... found thanks to thermalsatsuma

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Following my rant yesterday about problems getting some basic information out of First, here is an example on how customer care SHOULD be done. Not giving in, not letting your company be walked over… just solve customer problems in a polite way.

As I mentioned before, I got a new phone delivered yesterday – a new Nokia 2630. OK not the highest upgrade I could have gone for, just a little thing to keep me in touch. As you may recall, I tried to follow the upgrade path, to have the extra call credit added to my prepaid balance, and also have the introductory credit transferred from one sim card to the other, and have the redundant sim card disconnected. Upon trying this, I got an unexpected failure message, so I emailed o2 yesterday (you may recall from previous posts that I mentioned the helpful customer care when I contacted them last – see point 7 in this post).

Response came in this morning, with a text to my mobile to alert me to it’s arrival. They have said that I did qualify for the upgrade, and it will be arranged within the next 14 days. I sent them the further details required to move the SIM’s, and this will also be done later. Very polite service, using first names throughout, and sneaking in an upsale plug too! (This is how it should be done! It doesn’t just happen once, it’s been this way every time I’ve contacted them!)

So, what’s the bottom line of this? Well, the new phone cost me £24.95 plus £10 of calltime, which I use on calls. I also get 10% back of all top-ups made since the last upgrade (in addition to the usual 10% back every quarter) in calltime. The amount I’d amassed since the last upgrade was £21.50 – meaning the new phone will have cost me a net price of £3.45…

My sister suggested that I should get a new phone when we met last week. I saw an ad in the local rag, went online, and saw quite a cheap promotion on the Nokia 2630, still on PAYG with the same network. It's even smaller and sleeker than the Motorola L6... see for yourselves...



... It's brand new out of the box, but not yet 'in service' as the SIM hasn't been transferred over (for some reason, the easy way of doing it didn't work for me!) but the battery is fully charged. The phone can do WAP, SMS/MMS, as well as having a keypad direct email service (presumably save using Mail2Wap) and an FM radio (and double earpieces on the hands-free adaptor as a result). So, I won't be blaring the music out on the bus!  

Yesterday was a rather fun day, despite the soaring heat in Cambridge (no I’m not being sarcastic!) incurred on the way to work yesterday morning. We were all surprised, as it didn’t seem like three weeks since I was there last, but it had been! Mornings are busier than afternoons, and this was no different!

After leaving Milton, back to Cambridge, but off the bus at Chesterton Lane, and around to Shire Hall to pick up some timetables that I had left for me to uplift. After that, citi5 back to town, then changed to a citi1 for the next part of the trip. As a few of the passengers from the back got off, one of them asked ‘have I seen you on tv?’ Nope, not me… not unless that old cctv footage of me running into the newly-installed automatic doors at Dundee bus station early one morning has made it onto YouTube… but seriously, while questioning is a lot more rare down here, they are usually a bit more refined than some of the more cruder things that I’ve heard in my lifetime.

Anyway, popped in to see auntysarah, and as ever, she beat me to posting the story of our meet to her journal. We spent half an hour or so around the back, in the warm, with the sun reflecting off the fishpond. It was a very civilised way to spend half an hour, just moments away from the hustle and bustle of Hills Road, Mill Road, and Cambridge Railway Station.

So, after that, went for the 1640 26 bus back to Royston, which comes down Hills Road for the college users, so a very easy walk around the corner. Got home, C got in just seconds after I did, and I then had a further kitchen experiment with some noodles and sweet chilli sauce.

The highlight of today so far, I’ve cooked mozzarella cheeseburgers (yes I cans has!), and a further stir-fry, this time self-cook Chow Mein. Also, another soft toy has arrived, it’s a pink stress ball shaped like a pig, a reward from Pigsback – I might save up for the cuddly one, but that will take a while more, as most of the 200 points needed came from a signing-up reward.

So, we are having a quiet day now, but getting a delivery of groceries this evening, and may be out tomorrow. Monday and Tuesday I am not planning on doing too much, but Tuesday night, I am travelling up north to spend a few days in and around Dundee. Caroline is going to be driving up north Friday into Saturday, and we will meet somehow on Saturday, as we’re going to a double birthday party (C’s side of the family) on Saturday in Angus. Sunday – well, I’ve left aside a trip I’ve organised for the Anglia Bus Forum, along with a few other offers, so we can travel south in the hired car, and I may well take some more of the stuff down from my flat in Dundee, things I could not manage in a bus or train. Might get the chance to pop into Lathalmond on the way down, who knows - we'll see how things go on the day.

Longer term, June C will be away most of the time, so I will be doing some work around moving out of my flat in Dundee – I plan to leave at some stage of July. This is likely to be intermixed with days here and there too, as times change. In July and August, I would like to do a bit more work on top of what I’ve been doing recently, and ramp things up gradually once more. We’d then hope C would have a date for her surgery, and we are looking at early-mid autumn for that. After that, and once C is back in Royston recovering, I’d hope that my mind and body will both be ready for more regular hours and work, but we shall see. This has been said, assuming nothing else changes, ha ha!

(Me on TV? Well, there are some times I feel like someone (Beadle’s replacement) is going to pop out of a bush and say ‘You thought you’d came here to do xxxx,’ LOL)

It’s a fairly nice day in Royston today – 20 degrees when we went out earlier to Tesco. We took the old digibox back, as we’ve gone through several recently (all seem to have a hard drive problem), and also returned the DVD recorder. The latter had been barely used, but seemed to like going back in time by an hour or ten. After returning the pair, and selecting a new Thomson digibox (with larger built-in hard drive amongst other goodies) and shopping for the week, we were still six pounds up on when we left the house! (Sometimes it’s good to buy things before a price crash… especially if the items also crash…)

Anyway, while browsing the milk aisle, this woman came up to us, and we started talking. Turned out she appeared to feel oppressed over her own sexuality, and she’d only told this to a handful of her closest friends (fearing the worst from religious friends if she told the rest of them!).  She initially completed us on how we looked, somewhat good-looking femme/masculine* she thought at the beginning, but I think she was trying not to use labels, and she was all very polite about it all. Very nice person, who (as we were walking away) came back, and thanked us for giving her acceptance today.

Right, got to get on with this Forum move… here goes nothing, we’ve stocked up on cold and sparklings! Feel free to keep refreshing this page, to see how it goes!

(* I can’t spell the word that she did use, and the spell checker doesn’t seem to find it either).