Car, Music, Money

To the UK, US, Ireland, Australia and Saudi I want to say thanks for sticking with me and taking time to read the site. This month has seen visits from 15 countries in all but some don't seem to hang about much. You guys rock. Would love to know who you are so leave a comment sometime.

On Friday I go on holiday for two weeks and it's unlikely, although not impossible, that I'll update so I thought I'd better put something down tonight.

To tie up some loose ends before I go:

The car seems to be running fine. I amn't pursuing the wheel with the finance company but am going to put a strong complaint in to the dealership. I'm thinking something along the lines of:

I love your vehicles but have had such poor service from your service dept that I wont be purchasing anything from you again. The loss of this one customer probably wont damage your business too much but will cost you considerably more than replacing the wheel would have. If I only discourage one other person from using your dealership then I'll have done enough damage to pay for more than three years servicing. Given that people are impressed with my car and take an interest in what it's like to own I think I have a fair opportunity of discouraging at least one potential customer.

Who knows...maybe I might still get the garage to fit that wheel at get to watch the service manager squirm. Even if they do sort things out to my satisfaction they have completely lost me as a customer.

Talking of customers...One somehow managed to phone through to the training department today and got me. Now since a big part of our job is teaching people how to deliver customer service you would think we'd be at the top of our game. Don't want to give too much away but it took three of us to decide what was best to do. In fairness the end result was way better than it would have been with the call centre guys. My boss walked in toward the end and was extremely worried though. The last time he heard me being that polite was at interview. I think he thought I was talking to the police or the press. Nice one.

The music thing with the iPhone... Well I'm loving the app and it is introducing me to lots of potential music that I like but, it's a bit of an effort to keep it up daily. I think it will be one of those things where I'll try it every time I'm bored. I've blogged about it so can keep track of the date started and can then look back in a years time and see how many tracks it spawned. At the minute I've gone from one track to fourteen so it's not bad going. Try this site for downloading the individual tunes. I'd stick with torrent sites for albums but this is good for tunes: www.4shared.com

On the subject of music...Bob Geldoff (The Boomtown Rats) swore at me 25 years ago today. Well me and several million others when he was telling us to 'give us your fucking money' live on TV on Band Aid. Yep I work with people who weren't born then and lots more who were too young to remember. There's a music festival every week from about March to September nowadays but nothing comes close to live aid. I was 17 in a shared flat and a whole crowd of us gathered to watch and drink and smoke etc. Back then we were changing the world..Now 'We are the world , we are the people...' . God I hated that but Live aid was good. Give it another generation and I'm sure something will best it the way it bested woodstock.

Money..Still aint got none. I actually got one of those pre-approved credit card things through the other day. Just sign and return and you'll get a credit card. Given that I'm skint I could be tempted. Thing is they actually weren't even trying to hide the fact that they wanted 39% interest. The UK is usually quite good at catching that sort of scam and stopping it dead (we do do free enterprise but normally in a more civilised way). When does the interest charged become criminal? It seems that world leaders are scared to criticise banks just now because they are so insecure but someone needs to protect the vulnerable. 39% interest should be criminal.

Also on the money front...My wife lost her purse at the weekend. Had to stop all the cards etc and were planning to get new driving licenses and stuff when....Someone phones and says they found it. She got it back cash and all. As far as I can tell no one has stolen her identity (still looks like the same girl to me). So the world can't be all bad. Maybe it's even better than we think but we just concentrate on the bad.

Anyhow that's me for the moment. If you're really dedicated and can't wait till I get back from hols then go back and read some old posts (there's more than 80 now). If not I'll speak to you when I get back.

Did I mention that I still don't smoke?

Next time...

T