Stupidity tax?

I have probably had a rant on this before but every time it happens it winds me up.

We expect people to put the right reference on BACS payments to us. Its not unusual. Its why BACS has an 18 character reference in the first place - for the benefit of the beneficiary. If you pay water, gas, electric, telephone, rates, council tax, VAT, corporation tax, PAYE contributions to HMRC, heck - almost anything, you have to put the right reference. We're not unusual.

Occasionally a new customer will put something daft, we'll eventually work out who it is (sometimes by waiting for them to complain that we are chasing a bill that has been paid) and explain that they have to put the right reference. That usually sorts it. Policy is to actually send at least two real letters by post explaining this... Only if they persist do we charge an admin fee of £5+VAT for manually handling the payment (cheap price for my time I think).

When we charge £5 admin fee for this we try to include it on the normal invoice, but this does not always work as planned especially on quarterly bnilled customers, so sometimes our system raises an invoice for just £5+VAT which states "Admin fee (reduced): manual processing of incorrect BACS/CHAPS/FP payment. PUT THE CORRECT REFERENCE ON YOUR PAYMENTS IN FUTURE TO AVOID THIS CHARGE. See http://aaisp.net.uk/bacs.html for more details."

What really takes the biscuit is when someone pays this £5.75 invoice, by BACS, without the right reference on the BACS payment, so that I have to manually allocate the payment!

Are they totally mad?

I used to have a special letter I sent in such cases, but basically if people have ignored the letters already they ignore that letter too, so there is pretty much no point in doing anything other than just charging £5.75 again for handling the £5.75 payment they just made.

Ho hum...

Toilet Engaged

WTF is it with South West Trains and toilets?

I often have cause to return to sunny Bracknell from London late at night, and usually this means much to drink so the toilet on the train is kind of essential. The journey is an hour long.

But they often have all 4 toilets on the train marked "Toilet Engaged" and the door shut. This seems a tad unlikely.

Its a lie. Push hard on the door and find nobody in there!

So, I have to wonder. Do SWT have something to gain (or costs to save) by this lie? If they do that is criminal fraud under the Fraud act. If they do not then clearly they are not acting in the best interests of the shareholders meaning they may be comitting a criminal offence under the Companies Act (I think). I wonder which it is.

Anyway, FYI, the doors are easy enough to just push open if you try.

No response from ISP!

This is taking the piss now.

They have not only gone out of their way to ignore notes and responses on a fault, but after all the effort we have gone to in order to respond to a fault they have the cheek to come back with:-

"Fault has been awaiting CP`s response for 14 days. Fault will be auto-closed if no response is received within next 24 hours."

FFS, our response has been, several times "you can close the fault now".

What can I say to that?
"I don't believe it" does not really cover it, no matter how much I try to sound like Victor Meldrew.

A game played by men with strange shaped balls

Well, I have never been to a football or rugby match before, but was invited to the rugby at Twickenham today. It seems we came second...

I have to say it was all very civilised. Beer/cider in the stadium even, and nothing even sounding vaguely rowdy on the way back to the station. I was amazed how many people set up stalls, mostly selling food, in their front gardens between the stadium and the station.

Overall an interesting day out, albeit rather cold (well, it is November I suppose).

Pictures on e.gg as usual, only about 400 of them.

Novatech come good

As reported novatech had a dodgy display card and we left with machines that were not the spec we expected.

They only just got our letter (bloody postal strike) but were very apologetic and are couriering some RAM to make it up to spec...

Well done. That is what we would have done, and I am glad there are other companies that do the right thing too.

Arrg punycode

Why are they doing IDN this way.

EVERY app that wants to do domains has to understand it.

WTF are they not just making hostnames and domain names that are utf-8 just valid.

I just checked, and the version of bind we run as authorative server just works using UTF-8 hostnames in its config. It just works FFS, and that is the most popular authorative server and the most popular resolver FFS.

Looks like, for some things, the resolvers allow UTF-8 and for others not. But that has to be a lot easier to fix than every app getting punycode FFS. There are like two or three caching resolvers ISPs use.

The DNS protocol has always been 8 bit clean and it seems that many commands and apps just pass the hostname through the resolver library to the resolver as is so would need no changes at all.

That would have been way less work than changing every browser, every email client, ping, dig, nslookup, whois, telnet, ssh, and so on to understand punycode.

Of course, now the browsers have changed, we can't do this at DNS as the request no longer gets to DNS!!

Grrr.

I may make our auth servers put the utf-8 coding of punycode hosts in to the zone file anyway so things like ping and telnet will just work. That would be cool. I'll experiment.

na na na na na na na na na na

You know, fingers in ears, making a noise so you can't hear.

Its funny when a person does that, but when a large corporation does it, its just sad, and when its a major communications company!!!

We can add notes to update a fault report, sensible. We can close faults if they need closing, sensible. But look, new technology so new fault systems, so design it differently.

Key new features:-

1. Reporter cannot close the fault until it is cleared back to them for retest.
2. Reporter can however add notes, so notes like "problem sorted you can close it now".

Next step: tell staff that it is official policy to ignore the notes put on by ISP, but don't tell the ISPs this!!!

Next step: make the system itself ignore the notes (and make the system tell the ISP this).

OK, so we email in the notes that are rejected, typically things like "looks OK now, thanks, you can close it"...

Oh, and just for fun, make it so the system will keep faults for days, weeks, even months, without sending back for retest ever. This stops any new faults being reported so saves a lot of hassle for telco!

Obviously that is bad for service level guarantee, so make the clock stop at 39 hours and 36 minutes on a 40 hour target as well. Then no payout (even if only about £1.50) as not over 40 hours.

Next step: stop taking any notice of the ISP emailing in notes now. Ignore emails and then ask the ISP to stop sending then.

WTF!!!!

What next.

Well, our plan is to FAX the update in a letter automatically to their registered office addressed to the company secretary. See if they start ignoring at that level..

What comes after that I wonder? Recorded delivery letters to the managing director's home address?

Maybe just send the boys round would be the answer but we don't do business like that, honest.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg!