txting; dnt mke me lol…

I’m sure they must run classes to teach kids all these annoying short-hand codes for their texting. I guess the need to compress messages within the limit of 160 characters had a lot to do with it. I have to admit that I tend to use some text shorthand too but different from this gr8 stuff. More of that in a second. But here’s a little fact for you to show you what a man of foresight I really am. One of the guys who developed the SMS standard was a guy from Cellnet called Kevin Holley and back when I was Head of Marketing there, I was shown this new and additional way of communicating by mobile phone. Despite being a lot cheaper than a voice message I still found it unlikely to believe that anyone, other than our engineers, would choose to resort to typing a message  when they could just simply call and speak to someone. Didn’t they know that mail was dead? Spanner-heads – pah! Within 15 years 4 trillion SMS messages were being sent each year.  A multi-£billion business in its own right. Er  oops…

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spare me from call centres

So, regular readers will recall that for simplicity’s sake we opted for an all-in package from Virgin media covering our tv, broadband and home phone service. We would probably have preferred to go with Sky but there are restrictions on the use of dishes on the front of our house. Life with Virgin has been a sorry affair right from the installation process (see posting, Customer Service, of 12 November 2009) and throughout our service history. There cannot be a single month that has gone by without us losing our broadband connection or occasionally the TV service. But the worst thing of all was their appalling customer care service  when they’d ask me to switch the computer off and on or try and fob us off with excuses or blame things on our Apple computer equipment or fail to deliver on their endless promises to send an engineer round to sort out our problems. My exasperated wife C called me when I was up with the kids last week to say that she had just endured one unhelpful and difficult conversation too many with the Virgin customer service team and had cancelled our service. It felt like such a relief. All we had to do was find another service provider…..