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.

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.

Sure, this wine is being produced by the same ‘vineyard’ as the £200 a bottle plonk, but to suggest it’s the same in terms of quality or craftmanship is ridiculous. It’s like a Skoda salesman telling you that their Fabia is of the same quality and from the core components as a Bugatti Veyron! Just because they’re owned by the same company (Volkswagen AG) doesn’t mean they’re the same car!

Whilst the Fabia is a good car (indeed, we own one!), and it shares some notable similarities with a Veyron (4 wheels, steering wheel, doors, windows, etc) it, plainly, isn’t the same thing – and the same is true of this wine.

I seem to recall that one of Virgin Wine’s other recent missives to me was equally ambitious in its claims – the email was setup to look like a genuine mistaken Forward of an internal mail, offering me ‘Chateauneuf du Pape’ wine for £5.99 a bottle. On further, careful, reading of the smaller print it is revealed that the ‘Chateauneuf du Pape’ being offered is in fact a ‘Vin de Pays’, a wholly different class of wine just one rung of the ladder above ‘Vin du Table’ – a lowly Table Wine. This is tantamount to bait-and-switch – I’m surprised they’re getting away with it.

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…

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:

Telebid are selling a Sony 17″ Laptop. It has a RRP of £799. It starts at zero, like all of their auctions, and the clock begins counting down. Anytime a user places a bid on the item, the price rises by 7 pence, and – if it’s close to the end of the auction – some time is added to the clock. This means that even though an auction might be ‘ending in 10 seconds’, it is very likely indeed to run for considerably longer, as people wait for the counter to run down to 1 second and frantically click the ‘bid’ button – thus adding extra time to the auction end.

When the auction does eventually end, the ending price is £166.39. What a bargain! What a deal! The winning bidder spent £40 in bid tokens placing 80 50p bids on the item, and has only to pay the £166.39 and a small postage charge, and he’s the owner of a shiny new Sony VAIO, and it only cost him £206.39 – a fraction of the full RRP. Well done him.

Let’s look at everyone else who was involved in the auction: In order to reach the ending price of £166.39, there must have been 2,377 bids (16639p / 7 = 2,377). Each one of those bids cost the bidder 50p. This means Telebid made in bids alone £1,188.50. That’s £389.50 more than the RRP of the laptop! Not to mention the fact they’ll get £166.39+P&P on top of that from the winning bidder – that’s a whopping £555.89 of profit on that one item. Alone!

The average IT/Electronics retailer will be doing well to make an 6-7% margin on a laptop like that – Telebid are making a gigantic 69%!

Consider that they sell 100′s of items a day, and you can soon appreciate the figures involved must be gigantic. So gigantic that they offer some items on a ‘Fixed Price’ basis – where they’ll place high-value items for auction which will sell at a fixed (exceptionally low) price (say £19 for an 80GB iPod) no matter what the auction end price – or ’100% off’ basis, where the winner only pays for the number of bids he’s placed, no matter what the auction end price is. It is entirely possible for someone to win one of these auctions with a single 50p bid – just like it is for me to win the lottery on Wednesday with a single £1 ticket. It doesn’t matter if they lose £400 on an auction lot like this, because they’ll make it up in spades on the other lots.

I’m sure it won’t take long before people work it out – but in the meantime, I’m quite sure that Telebid will be making hay while the sun shines and will be laughing all the way to the bank with bidders money. Legitimate? Sure, I guess. Ethical? Probably not. A bargain? Sure, but only if you’re really, really lucky.

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.

The regular, semi-skimmed, Fiat Punto is a three or five door small hatchback in the traditional ‘supermini’ mode – available with a range of tiny tin-pot engines ideally suited for pootling around town. With the full-fat Grande model, Fiat have taken the original car, and stretched the back out a bit. It’s a regular Punto, but with a bit more room in the back. There’s some styling changes, but essentially, they’re the same car, just one’s a bit longer.

The ‘Grande’ Punto is in a curious niche – too big to be a supermini, but too small to line up with a Golf, Focus or Civic. I’m struggling to think of what market it tries to fill.

As for the car itself, it’s fairly well appointed internally – the fit and feel of the plastics and materials used is of a good quality – certainly better than I was expecting. I’ve no idea how far up the model range the car I had was (all I knew was that it was a 1.2), but it was fitted with alloy wheels, CD player and electric windows and mirrors, and steering-wheel controls. The electronic windows lack the ‘one touch’ operation of most modern cars – allowing you to roll up or down the windows without having to hold your finger on the switch until fully open/closed. I found this quite annoying.

The car also featured variable speed power steering, which was activated by pressing a button on the centre console. This puts the steering into ‘CITY’ mode, which I guess is to help people with absolutely no lower arm movement to park the vehicle – the regular power steering was more than competent, and enabling this ‘CITY’ mode just seemed pointless to me.

Speaking of parking – the Grande isn’t going to be much use to you if you’re not a confident reverse-parker. Visibility is, for a car with such large windows and a slightly elevated driving position, frankly – crap. You can’t see where the bonnet even starts, nor is it easy to make out what’s going on behind. Other niggles were found in the general controls of the vehicle – all the buttons and switches (radio, electric windows, heating controls) all seemed to be just that tiny bit just out of your reach.

I’m quite worried, nay! – petrified – by the inexplicable button on the steering wheel which looks frighteningly akin to the Microsoft Windows logo. I pressed this and the stereo went off and its display said ‘VOICE’. I have no idea what this button does. Frankly, I’m scared that I pressed it.

Another annoyance is that there’s no boot handle – this is something that slightly bothers me on the RX8, but significantly less-so, as the RX8 key has a button on the remote that will pop the boot for you whenever you like. In the Punto, you’ve got to climb back into the car and press a bloody button in the middle of the centre console to open the boot. I can see that getting annoying real quick.

On the other hand – it’s an exceptionally cheap new car – about eight grand on the road, if you do some haggling. Shortcomings aside, similar offerings from the likes of VW, Ford and Vauxhall are well over a grand more.

So, there you have it. If you’re feeling frisky, spank 8000 quid on a Fiat – however, whatever you do don’t ever, ever, ever, EVER buy one from the GK Group (Mazda, Ford, Fiat, Seat, Peugeot, Citroen) in the North Midlands and Yorkshire. In fact, don’t buy anything from them, or have your car worked on there. Mark my words.

Now, this shower of steaming piss have caused me nothing but consternation and grief ever since the day I signed the papers on my RX8 in July (I won’t go into specifics here, but one problem as an example – I bought the car in July but didn’t actually get it on my driveway until August). As I’ve said before, they dented my car when it was last in for its starting problem – today was supposed to be when they’d sort the dent, and fix the starting problem.

Not so. Today would be the day that they’d shrug their collective shoulders and deliver two pieces of bad news to me.

One. Yes – I was right, as was the first Mazda Assist engineer, and the second Mazda Assist engineer, the battery is fucked. I had told them this two weeks ago when the car first went in, and when I picked the car up (dent day) they’d assured me that they’d replaced it, and everything would be hunky dory.

However, it works out that, no, there was a mistake – they didn’t replace it at all – in fact they wouldn’t replace it as it’s a consumable item – like tyres or brake pads – and isn’t covered by any warranty. No amount of explaining that I’d only bought the car 6 months ago would cut it. No dice. If wanted a new battery, I’d have to pay the princely sum of £124 (£60-odd for the battery, £40-odd for fitting, plus Alistair Darling’s 17.5% cut) for one. As I rely on the car and need (and indeed, expect) it to work when I turn the key, I agree to this – I’m fully intending to bring this up with the Chesterfield branch who sold me the car.

Two. The dent. No, no, no sir – that dent can’t possibly have happened whilst the car was in our care. O RLY? I must’ve done it myself on the way up to the garage then, or I might just be making the whole thing up for shits and giggles. They refuse to claim any kind of liability for the dent, and won’t cover the cost of any repairs. They claim that their technician noted the dent when he first started working on the car.

Cue much, much loud heating argumentation between myself and the service manager. I certainly hope I put off any potential buyers in the showroom. I ask for the branch manager, who agrees somewhat hesitantly to speak to me.

The manager is equally unsympathetic, and actually offers me his opinion on what’s happened – he claims that they’d had the car up on the ramps in the workshop to inspect this dent, and claim that the marks are typical of the impact of a shopping trolley! My protestations that no such mark was present at 8.30am on the day I took the car to the garage, but was there at 6pm when I picked it up again, were met with the same repeated spiel. It all boils down to my word against theirs, and neither side will back down.

The ‘best’ he can do, he claims, is to get his detailing specialist to have a look at it when he’s next on site – and he’d very generously charge me the ‘trade rate’ for any detailing done. Gee – how thoughtful of him!

A complete, and utter shower of bastards, these lot. My only advice is to avoid the entire chain like the plague.

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…