26

01/09
10:36

Troubling subject lines

Today I was quite troubled by the subject line of an email I received, apparently inviting me to:

“Celebrate Valentine’s dat with the world’s most romantic Jew…”

Thankfully it turned out that the subject field was just not quite long enough. I extended it to reveal:

“…ellery”

I have to say I was relieved, although I’ll be forever wondering what an evening with that Jew may have been like…

21

01/09
21:39

Stu’s Tuesday Challenge: Water

I’ve decided I can’t wait till the following Tuesday to put them up, so your just gonna get them once I’ve taken them :)

This week’s title is ‘Water’ and here is my submission:

Water 

Stu said this week that using old photos was not in the spirit of the challenge, which is bad as I had tons to choose from, but good as it meant I didn’t have to! Here are some I was considering before I knew they had to be new photos:

DSC_0005.JPG 

DSC_0019.JPG 

Woolcotts_25.JPG 

20

01/09
06:00

Stu’s Tuesday Challenge: People At Work

Stu has started setting a weekly photo challenge, which I’ve decided to try my best to take part in. Each Tuesday he’ll set a new task, and assuming I succeed in completing it each week, the following Tuesday I’ll post my resultant photo here. You can also see the whole gallery as it grows at flickr.com, or by subscribing to this feed.

He set the first task last Tuesday, which was to take a photo entitled ‘People At Work’

So I decided to kick off by doing a self portrait. Here it is:

People At Work

17

01/09
20:22

A date

Last night I took Sarah out on a date, a rare occurrence. It was very romantic, nothing would be too expensive for my lovely wife.

So I checked that I had the half price voucher for Pizza Express and my free tickets for the Funky B gig, and off we went.

We had a really nice meal at Pizza Express, and then the dessert menu was presented. I narrowed it down to a choice between Chocolate Glory or Chocolate Fudge Cake. The Chocolate Glory is ice cream, with chocolate fudge cake pieces in and chocolate sauce on top. So the only apparent differences are ice cream, and the fact that one is served in an ice cream glass.

I opted to save 15p and have the Fudge Cake.

“Would you like ice cream with that sir?” 

Okay, so in fact the only difference is if you want it on a plate or in a glass.

A few minutes later, the waiter returns and informs me that sadly they are out of fudge cake, so I’d have to select something else.

“So I guess that means no Chocolate Glory either then…” I mutter to myself jokingly.

“I think we can do one of those for you sir” he replies.

So they cant give me chocolate fudge cake with ice cream, but they can give me ice cream with chocolate fudge cake!

After the meal we plodded along the road, avoiding the drunk argument on the other side of the road, to the gig venue. It was really great soul/funk music and we had a thoroughly good time. We probably spent too much time at the beginning trying to decide if the two blonde girls on the table next to us were twins, or in fact just two blonde girls. It turned out one of them was the singer in the band and we decided they probably were twins.

13

01/09
13:40

Support request

Bare with me on this rant…..

On friday I received an email, I was one of several recipients. I hit ‘reply all’ typed a message and hit ‘send’.
Sounds simple right?

Wrong.

I presume the original sender put a typo in one of the addresses (so I haven’t a clue why he didn’t experience this problem) because my mail provider sent me a message saying “One of these addresses is screwed up, I cant send it”

Ok, not a huge problem. Except it is, because it then tries again an hour later. Then again an hour later. Then again an hour later.

Each recipient (including me) before the erroneous address receives a fresh copy of this email each and every hour. How nice for us all! so I email my service provider & ask for them to stop the message resending. I helpfully told them that I was using their webmail and attached copies of the message and error message to help them out.

I later receive a reply saying “We think you might be a robot sent from the future to infiltrate & bring down our copmpany by sending us a support request”. Well, something along those lines anyway. So I follow the instructions to verify that I’m not a robot from the future.

Another email comes “You aren’t a robot from the future after all, so we’ve stuck your address on a list to let you email us”.
Then another “Although you aren’t a robot from the future, we can’t rule out that you might be working for them. You attached something to your message that might destroy mankind so we deleted your email. If you really want us all to die, put it in a zip file and send again and we will open it without question…”

So I do and try again.

Another email: “Although you aren’t a robot from the future, we can’t rule out that you might be working for them. You attached something to your message that might destroy mankind so we deleted your email. If you really want us all to die, put it in a zip file and send again and we will open it without question…”
I scream loudly, and resend the message, plus “Your server rejects my zipped attachment saying I need to zip it, so you can jolly well fix it without my attachments”

Next reply: “We’ve got your request, we might look at it later if we have time”.

A few days later: <techie bit> “I see you used our webmail service, do you have to? Try using an email client and route your outgoing mail through googlemail or something instead”. </techie bit>  Right, so rather than address or even acknowledge my problem, they suggest I don’t use their services. great.

My reply “When I’m at home I do just that, but I’m at work and therefore have no option other than your webmail. That doesn’t actually help right now anyway, since I have already sent the message and if I used a different service now, the message would continue to keep coming every hour!” I then gave them step by step instructions on how to solve my problem.

Another repsponse: “The address you sent this to doesn’t exist, despite the fact that you’ve used it for all the previous conversations that you’ve waffled on in your blog about”.

So I scream again, and resend the message from my work email account to the same support address.
Response: “We think you might be a robot sent from the future to infiltrate & bring down our copmpany by sending us a support request”.

AAAAGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!
I follow the instructions again, am again reassured that I’m not a futuristic robot, then “We’ve got your request, we might look at it later if we have time”.

Finally I get another email: “I followed your instructions and it seems to have done the trick. By the way, I notice you used our webmail service, you should try using an email client and routing your outgoing mail somewhere else”.

I slap my forehead & decide to heed the phrase “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

So 5 days, 120 emails and 16 support emails later, tranquility returns to the inboxes of myself and my friends.
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