Firstly, the number of phones it supports is meagre at best – most of which are old and retired now. None of the Nokia E or N-series phones (or indeed, any Series 60 Symbian phones) are supported – though that’s a Nokia issue, rather than an Audi one, which they’ve only just fixed with the E71 and N96.

Secondly, when you have a compatible phone, and you wish to utilize the Audi’s wonderful voice-activated controls, it all turns to goopy shit. To illustrate this, I recorded my attempt this morning at trying to dial my voicemail box using the voice controls. All the car needs to do, is dial ’901′.

Apologies for the quality of the recording, it was done by using another phone’s Voice Recorder and then exporting the audio off.

Painful MP3 here. (4:19)

Using the myriad comparison websites, I eventually did find a good deal, with Privilege. So good a deal, I opted to pay up-front, instead of by instalments. After a week or two, Privilege wrote to me to ask for me to send them some ‘proof’ of my No Claims Bonus. After enquiring with them, what this boils down to is a piece of paper from your previous insurer which says “Yes, this person has X years no claims bonus”.

So, I ring up my previous insurer, Esure and ask for this piece of paper. They’re very nice and efficient on the phone, and tell me that they’ll send it out and I’ll have it within a few days. Great stuff.

A couple of weeks pass and there’s no paperwork from Esure. There is, however, a stern letter from Privilege saying that if they didn’t get the ‘proof’ soon, they may have to charge me extra. So, I ring up Esure again and ask, again, for my proof of no-claims bonus. They, again, say they will send it, and that it’ll take 3-5 days.

I ring Privilege and explain to them what’s happening, and they say that everything is ok, and they’ll hold off on any excess charges for a little while longer while Esure sort themselves out.

My personal life turns upside down at this point, and car insurance is the last thing on my mind, and some more time passes – perhaps a month or so, and we come to yesterday. I receive another letter from Privilege saying that they’ll be debiting my account with around £500 within 7 days due to the no-show of this ‘proof’.

So, last night, I rang Esure again, once again requesting this proof. They claim to have sent me it twice over, and suggest I check with the Post Office as they believe my post may be being tampered with! Yes – because naughty posties are only interested in letters from Esure, and not anything more juicy.

They do offer to verbally tell Privilege (but only if Privilege phone them!) that I’m a good driver, but when I check in with Privilege, I find that they won’t entertain such frivolity and demand this mythical piece of paper again. However, they will entertain the paperwork in facsimilie form and give me a fax number. Great!

I ring Esure back again, armed with fax number – and to my utter astonishment, they claim that it’s their policy to only fax any policy details to a person’s own fax number! Back to square one. I have a sudden brainwave, and give Esure _my_ fax to email number – which, even though it’s an 0870-prefixed number, the Esure monkey does not question. I figure I can get Esure to fax me the document, then I can print it, and fax it on to Privilege. A kind of intra-insurance-company-fax-proxy, if you will. There’s a gap in the market right there, you know!

He assures me that the details will be faxed through “first thing tomorrow”, which I deem acceptable, as it is knocking on for 9pm by this point.

This morning, Thunderbird ‘bings’ at me as my fax-to-email folder recieves a new message, at 10:40. It is a fax! Hurrah! I open the fax….and it’s a blank sheet of paper. FOR FUCKS SAKE.

Hang on – it’s ok, there’s another one just popped into the mailbox – perhaps they screwed the first one up….and…no, that’s blank too. And, oh, there’s another one. It’s blank. And another… they send me 6 fucking blank fucking faxes one after the fucking other. Either Esure really, really have it in for me, or the spotty oik they’ve got manning the fax machine in their office is feeding it the paper upside down.

I’m angry now, and ring Esure to find out just what the fuck is going on. This is where it gets really, really fruity. Someone answers the phone, or, do they – they seem to be reading a script – like an answerphone message – “I’m sorry, the department you have called is unable to take your call right now. Would you like to phone back after 2pm?”. I’m still undecided as to wether it was a person or not, until the voice said “Is that ok?”

“No. NO. It’s bloody well not ok!”. What kind of absurd idea is it to have phone operators ANSWERING THE PHONE only to tell callers that they can’t help them? Surely this achieves absolutely nothing other than frustrating the caller? If they have a computer glitch, or technical problem – why not just say so. It’s a more honest excuse, and I just found it utterly incredulous that the bosses at Esure think this is a good idea.

The phone operator who helpfully won’t help me, takes down my policy number and promises to get things sorted, but I suspect I’ll be calling again later/tomorrow in a vain attempt to try and unfuck things.

What makes me laugh the most, however, is this. Esure’s customer services department operates out of a building at 19 Cadogan Street, Glasgow. Do you want to guess where Privilege operate from?

Yep, 18 Cadogan Street, Glasgow.

Who’s ever going to believe that Google and Virgin would open a Martian colony? Or that kernel.org.uk, the home of the Linux kernel, was switching to FreeBSD?

Then there’s the jokes that are just designed to get a laugh – like Youtube’s redirection of videos to the Rick Astley classic, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

Maybe the days have gone where we’d be fooled into thinking spaghetti grew on trees, and we’re all far more ‘informed’, due to the wonderous interweb…

The meeting goes well and fairly quickly, and I’m left with three hours to kill before my late train back. I’d much rather get open returns, but one must always count the pennies when dealing with expense claims!

I figure that it wouldn’t be too much of a wait if I made my way over to St Pancras, and sip a couple of quiet ones at the Baby Betjeman, where I could use the wireless and get on with some stuff. So, I make my way back across town and just miss the 5pm mad-dash – which was nice.

However, disaster strikes. The Baby Betjeman is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it lies in peace. Well. It’s closed, anyhow. All that’s left is the giant parasol and a chalk noticeboard saying that they’ve closed up because the ‘proper’ Betjeman pub is nearing completion – at the end of April! Bollocks.

The only other option is the on-platform ‘Champagne Bar’, which is entirely as pretentious as it sounds. I find a seat by the bar and order a cup of tea, in true British stiff-upper-lip style. However, tea doesn’t last 2 hours and curiosity gets the better of me, and after supping my (rather bland) tea I take a look at the drinks menu.

This place sure does sell a lot of plonk. For obvious reasons, though, they only sell a few varieties by the glass – meaning that if you want to sample an 1990 Krug, you’ll be stumping up a few hundred quid for a bottle. There is nothing non-Champagne-related on the menu, apart from a couple of sparkling wines.

Madness and boredom takes me, and I order a ten-quid glass of Bollinger. The cheapest Champagne on the menu – something I’ve never heard of, and likely to taste of cat’s piss – is £7.50 a glass. I figure if I go with a ‘name’ I’ve heard of, it’ll at least taste good while I’m struggling to get over the cost. It is, actually, very nice – but worth £10 for a single glass? I think not.

It’s only after I order and drink my Bolly (darling!) that I notice that some other people at the bar appear to be drinking lager. At least, they’re drinking something that looks like lager out of large goblets. I double-check the menu, and no – there’s no lager or beer on there anywhere.

When the barman (or, more probably a ‘Champagne Waiter’) asks me if I would like another drink, I ask for a lager. He replies, somewhat nonchalantly that they do not have any lager. I gesture over to two guys clearly drinking lager and express my disbelief in his assertion. “Oh, zaht is zee beer, made from zee Champagne”.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Beer? From Champagne? You what? I tell him I’ll have one, even if just to see what the hell it really is. It turns out to be Kasteel Cru, a lager brewed with ‘Champagne Yeast’. “Made from Champagne” is stretching it quite a bit – but, it’s only £3.75 and for fizzy (naturally!) lager it’s not too bad.

Speaking of stretching the truth – I noticed that the Champagne bar at St. Pancras claims to be – with no hint of irony whatsoever – “the longest Champagne bar in Europe”. This is fine, except for one thing.

The bar, itself, is a small square – there are four seats at each side. It is, by no definition of the term – ‘long’. Evidently, I’m not the only person to notice this and a fellow Kasteel Cru drinker pipes up and asks a waiter. The response is that it’s the length of the seating area – which runs down a fair length of one of the platforms which makes it the longest. There’s tenuous links and there’s tenuous links… really!

On the train back I watch the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-laden new movie – “No Country For Old Men”. It is everything I hoped that “There Will Be Blood” would be – full of suspense, mystery and damned fine acting.

Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as the pathos-driven local Sheriff, and – who-da-thunk-it – Josh Brolin can act, playing the hunted ‘man in the wrong place at the wrong time’ – but the show is totally, and utterly stolen by Javier Bardem’s psychotic hitman, Anton Chigurh.

If there’s a list of top movie psychopaths, then Anton is right up there with Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci, Goodfellas), Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet) and Hannibal Lecter. Woody Harrelson and Trainspotting debutee Kelly MacDonald provide excellent supporting parts. The only let down is the ending, which is disappointingly inconclusive.

There’s no way I’d be any use at work, so I call in sick and spend the day alternating between the sofa and the loo. It looks like the illness I’ve been experiencing could well be this Norovirus thing that’s been going around recently.

Regarding the entry the other day – Bad Brother – I read with great interest that the 19 year old “entrepreneur” contestant Liam Young has actually told a few teeny-tiny little porky pies about his allegedly booming business. Namely that…well…there isn’t one. Not really. He’s hired a mailing address and bought some shared webhosting. Sure, he’s registered his company name with Companies House – and, bless, his mum is Company Secretary – but he appears to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land with respect to his claims of being an internet business magnate!

I probably earn more than this choade does hosting the few bits and bobs which I do for people. This news appears to be all over t’interweb, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the newspapers pounce on it. Which is probably exactly what Endemol and Channel 4 want to happen.

I’m sure that given all the previous problems with previous series’ Endemol will have gone to great lengths to double and triple check prospective entrants and any fucking idiot that can add up 2+2 can see that there’s something a bit fucking spaffy about some dickhead that claims to host “2 million websites” for “250,000 customers” whilst employing “12 staff” and yet…. has a gross turnover of £200,000pa. Doubly so, when the moron in question posts this request for advice on how to embellish one’s turnover figures in a public forum three months ago…

Do we really think that Channel 4 and Endemol are this dumb, or is this just Endemol’s attempt at a poor publicity stunt? Putting this twat in the house knowing full-well that people would pick up on his outrageous claims and ‘out’ his lies? Call me a skeptic if you like…

My job, managing a team of sysadmins, DBAs and support staff for ‘a large internet retailer’ means that I get to be the lucky punter whose phone number appears on DNS WHOIS records. This is something that ICANN stipulate should always be present in WHOIS data, and as a responsible retailer, we provide a working, real number. It happens to be mine.

These details are ostensibly a ‘Technical Contact’ – supposedly used by other internet professionals to report issues and other operational problems with that particular domain name. The trouble is, I get a fair amount of non-technical calls from it. Everything from customers wanting to place orders, to returns, to complaints, to Chinese people wanting to sell us stock, to recruitment agencies wanting to sell us people. Everything. Everything, that is, except Technical issues.

It got so bad a while ago that I got our phone guy to record a polite message which gets played before the phone rings at my end, which tells callers exactly what this number is for. It even gives them our dedicated Customer Services number. This is great, and the number of ‘fake’ calls has dropped significantly, but we still get people ringing through wanting anything other than technical assistance.

For some, I guess it’s that they think they’ve found some ‘magic’ number into the company, which will bypass any form of queuing and will get their order-related problem dealt with quicker. This is wrong! We can be as sympathetic as possible with reference to any problem, but, unfortunately – ultimately – we can’t actually help. Really, we can’t. The best we can do is to transfer you to our Customer Services team, and you’ll land right at the back of the queue.

Others seem to use the line as a backdoor into the company, even saying things like “Oh, I know this is the wrong department, but could you please transfer me to your ‘X’ department” – If you actually needed that department in the first place, you’d have a number. Don’t call me, I won’t put you through.

From a frustrated customer’s point of view, I can see the logic – you ain’t getting the result you want from regular CS, and any other method is viewed as a possible other route into the company. It’s something I’ve experienced myself – with the likes of BT and Barclays. Someone’s fucked up and dropped the ball, and you want answers. The trouble is, it’s almost always a fruitless exercise – all you end up is angrier and no further on in your quest to solve whatever clusterfuck has happened.

In short, don’t do it. Please.

Ended up working a little late and got home after Aimee’s bedtime. A depressingly frequent occurrence. Today, I’ve spent only around an hour with her this morning when she got up, and for most of that, she was bouncing on the bed, and, invariably – on my head. Her energy first thing in the morning puts us both to shame, when we wake up bleary-eyed and unable to crawl out of bed in the morning. Perhaps I should take something from it, really.