» Helicopter Parents

My late Auntie
Bless her soul, was a bit barkers, like most of the women in my dad's side of the family. We were on holiday in Cornwall at Caravan Park, and my dad and my Uncle are sat in the club house having a couple of drinks, when the option of "Late Lock In" was offered. My dad was well up for this, but my Uncle not so much so, because he'd be in trouble with my Auntie. Cue the entire bar, ripping the piss out of him for being hen-pecked.

Roll forward about 10 hours, and me and my dad go into my Auntie's caravan, and my dad regails his sister about how everyone was taking the piss out of my Uncle for being hen-pecked.

Her response... "TELL THEM DEREK, TELL YOU AREN'T HEN-PECKED... TELL THEM!"

I worry that even tho I'm a bloke, I'll turn batshit crazy like the rest of my dad's sisters!
(Thu 10th Sep 2009, 16:31, More)

» Call Centres

Not a story, but a way of playing with the Call Centres that phone you
Found on Stumbleupon: www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
(Fri 4th Sep 2009, 1:42, More)

» Customers from Hell

Call Centre Story Reversal
OK, a bit of a reversal on the general theme:

So I called my wonderful bank HS-guess-the-rest, to complain about the fact that a credit card transaction had failed to be processed, and as far as I was being told by the vendor, was down to my bank declining the transaction. I'm not a stingey bugger, I had plenty of funds for this, but I digress...

So I'm calling the Complaints department of said bank, because I am an aggrieved customer. The "conversation" went something like this:

Me: "Hi there, I've got a complaint about the fact a transaction was declined"
Her: "......silence......"
(I listen a little closer, and notice she's not silent, but is infact talking to her colleague sat beside her)
Me: "HELLO"
Me: "HEEEEELLLLLOOOOOOO......"

(after a couple of attempts, I realise that the automated call system has patched my call through to her, and she is oblivious to the fact that she has a call. In fact, because of the distance of her voice, I summised that she had taken off her headset. The conversation she had with her colleague went something like this):

Her: "And he said, why can't you access my account, I've given you my details, and I said, well you haven't given me the correct security details, so I can't verify that you are the account holder, and the account is in your wife's name. Well my wife isn't here right now, and she's not going to be very impressed if I have to phone her up and wake her just to get her details for this stupid thing. Well I'm sorry sir, you will have to do this, or call back another time when you do have her details. I'm not FUCKing taking this bullshit, I demand you let me into the FUCKing system. Sir don't take that tone with me. Why the FUCK not, you're not being FUCKing helpful. I'm sorry I'm not being FUCKING helpful sir, but that's not my FUCKING problem... and another thing, who the fuck does he think he is, ordering me around like that, I mean fucking hell, I'm not here to take this kind of bullshit, that guy can go fuck off..."

(Towards the end of this tirade, her voice became decidely loudly, so I'd decided that she'd obviously put her headset back on. She was still oblivious to the fact she had a live call)

Her: "... I mean, what the fuck, if that guy thinks he can do my job bet..."
Me: "Hello..."
Her: "....Stunned Silence..."
Me: "Hello, I know you are there. Just for your information, I have recorded the last minute and a half of that conversation you've had with your colleague, and will make this available to your..."
Beeeeeeeeep. And I was hung-up upon.

So I promptly called the complaints department back, and spoke with another individual, who actually answered the phone, and I explained my original gripe, and now my new gripe that the complaints department took a call, ignored me, and then hung up on me when they realised they'd fucked up.

I know the kind of shit you call-centre types take, and I'm not defending the ass-hole who got her this wound up, but have some dignity and answer the phone and apologise for it. I since learned via a letter that they'd pulled the tapes of the incident, and the operator involved was reprimanded for her action.

And the sting in the tail, it was the vendors fault after all for not processing my credit card properly!
(Thu 4th Sep 2008, 19:46, More)

» Restaurants, Kitchens and Bars... Oh my!

The Wife....
Used to work in a bar in Stirling, Scotland. For the most part it was the usual bar bs with the kitchen staff hating the bar staff vice-versa. One thing that does stick into my mind though, is the careful cooking method of the steaks.

I don't doubt that other bars do this as well, so be forewarned. The quickest way to cook a steak, is to deep fat fry it for a few minutes, and finish it off on the grill, to give it that "grilled taste". That'll be the same deep fat fryer that they do the chips in. The same chips that they sold with the Vegetarian meals!

Still they were tasty chips and steak!
(Wed 26th Jul 2006, 13:13, More)

» School Projects

Running on the theme of DT... but with a hint of Geek
Back when I was taking my GCSE's, I had myself a wonderful Commodore Amiga 500. I worshipped the code it ran on, chuckled everytime there was a Guru Meditation Error, and gazed in wonder at the naughty 3.5" floppy disks of pron my friends in school had somehow aquired. So what better way could I show my devotion to my god, than to free it of it's plastic case, and build it a custom tower case, with additional inbuilt motion detecting alarm.

The design of the whole system was beautiful yet simple. The Amiga would stand on it's expansion slot, with a custom built PCB to allow the expansion slot to be pointing horizontal to allow for my external 40MB harddrive I had. The alarm circuitary was a work of art, it worked off of a battery which charged whenever the power was on, had a key which simultaneously turned off the alarm and powered the Amiga.

The A3 sheets we had to use to demonstrate our progress through the system again was simply genious (if I do say so myself). I had managed to get our plotter to correctly render the Commodore C= logo, and the Amiga logo after painstakingly drawing all of these out by hand on the dodgy Corel Draw v -666.

So after drawing up a fantastic PCB for the alarm/powersupply, I went down to Maplins, and with a kind loan of £45 from my parents, promptly bought all the items required. It was about now that I started to realise, that maybe I might not be quite so clever at electronics as I had thought.

I spent weeks and months labouring over this circuit. Redesigning it, tweaking it, but all the while, never working. I'd managed to blow a couple of transistors along the way, gotten too many electric shocks from the mains transformer I was using, and probably gave myself brain cancer from all the soldering smell.

Infact, so much time I had devoted to this alarm circuit, I had completely neglected the actual metal tower case. I had built a part of a frame, but it was all twisted and I wasn't quite happy. I bit the bullet and decided to do away with the tower idea, and simply have an alarm system for a computer, that could be plugged inline to a standard Euro Socket, so I set about building a smaller wooden box, with a 2-tone Piezo sounder, wonder key for setting, resetting the alarm, tilt sensor, lifting sensor (a small switch on the floor of the device, which gravity would keep pressed down), and plenty of air vent holes on the back.

When push finally came to the shove, it just didn't work. Nada, nothing. I had managed to build an AC-DC convertor and that was about it. I still soldered everything else to the PCB to make it look like it was all there. I then wrote in my construction notes, that I had hit upon a snag near the end, and was working through the final problems before getting it fit for release". Even back then I knew the Management BS that would get me through life.

End result. I got a B! Fuck knows how. But then, don't get me started on my dissertation project that wouldn't run when I demonstrated it, and I still got a 2.1 mark for it!
(Mon 17th Aug 2009, 11:03, More)