I'm currently in negotiations with Gigabyte technical support. My 18 month old motherboard - which has already been back once, has gone faulty again. Their attitude to "support" is predicated on the assumption that I'm a moron and the "fault" is a figment of my imagination. So par for the course in the IT sector then.
I mentioned way back in the summer that if I was still unemployed by Christmas I'd give an award to the Worst Recruitment Agency I've had the misfortune to deal with. And, after due consideration I'm happy to announce that Chapterhouse are the easy winners. Why? Well there are a few reasons. 13 unreturned phone calls from the guy who was supposedly running the recruitment for a job (he was either in meetings, wrestling yaks, feeding the starving or something), a blank refusal to even look at my CV without first speaking to this guy, but mainly it's due to the PR guff they have on their home page, "....we listen, we explore, we respond." The addition of the word "don't" after "we" would increase it's accuracy 100%
It's Sale time again. And the High Street has been saved! Hurrah for us. Aren't we great? Of course these are "Matsui 180TC*" sales but who cares? Certainly not the media who don't seem to realise that retailers having a couple of good days around Christmas used to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.
This year again there's been the annual "come back to work in Northern Ireland" campaign, aimed at people who left Northern Ireland because there are no jobs in Northern Ireland. A few years ago I signed up for this scheme at Belfast International airport's departure gate "Fill your email address in here and we'll be in touch." Beyond asking me would I consider returning to NI to work, they took no other details. Guess how many emails I subsequently received? So many I had to tell them to stop sending them three times before they paid any attention to what I'd said? A couple a month? One every few months? An annual email asking if I still wanted to be part of the scheme? Or none?
Hands up everyone who isn't surprised to learn that, to date, I haven't had a single one.
*The old Matsui 180TC microwave. If an item has an advertised saving, then it must have been sold at the higher price for 28 consecutive days in the previous 6 months. In the "glory days" when Currys issued their pre-Christmas pricing and merchandising instructions a curious thing happened with the 180TC. One of the most popular microwave ovens would double in price overnight. Guess what happened in the sale? Guess what item was advertised as 50% off? Guess what flew out the door on Boxing Day? Guess why I don't believe the word "sale" or "saving" when it's printed on day glow point of sale? Guess why I think "sales" are little more than a notion based on smoke and mirrors that shoppers pretend not to believe, but that they want do believe? As for the people who queue up outside shops over Christmas to avail of these "savings"? Frankly there are saner individuals in remote institutions, who when they don't think they are Napoleon, spend their evenings chained to their beds.
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