You have no mail.

The UK postal service is getting worse. The impact of losing some letters in the post has impacted upon my life in trivial and not so trivial ways.

For example, my wife ordered some Tesco vouchers for some cinema tickets so we could watch Toy Story 3. 10 days later they have not turned up. Lost in the post apparently. Now we have to figure out how to sort this out. Lost to us: quite a lot of money in vouchers and the time and effort to try and sort it out. It's not exactly life threatening, but it's annoying.

But my biggest annoyance was when my hospital sent me an appointment by post and this did not turn up. I had been waiting 6 months for this appointment. So I had to write to my doctor for a re-schedule, grovel to get an an appointment because apparently was a bad customer for not attending an expensive consultation, and lo and behold I have to wait to November. Not only is the postal service doing my health a dis-favour, but so is my local heath provider. Surely the NHS never gets any mail lost en-route, since they don't seem to believe me when I tell them when my mail does not arrive.

So I'm stuck with the current postal service that does not seem to care about lost mail and because we have a monopoly running this service on the last mile, my mail will be subject to poor service and there is nothing I can do about it. I feel powerless, annoyed and I seem to have no way to get this resolved.

Health and Safety Madness #2

So in a previous posting I visited B+Q to buy some timber and they would not cut it, so today I visited Homebase instead of B+Q and tried to buy a short length of 2"x4" but it only comes in 2m lengths.   So I went to the wood cutting service desk and they only cut big sheets of wood and not the wood I wanted cut all because of health and safety rules. 

Apparently some fool may saw a finger, a hand or their head off in some freak accident with a wood saw so instead they leave the customer to figure out how to fold it into two and squeeze it into their car.

So much for an convenience store.  These wretched DIY shops are tied up in heath and safety madness.  B+Q now has self service check outs - is that because heath and safety reasons too?  Will the checkout staff hurt their little digits pressing the buttons on the till or maybe suffer from muscular strain injury swiping my credit card?

Urgh! The world has gone bonkers!

Allegations of former ministers selling influence for cash.

So it appears that influence in the government can be bought with cash if we believe what is being reported by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 investigative journalism.

Actually, I'm not shocked at all, this is no surprise, nothing these money grabbing snout-in-the-trough MPs seems to do can shake me now.  It confirms the fact that some of our elected representatives don't really represent us the electorate, instead they just care about lining their deep pockets.

So, when it comes to the general election and you believe your vote can perhaps in some way help steer the way government decides policy think again. Your vote counts for little - what matters is money. Money buys influence, connections and power.  Welcome to corrupted UK politics, goodbye principles, fairness and representation.

Customer Dis-service

Yesterday I visited a B+Q (a UK Do-It-Yourself) to purchase a couple of lengths of timber which were 2400mm long and hence rather tricky to get inside a family car. So I visited the B+Q timber cutting desk only to be told:

1. The timber was not big enough to be cut (why!?)

2. I could not be given a saw to cut the wood in-case I injured myself (once again heath and safety rules non-sense).

The staff member was very apologetic, as if to say "yes, I know it's crazy, but I don't make these insane rules up, I just work here.."

So zero service satisfaction there.

Next at the check-out we were confronted with high-tech scanning self-service tills. The tone of the computer telling us what to do was very condescending and when we got stuck a girl monitoring four self service tills was abrupt with us because we had done something wrong.

Come on B+Q, the customer comes first! If you cannot be bothered to serve the customer then your customers will not return! As it is, next time I want to do some D.I.Y. I put B+Q at the end of my list of places to visit. Humph!

MP's Expensive Expenses

So the UK's MPs have been told to repay £1.12 million of their expenses after Sir Thomas Legg's audit.  Meanwhile the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) has replaced the Commons Fee Office to monitor expenses. IPSA will cost £6.5 million to run to keep MPs honest.

So £6.5 million probably pays for 100+ expensive civil servants, which equates to about one full time civil servant to monitor 6.5 MPs.  That equates to over 5 hours work per week per MP to make sure that the MPs are not stealing tax payers money.

Looks like the UK government has an expensive job creation scheme all because MPs cannot be trusted with it's citizens money.  No representation without expensive taxation creation schemes...

Blow your nose and get stopped by the Police!

The BBC news website is reporting a story of an Ayershire Businessman who was apparently sitting in his stationary car with the handbrake on and was fined for blowing his nose. He was stopped by no less than 4 policeman and given a £60 fixed penalty fine for not being in control of his vehicle. Needless to say he's taking this to court and will plead not guilty. Let's hope sanity applies here and the Police jobsworths are laughed out of court.

UPDATE: Common sense has prevailed. Looks like the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has decided that no further action is required and the case has been dropped. The BBC has a full report about this case. But how much time and money has gone into resolving this? Perhaps it should be docked from the charging Policeman's pay...

DVLA sells your private data

Apparently private data is being sold by the DVLA according to this article by the register and the Daily Mail.  It has been reported that in the past 5 years 18 million names and addresses have been sold by this UK government agency to companies such as parking firms an private clamping companies.  So much for privacy of your data.  Apparently the data is not sold to dodgy establishments. Hrmm.

Well, apart from that fact that in 2009 the DVLA data was acquired by Castrol via an intermediary and used for some creative marketing according to the the register. Castrol used number plate recognition and data about the owner's car make and model from the DVLA was flashed up on digital billboards.  The data was not provided directly by the DVLA and the DVLA stated such use was inappropriate.  I'd say it's more than inappropriate - it's absolutely scandalous.

Nice to know that the UK government is happy so share the data of it's citizens - any chance of opting out of this scheme Gordon Brown?  Goodness knows how secure my Government owned medical records are...