged partridges"  ...   Conservation fail.

Do not eat this bird !!!!


Photo from W. Braun

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Skyfail - Lost in the move 1 phone number with no explanation


Moving house is a good time to have a life laundry, dump some of the junk, refresh the wall pictures and generally move on in life. When moving locally (less than a mile) one thing you don't expect to loose is the phone number you've had for 12 years.

Kevin and his house moving crew packed up our world into boxes, into his van and down the road. We had triaged the clutter into move, charity shop and dump boxes to get started on the stuff reduction but there was still a big pile of things to move. Remember when reducing clutter with a partner that "My Junk is Stuff but your Stuff is Junk."

All Sky UK TV had to do was move a landline phone number from one external line to another within the same exchange code. To be fair Sky made the moving process easy, click on a few buttons and fill a few forms, wait a few days, then the broadband, phone, satellite services were moved. They even had a land line and dish install guy come round to check the service. Unfortunately the phone service was assigned with a new number.

The other half is way more organised than I am and had sticky labels and stationary prepared and was already half way down the long list of organisations to contact with the new address. I did not help by saying I liked the new number that does have a glow to it being a bracketed palindrome.

A call to Sky customer service provided no explanation other than "The customer service rep should have told you when you placed the order." I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a business process failure somewhere between Sky and BT Openreach who control the exchange lines.

Anyway that really does not cut it, no technical or service explanation for what will be a lot of unnecessary hassle and inconvenience. The impact of this on Sky ? Everyone of our 250 closest friends and family gets to hear the story.

 Lets put this down to a Skyfail.  Cue the music Adel .... the thin lady sings.

Cheers Gannett