Category Archive

However disillusioned we get with Gordon Brown and the Labour Party (and there’s no way I’ll vote for them again - though I Blame that on Blair, not Brown), we should never forget just how horrible and slimey Tories are.

Recess Monkey - I feel your pain.

In the bad old days of only a few months ago, I used to have to queue 15 minutes every time I visited Abbey National. It drove me nuts.

Now some genius has installed a new system.  The Cheese Counter System.  We take a ticket and we wait to be called.

In the meantime a screen keeps us up to date with our estimated waiting time.

The result? 

They’ve actually managed to increase waiting time.  The pic above shows 18 minutes and counting.  It was up to over 20 by the time they served me.

Unfortunately for the poor bastards behind me, by the time I left it was up to 23.  The reason being that it takse a while to empty and close your account.

Because there’s no way I’m using up 20 minutes of another lunch hour to deal with them ever again.

* NB Went straight into Nat West and payed my savings in there instead.  Waiting time: zero minutes.

Somebody just ended up at Our Man in Newcastle after Googling:

“ba phone number that actually gets through”

Poor bastards - there must be thousands of them out there - listening to hold music, if they’re lucky, but more likely simply being told, via a recorded message, that BA is just too busy to talk to them.  As the days, then weeks, go by they wonder will they ever see their cases again.

There is just nothing you can do.  Nothing that BA haven’t suffered.  No threat you can make against them.  Legal?  Media?  Shame?  Whatever.  It’s water off a ducks back now.  I feel your pain.

The good news: after this upset we finally found our lovely summer flat.

Altogether brighter, fresher, closer to work and with that all important sitting out area for the summer.

So how did we find it? Well, we saw it on Gumtree.

For the unenlightened, Gumtree is just a place to buy, sell, giveaway or swap things. You can put up pictures, info, contacts details – in short, virtually everything you need to know to decide whether or not you want to view a house.

We saw the pics. We liked it. We arranged a viewing. We liked it. We agreed the deal. It’s that simple.

All done without the use of a lettings agency.

Our lettings agency experiences weren’t so positive. Pattisons made an appointment they didn’t keep. Then they rang me a whole two weeks later to see if I wanted to see another property. Understandably we said no and explained why. They didn’t apologise.

They did, however, ring up again the next day to ask: do you want to see another property? Lettings agents, it seems, have thick skins.

I trawled one by one, the lettings agent paradise of Acorn Road in Jesmond. Every last one of them, without fail, told me just to check their websites. I did they were all, without exception, wildly out of date and lacking the most basic of info.

Acorn Properties were the most friendly but their initially businesslike manner was ruined by not getting back to me on two occasions when I tried to set up viewings.

When I checked out the Adderstones Group’s website I was amazed to find that the details it provided included only a downloadable pdf of properties available – no pics, no details. Try working through that.

On other occasions agents couldn’t even find details when we rang up asking about properties when we saw them either on the web or marked by To Let boards. Other agents didn’t even have websites. Can you imagine?

So what do we expect of Lettings Agents? Well we want the obvious. We want to be met at properties when we make appointments. We want agents to keep us in mind when new properties become available that meet our requirements. We want them to return our calls and our emails (I genuinely don’t think many letting agency employees even understand email). We want them to, unlike Bowsons Lettings, keep their word and behave with some level of ethics and decency.

When we say we are interested in properties in East Newcastle we don’t expect reams of badly photocopied brochures through our letterboxes detailing houses in Gateshead.

But…

You could also argue that agents don’t actually have to do any of this because, although they haven’t spotted it, their world has already changed

You see, really we don’t need them at all. We just need a website that functions and some way of contacting the owner without the agent slowing things down.

I want to see pics on the site. Lots of them. I want to be able to enlarge them. I want to be able to send questions. I’d like to see a diary where I can place viewing bookings. I want each property to have its own url so I can forward them individually to my partner for her consideration.

Comments from past viewers might be cool too. If I was a landlord and none of the viewers took the property I’d be interested to know why.

Most of all I want it to be up to date. I don’t want to waste my time checking up on properties that have already gone or may not even reach the market. None of this is hard. Newspapers change their entire websites overnight – we’re only asking agents to weed out those properties already spoken for.

Gumtree already provides much of this and it was significant that my house hunting only became successful once we ditched the agents.

Using an agent would have cost me in the region of £400 more in fees. By not using one I have been able to use the saved cash (almost £70 a month over a six month contract) to find an altogether nicer property. By searching myself and dealing directly with the owner I have also had much better service than what the agents charge so much for.

In truth, the estate agency industry will die and its employees don’t even appear to know it. When they could be promoting the human side of what they can offer, as opposed to the more efficient high tech option, they’re not even keeping up with basic business courtesies. They’ve either already given up or have just been spoiled by housing booms gone by.

The very next time I do any of this as seller/buyer or landlord/tenant I won’t be using agents. They simply aren’t needed any more. Everything is better and easier if I do it myself.

Will anyone miss them when they’re gone?

* Since being treated badly by Bowson Lettings over 20 people have found their way to this website having searched for the agency. No doubt they read what I wrote and I am sure the vast majority decided to go with a more reputable agent. Good.

So Terminal 5 is a disaster and British Airways is once more having its named dragged through the mud.

Is anyone really surprised? Does anyone who has ever used British Airways actually have anything good to say about them?

Last year when I flew back from Nicaragua, British Airways lost my bag. I was left with a phone number to call to try and trace it.

I called it. It was so busy that I couldn’t even go into a queue. My God, how many bags had they lost?

They recorded message simply told me to ring back another time. I tried and tried and tried and I never got through to one human being on that phone line. I didn’t even get to join the queue – not even the luxury of being exasperated by hold music.

I started ringing all numbers. I no longer cared that I was ringing the wrong hotline. I just wanted to speak to a person. Nothing, nothing and nothing.

Some weeks later I came home and wandered what that was in the backyard. It was my bags. I hadn’t been in so they just chucked them round the back.

No letter of apology or anything. No follow up phone call or email. Can you imagine any other organisation behaving like this?

Traveling by air is not fun. It’s almost as if the airlines know they are the bad guys. Like they’ve decided to cut back on every customer comfort and maximise their profits before the green lobby catches up with them.

If their customers hate them in the meantime then what do they care?  If it’s all going to come crashing down then they might as well be architects of their own downfall.  Better that, they must reason, than letting the Greenies do it.

I liked this from author Anthony Horowitz who was caught up in the debacle with his family:

The one thing I didn’t see at Heathrow was the expected demonstration by environmental groups such as Greenpeace or Plane Stupid. But perhaps they weren’t needed. There were, after all, thousands of people protesting for them, albeit in a rather lacklustre and disorganised way. They were called passengers.

And at the end of the day, it is their voice that may put an end to the vexed question of airport expansion. The bigger it gets the worse it gets, and I’d guess that modern air travel carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. There will have to come a time when everyone decides that anything is better than seat 27K behind the lavatory… even staying at home.

The environmentalists only have to wait, because in the end they’ve simply got to win.

I’ve been accused in the comments of being a bit of a grouch on here.

Fair point. You have to be moved to write anything at all. While in Vietnam and Nicaragua it was all so new and so different and I had a story to tell. There was an obvious narrative.

Here my life seems more private. Talking about my day to day life would be likely to offend someone – it’d also make for dull reading. My life now is probably pretty similar to yours.

But point taken. Look out for much more cheery stuff soon - and stick with this post for news of fluffy bunnies. Really.

But first this (sorry):

There is no way of being nice when you’re talking about estate agents.

To put this in context, we recently made the decision to move to a more summer friendly flat. We want some outside area - be it a balcony, small garden or even a nice yard.

We’ve been searching less than a week and…Oh God. Estate agents make their money too easy.

They don’t return your emails at all. Their websites don’t work. Their pictures of properties include only outside shots – these are terraced homes. They all look the same from the outside dummies. Show me the insides.

Despite all this we found a new flat on Saturday.

Patio doors led to a decked out yard - perfect for evening drinks when it gets warmer.

It was around the corner from a pool – great for my fitness kick.

It was on the Metro line - which would make me just two minutes from work.

We rang Sunday. We knew the office would be closed but we wanted to leave a message to say yes yes yes, we loved it…we’ll take it.

I followed that up with an email. We’d pay the cash they asked, we’d pay the horrific admin fees, the rent in advance, the deposit. It was worth it to secure this lovely spot.

I rang at 9am on the dot on when they opened on Monday.

We want it – I told them.

Great, they said.

We got your phone message and your email. It’s yours. Just drop off the cash. What time would suit you?

I suggested at 12.30 – in my lunch hour.

That’s just fine they said.

Two hours later – they called me. Our lovely flat was gone.

But, but, but…you said it was ours. I was coming in to pay the cash.

Apparently someone came into their office and dropped their cash off first.

They didn’t tell me we were in a race situation. They told me it was mine. We even set a time. Surely this other person would be told that it was already promised to me. I could have been there in five minutes flat if only they had told me the clock was ticking.

I wrote a pissed off email. They wrote back a seemingly polite letter that essentially said: “tough shit”.

They said they had other properties they could show me.

I told them to shove it.

And now we’re back to the beginning again. We still haven’t found our summer flat.

But, now I’ve got that whinge out of my system, I promise there will be more positivity around here. Soon. Very soon.

First though I just have to write – in the hope that this will eventually show up when potential customers/victims Google them:

IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO LET OR FIND A PROPERTY IN THE JESMOND AREA OF NEWCASTLE THEN DON’T USE BOWSON LETTINGS - THEY WILL ONLY WASTE YOUR TIME.

There. I feel more positive already.

About those bunnies. Did you know that there are rabbits on the grassy areas right in the middle of Newcastle city centre?

Expect Eastertastic fluffy bunny shots soon.

UPDATE: ILuvNUFC has offered to link this post on his photoblog to push it higher up the Google search list. If anyone else would like to do the same then that would be fantastic. Make sure the link text is Bowson Lettings .Think of it as vicarious payback for Estate Agents as a whole.

Oops.  Not sure how I missed this in the post below but, in the Guardian article that inspired it, MasterChef winner James Nathan comments (on Delia’s cheating):

My one real comment on all this, is that not everyone lives in London, not everyone can drop into their local deli to buy fresh ingredients on their way home from work.

I’ve stayed with friends in the provinces, they both work, they both have two-hour commutes, they have two kids, they have to shop at big supermarkets and they have to buy for a month or so at a time.

You utter utter twat.  Yes, head five miles out of London and all you can buy is black pudding and that’s what we stuff our fat kids with.  What an absolute utter nob.

“I’ve stayed with friends in the provinces..”

Gosh, really.  Have you?  What it soooo awful?  What were they like?  Did they make you eat awful food from those nasty big supermarkets?  Wow, you are sooo brave.

James Nathan - Mastertwat

More tales from the Guardian of London folk peering down their noses at the fecking “provinces”.  Utter arseholes.

This is much more like it from David Cox: (Bitching about Guardian Unlimited to date, here, here, here, here and here.)

What may appear disproportionate outrage about a minor act of nepotism perhaps reflects something deeper. It’s a feeling that those who occupy the public pulpit don’t altogether deserve the airs they give themselves. Any such feeling wouldn’t be without foundation.

Since the dawn of the mass media, its practitioners have enjoyed a peculiar degree of immunity from the complaints of those they address. Understandably, they’ve taken advantage of this, growing lazy, sloppy, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, nepotistic and arrogant. Readers have sensed this, but until recently have been powerless to do anything about it. Now, the internet has given them a voice.

Just how they use this voice is not something that media managers will be able to dictate. The people are under no obligation to be mannerly. They may be unruly and often are, but they’re also often right. Certainly, they’ve already shown themselves well up to finding the flaws in illustrious journalists’ output. And, right or wrong, they aren’t going to shut up now.

Politicians have long grown used to facing the wrath of the rabble. It was the vote that brought them to heel. Now, it seems, the web may subject journalists to similar treatment. We shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t like it. Priesthoods prefer quiescent congregations.

That actually makes the Max Gogarty affair feel like the start of something.  Up the revolution.

Okay - so I get angry at The Guardian.  I get irritated at it because, for the want of anything better,  it’s my paper of choice.  There are others you expect only (and this is in no way too strong a word) EVIL from.

Despite this lowly opinion of them, they occasionally still manage to behave in a manner so low that it very nearly takes you by surprise.

See below, with thanks from Liberal Conspiracy and The Enemies of Reason for the info and links.

Diana Appleyard - I hope your parents are very proud.

PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana
HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@aol.com

Liberal Conspiracy tells us that her website says she is a contributor to Women’s Hour and a member of the NUJ.  Will they have a problem with this?

I believe the LabourHome was the first to publish this.  Well done to the whistle blower.  No doubt they were pretty close to the journalist in order to receive the mail. 

Congratulations to them for doing the right thing and forwarding it to someone who could bring wider attention to this horrific behaviour.

More evidence, following the Max Gogarty blog,  of the Guardian’s absolute disdain for its readers. 

The message below was sent out as part of its football-based, Friday Fiver Email and was written by Barney Ronay and Barry Glendenning (yes it took two of them to write that snappy intro).

“Possibly after witnessing the cyber-monstering dished out to young Max Gogarty, 19, for the heinous crime of going travelling and agreeing to write about it for a travel website in exchange for bead and beer money, the Premier League has categorically dismissed reports that it will sue Fifa if it tries to stop its foolish plans to play Premier League matches abroad in exchange for TV and merchandising money.

“After all, who in their right mind would hop on a plane and if they knew it would send guardian.co.uk’s more malevolent and sanctimonious readers into a simmering self-righteous fury over … not much really when you think about it? Yep, us too.”

Serially updated. See unfolding story below.

Web 2.0 - can give it to you with both barallels. This is as funny as it is painful. Something tells me the travel editor has a lot of explaining to do.

Discovered via Bloggerheads - thank you thank you thank you. Suddenly I feel less angry towards the Guardian.  I am now content just to join in with the laughing - no more slagging, only guffaws.

Max Gogarty Update 1: A Travel Editor Says Sorry (Almost) and gets yet more comment box abuse.

Max Gogarty Update 2: This fabulous comment to the above is spot on and ties in exactly with what I was saying in my last post, - see it wasn’t just me.

What’s simultaneously so marvellous and so awful about this story is what a paradigm it is for so much.

For how the interweb can explode a little story so quickly. For how much hatred there towards a perceived middle class London coterie who run the media. For how un-selfaware that coterie is about their own status. For how much funnier cruel stuff is than all that serious nonsense. For how easy it is to be vitriolic when blogging. And so on and so on.

It’s not Maxieboy’s fault that he represents such a terrible stereotype, but you’d think he might have had an inkling of awareness. Actually, not necessarily, I meet his type on a weekly basis and they are a staggeringly ill-informed bunch. And of course he must feel crushed that this little story has gone a bit nuts and he’s being laughed at for little more than writing a truly ballsucking piece. But you know what, I think he’ll probably survive.

The real issue here, as others have pointed out, is with the travel eds. I don’t think it honestly occurs to you - and when I say ‘you’, I mean London based journos on the nationals - just how often, how incessantly and how forcefully we are fed the stories of the lives of a small subsection of London society, how we can’t open a paper or magazine without hearing their bleating, self-important voices complaining about their nannies, discussing whether it’s OK to wear a mini skirt round the Portobello Road if you’re over 40, and yes, just what their kids did on their gap years.

It’s so dispiriting and depressing to find that there is LESS of a cross section of a society represented in the acres of newsprint that there were 30 years ago.

Like university education, the clock is turning back from the brave years of working class kids taking a step up. Unis are more middle class than ever and so are newspapers.
Now, Maximillian didn’t know he represented such a cliche (yes, they are there for a reason, boyo), and he might thus be astonished by the levels of anger on these blogs, but the sad fact is that the Max’s of this world don’t even realise they’re treated like the centre of the known universe - because they’ve already taken that fact for granted.

Every word of his glittering prose is littered with that fact, along with a smattering of youthful bravado. Sure, it’s not his fault he’s a painful archetype, but by god, Guardian, didn’t any of you recognise this as an article that was going to get SLAUGHTERED by us mere provincial mortals?

No, you didn’t, because you too, stuffed to the gills with your Marinas and Cartner-Morleys, you just took it as read that he’d be accepted as the voice of youth. That’s how out of touch you are.

Yes, this whole thing has gone OTT, but don’t blame your readership for biting back for being so consistently and systematically excluded from your version of who the world consists of - and giving an article like that space instead. You got found out. Good.

Fantastic. Give that man a Guardian blog.
Max Gogarty Update 3: The Guardian/Observer is getting arsey and while the large proportion of the bile has been aimed at the paper and it’s incredibly short sighted Travel Editor - all commentators are now being labelled as cruel, heartless etc.

Well, it wasn’t us that put him in the firing line.
They could have featured him anywhere in the paper - that didn’t have the comment function if they really thought he was genuinely talented. But the Guardian isn’t humble and doesn’t learn - only blaming its big, bad readers.

The piece, which is incredibly harsh on its own commenters, includes this whinging - and redirecting of blame:

The director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the mood had changed after the intervention of Max’s father and the comments had become more critical of the website and its editors’ decision to commission and publish the blog: ‘They were much happier to give us a kicking instead of him.’

In her own online blog, Bell wrote: ‘We’re used to it, but it is still an absurdly awful experience for the individual on the end of the monstering, particularly if you are a relative novice.’ She added: ‘Perhaps an open blog post was not the best place to publish it.’contributors were uneasy over the tone of many comments. One wrote: ‘The amount of hate, envy and hypocrisy that’s been on display here is shocking.’

But others compared Max to Nathan Barley, a loathsome fictional twentysomething London media type in the Channel 4 sitcom of the same name. One asked, ‘Whose son is Max then?’, while another predicted, ‘Oh, Christ. This guy’s going to get an absolute hammering.’ Yet another added: ‘Don’t show Derek Conway this - he’ll be most upset.’

Still others urged him to continue the blog and answer the critics, but his father said: ‘We just want him to be left alone. It’s scary and the exposure is so horrible. He’s a strong kid and I think he is moving on. Max himself made the decision to pull it and I think it is a mature decision.

‘People have said “stay and fight”. But there is no way - whatever he writes next week, it would be pilloried. It’s a no-win situation. He has seen some of the blog. He has said to me that he doesn’t like the media world now. He doesn’t want to go into it any more.’

Oh pleeease. The Guardian, Emily Bell, Travel Editor, Andy Pietrask, travel writing Dad, Paul Gogarty and to a much lesser degree young Max Gogarty all come out of this looking bad.

Admitting publicly to lessons learnt might have been a big start - in reality you can’t help but think that it’s just way to easy to blame people from outside their cosy little media world. We still await from The Guardian: “We f*cked up. We have learnt”

Similar comments here, superbly put by Dan Wilson.  More from Bloggerheads too. 

Time for the Guardian to stop digging on this one.

Following Noodlepie’s unearthing of the worst restaurant review ever (via Pittstop Works), today I read what surely the most awful,  most laboured, match report I have ever seen.

The match was good though.  Big smiles today.

A parcel was sent “guaranteed Saturday delivery”.

Unfortunately, with it being sent to a business address, there was no one there take personal delivery.  So it wasn’t dropped off.

On Monday my customer rings me and asks where the urgent parcel is. I check with Royal Mail. They explain the Saturday situation.

But by this time it is 2pm on Monday. They tell me it is in the van to be dropped off today. But apparently not yet.

“Can you,” I enquire, “check with the van to see when they will deliver?”

“No,” they reply.

They explain they have no means of communicating with the driver once he has set off in the morning.

“Really?”

I’m quite surprised.

“So there really is no way at all of getting in touch with him? Not even in an emergency or when an urgent parcel hasn’t been delivered?”

“No, none at all,” replies the indignant, but suddenly seemingly proud, Royal Mail lady.

“We are not a courier service you know.”

Doing a Royal Mail: Promoting yourself as superior by offering a significantly poorer service than your competitors.