While I was on the blog-hiatus, I changed my car (though the 306 still lives with me!). I went from the RX8 to a nice, sensible, economical diesel Audi A3. Co-incidentally, the car change happened at the same time as my car insurance was due to renew, so I took it as an opportunity to shop around for a better deal.
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.
Some time ago now, I bought some wine from Virgin Wines. It was cheap, and the quality middling – though their full money-back offer if you didn’t like the wine was (and still is, I believe) too good to miss. As a customer of theirs they send me their marketing offers via email every now and then, and unlike many other companies, they send me an email maybe once a month.
Other internet retailers – This is good. I don’t want to know about your MEGA SPECIAL OFFERS more often than this. Once a week is too often. Twice a week is where I look for the unsubscribe links, and any more often than that and I’ll be blackholing your mail outright.
However, recently I’ve noticed that they’re resorting to some pretty daft e-marketing ‘tricks’ with their offer emails. Like the one above, which arrived with the subject line of ‘SAVE £192.50… a bottle! Only 500 cases left”.
The email paints the picture that Virgin are selling bottles of wine that could go for £200 a time, at the princely sum of £7.50. An amazing deal, if it were true.
All the online April Fools’ jokes were poor this year. The whole point of them is that they’re supposed to be vaguely plausible – so you’d read/look at them and think that it’s real.
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…
I stumbled across a most interesting website today – Telebid. At first glance, you might dismiss it as the usual eBay-clone fodder, but – there’s quite a bit more to it than that. See the low prices of items sold? Got your attention? Thought so.
However, there’s a catch – there’s always a catch – and the catch in this case is pure fucking genius by the site owners.
You don’t bid ‘on the item’ in the traditional sense, you’re bidding essentially for the right to purchase the item for the current highest price… And the current highest price is inflated by 7 pence every time someone makes a bid… and it costs you 50 pence to make that bid… aaaand if you’re a last-minute sniper, you’re out of luck because they extend the auction end time in the event of last-second bids. Is your interwebby ‘scam’ spidey-sense tingling now? I know mine was.
Only this isn’t a scam – it’s not particularly nice, and it leaves a lot of (foolish) people out of pocket – but people do walk away with £30 PS3′s and £50 LCD TV’s. It’s just that Telebid walk away with much, much, much more.
Let’s take an example:
The term ‘supermini’ was first coined in the mid 80′s, and was applied to the Ford Fiestas, VW Polos and Austin Metros of the day. It intended to describe a small, practical car, larger than the likes of the real classic Mini and Fiat 500′s of the day, but smaller than what could be more broadly termed as a ‘small family car’ (eg. a VW Golf or Ford Escort).
As automotive technology has moved on, cars have gotten safer and more reliable, but all the extra fluffy bits have made cars heavier and larger. This weight gain has meant that modern superminis are quite a bit larger than their 20 year old counterparts. As the cars get bigger, manufacturers struggle to make the cars ‘fit’ the Supermini label. Indeed, BMW’s relaunched modern Mini now falls into this Supermini label, despite the name actually referring to a small car ‘larger than a Mini’.
These days, the ‘Supermini’ moniker is applied to an exceptionally wide band of vehicles – some of which are neither super, nor mini – no doubt due to the fact that Supermini sales make up the largest chunk of new cars sold every year in Europe. Because of this, car makers are forever dreaming up new market segments of vehicle types, and this brings us to the curious beast that is the Fiat ‘Grande’ Punto.
So, last night, my blog entry was referring to how I thought my cold was dying off. Well, that was a complete non-starter. Woke up at about half-one this morning with extremely uncomfortable stomach pains and an uncontrollable urge to visit the toilet NOW. A few hours of very broken sleep and three toilet trips later and the sun was coming up. Not good at all.
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!