BarredI've only ever been barred from one pub, the "Fort St George in England" on Midsummer Common in Cambridge.*
I was part of a group caught drunkenly trying to add our names in biro to a historic signed cricket bat. I still have the pint glass I was holding as I was chucked out.
Where have you been banned from?
*All pubs in Cambridge have posh names like this. 25% fact
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chthonic, Thu 31 Aug 2006, 12:00)
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Free CD bonanzaA bit of a geeky one this… I'm still (6 years on) barred from buying anything from Amazon.co.uk, when I enter my address it mysteriously says it's not valid.
It's been doing this ever since I managed to order many many hundreds of pounds, possibly more, worth of CDs from them for nothing over a short space of time. Remember that email service that had all sorts of humorous domain names for you to choose from? Funmail.com if memory serves me correctly, this is going back a few years so my memory's a bit hazy.
They had a sign up offer which gave you a free £5 voucher for use on Amazon, it generated a string of letters that you then typed into Amazon and £5 was added to your account. Stupidly they forgot to put any sort of 'one per address' restriction on, so anything costing less than a fiver was free. Lots of CD singles turning up at the house.
The next stage came with the realisation that when you bought something for less than a fiver the balance was credited to your Amazon account. This was during the Sophie Ellis Bextor & Groovejet / Victoria Beckham & Dane Bowers chart battle, so they were selling those CDs for £1.99
We wrote a script that signed up multiple accounts to Funmail and harvested the voucher codes, it was then a simple matter of plugging those into Amazon and ordering 1.99 CDs until enough money was in the account to buy an album (I still have several hundred Groovejet CDs somewhere, if anyone's interested?)
Lather, rinse, repeat, and for a period of several weeks there was a big box from Amazon waiting on the doormat every morning. I told my mum it was 'a special offer', only bending the truth slightly. Didn't take all that long for them to clock on, change the terms of the offer and ban me, but by that point I had more or less legitimately got myself a rather fine CD collection.
I like to think that this contributed to the fact that shortly afterwards Funmail started charging for their service, but I can't be sure!
The weirdest thing is Amazon have never officially told me I'm barred, it just won't let me order anything...
(, Tue 5 Sep 2006, 15:48, Reply)
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