Rob’s Blog

OK, I know I only finished reading 1984 a short while ago, but I didn’t expect it to be so relevant so quickly:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/115736/Sin-bins-for-worst-families

I’m not quite sure what sort of catastrophic series of failures must have occurred for this to happen. And surely a PR team or spin doctor must have pointed out how utterly ridiculous this idea is, and how it will be hated by the public.

The parallels to the novel (I’m wondering if ‘novel’ is actually appropriate any more…) are uncanny: video monitoring in private homes, ‘private security guards’ checking up on families, state-controlled daily activities and diets.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there are two further causes for concern. Firstly, the Sunday Express, which reported this story, gives many lines of text to support this idea, but only one single sentence against it. Secondly, we don’t actually get any sort of vote on this, or any say at all.

On the plus side, I could re-read the book, pop down the bookies and start making bets on the future - I’d make a fortune.

For those of you who don’t know, Vittorio Colao is currently CEO of Vodafone. See where this is going now?

You’ve had a month to fix the “temporary” problems with topping up. You’ve failed. Clearly, Mr Colao, the people in your organisation don’t want my money. And that’s fine. I’ll happily give it to someone else.

It’s not just this one incident. Many things over a period of years have made me grow to hate your company more and more. And I’ve had enough. I think the final straw was spotting your £6700 million profit each year. I’m sure some of that invested wisely in making your website work, and making your network work, would be money well spent. But then again, I’m just a customer. It’s not like my opinion is valuable or matters one iota.

See ya Vodafone. Hope the recession hits you badly.

On a completely random note, I have just seen a McDonalds advert on TV and I’m sure the McDonalds they drive into at the end is the one on the A41…

Sorry, just caught my eye Weird how I can spot that sort of thing too…

The likes of QVC, Ideal World and Kleeneze have bought us thousands of things we would never need. But this was just… weird…

It’s a downward slope from here to the shoe event horizon.

My hatred of Vodafone, I would say, is long running. It started when we were first introduced to one another, and has continued unabated to this day. Let’s start with the basics, shall we?

Calls are Shambolic

I know in this modern world very few people use a mobile phone to make a phone call, but it might surprise Vodafone to know that some people actually do. Me, for example. I expect a phone to work as a phone. For this to work, network coverage is required (discussed below) along with your ability to inform me of a call arriving. If you don’t inform me, generally with the traditional method of making the phone ring, then I have little chance of answering the bloody thing. Sending me a text message six hours later is of little use. Especially when you use that message to place the blame on me! I did not miss the call - you did. Please, in future, make the phone ring when I have an incoming call more often than 50% of the time.

Your Network Coverage is Useless

At home, signal is somewhat hard to come by. In Exeter (a city by all accounts) you also fail miserably to provide the required signal to use your services. I would check this against your map of network coverage, but this is currently replaced with the less than helpful error message:

Sorry, unfortunately the Vodafone Coverage Viewer application is not fully compatible with your web browser or platform, and therefore not supported at this time. Please try to use another web browser.

Is Firefox with Flash, Java and every other add-on really that odd that you can’t support it? This brings me to my next issue…

Your Website is Diabolical

NB: Do let me know if you have any other synonyms for “awful”, as I will soon run out. Cheers!

It’s slow. Clicking from page to page means a wait of around 30 seconds to two minutes. This is not my Internet connection or computer - every other website works just fine. This would not be so bad if things could be reached in a number of clicks that doesn’t need expressing in standard form. However, in your bid for complexity, confusion, bogglement and discombobulation of the consumer, everything is burried in a labyrinth of submenus unrelated to the topic at hand.

Also, none of it works. The map of coverage, as mentioned, just keels over and dies at the meerest possibility of being asked to appear. I decided to do as the error suggested and try another browser. I decided on Lynx. Think of the Internet being displayed as Teletext. To my amazement it actually displayed the troublesome map!

Mobile Coverage Check
Our coverage maps allow you to check network coverage anywhere in the UK. We expand our coverage area and improve the capacity of
the network every month and the maps also show you these forthcoming improvements.
Using Coverage Check
Simply enter a postcode, place name or location and we will show you a detailed coverage map.

Postcode or Place name
____________________
[uk.jpg]
[Postcode_______________]

[search.PNG]-Submit   [reset.PNG]

Click to centre the map

[loading.gif]

Move the map North

Move the map South

Move the map West

Move the map East

Current or Future Coverage
(*) Coverage today
( ) Future Coverage
Coverage Maps

[X] [sq_red.gif]        3G broadband
Video Calling, Mobile TV, Music Downloads, Mobile Internet & Mobile Office.
[X] [sq_blue.gif]       Standard Services
Voice, Text Messaging, Picture Messaging, Mobile Email
[sq_light_blue.gif] Variable quality service

Well, it got a bit further than before. Congratualtions Vodafone in designing the only interactive map that works better in a plain text browser! The rest of the site, unfortunately, is just as crap in plain text as in a normal browser.

It also fails to process debit card transactions. Every time I attempt to buy credit online I am presented with the same error, or something worded similarly, but slightly different, to give the illusion that someone might be screwing it up in a different way this week.

Useless Messages

The following message was sent to my phone last time I topped up:

From Vodafone: çç   We?ve added 300        Texts/100Minutes packs to your account on31/05/2009 & 12:01. çç   This pack will expire on      29/06/2009.

I’ve always liked the latin letter c with cedilla. Underused, I think. Spaces seem a little unnecessary, and even after you correct the punctuation and attempts to text me in HTML, it still doesn’t make much gramattical sense. And the 29th of June is not one month after 31st July. And I topped up at 12:57, not 12:01. And it took six attempts to get it to work.

Charges are Astronomical

10p for a text message is a little much. No, it’s a hell of a lot. 10p to send 160 characters. Sending Romeo and Juliet would take 972 text messages and cost £97.20. Or 39 copies of the actual book.

It’s also more expensive than sending data to and from the Hubble space telescope. A text message is 140 bytes of data, so 7,490 text messages to make up 1MB of data, at a cost of £749. Getting data from Hubble, according to NASA, costs £8.85 per MB. So, Vodafone is 84.6 times more expensive than getting data from space. Marvellous.

(Also, I have only just noticed the awful pun in the title of that section. Purely unintentional and accidental. Honest. Feel free to ignore it.)