Tesco Cards? You'll Be Rolling In The Aisle

Buying a birthday card used to be a pleasurable experience. A visit to the card shop would present the customer with a wide range of cards for all occasions - birthdays, marriages, deaths and anything else that one might consider worthy of celebrations or condolences. Cards would be funny, sometimes clever, sometimes corny. Sincere thoughts might be found alongside more dubious messages. There are fewer card shops around today as the big supermarkets continue their inexorable rise to retail denomination. So,yesterday, in search of a birthday card for my daughter's partner Duncan I found myself in Tesco. The card aisle should be given an x rating. Rows of cards offered me the opportunity to insult poor Duncan by suggesting he was old,flatulent,balding or alcoholic (or often a combination of all four) or to amuse him with jokes that Roy Chubby Brown might consider too near the knuckle. Duncan is a scuba diver so my eyes were drawn to a card depicting a diver in full diving gear only to find a crude joke about cunnilingus no less. Another depicted an old man hiding his genitals in a popcorn bucket he was about to share with an old woman(so original - a joke made in Diner in 1982) and one hilariously made a connection between a girl and a crab.I don't want to sound like disgusted of Tunbridge Wells - I can laugh at any joke if it's funny - but sorry Tesco, your (huge) card selection stinks. And if you are reading this Duncan, don't worry I left the superstore empty handed - you aren't old, flatulent balding or alcoholic.

As the saga of the lack of internet rumbles on for yet another day, yesterday turned out not to be "today" as Freezone had hoped and I finally gave up and on 29th September we should be back up and running with Be There who have been recommended to us by our friendly IT Crowd at Mainframe Computer Services. We have managed with a dial up connection for the past week but it's painfully slow and means that we haven't been able to send emails with attachments of any size and downloading orders from web based ordering systems has been extremely difficult. If you run a business you might learn from our experience. Imagine how you would manage without broadband for a day. Now think about three weeks. Doesn't bear thinking about does it? If it happened to us it could happen to you so maybe the insurance of a second broadband line and provider would make business sense. That's what we're going to do and a few hundred pounds a year is not much for peace of mind.

We're off down to London tomorrow to celebrate my birthday. We've got a busy weekend ahead of us and are going to a matinee performance of The Railway Children at Waterloo Station theatre and then a dinner with Paul and Josephine at the Dorchester Grill. We're staying at the County Hall Park Plaza (above). I mention all of this as each of these bookings was made after following recommendations on the internet. Trip Advisor members rank the Park Plaza 44 out of 1058 London Hotels, 1654 Top Table members have given the Dorchester Grill a massive average score of 8.6 out of ten and The Railway Children has glowing reviews on many websites. So when it's working like it is here at home (thanks BT), broadband is now perhaps life's most important and most useful tool.

As we are travelling by train I'll have plenty of time for the Saturday papers. I've started buying the Times on Saturday as well as the Guardian as the Times has a superb quick crossword that will guarantee to keep me quiet for the journey. I've never been into cryptic crosswords but these puzzles are really entertaining with the challenge not being whether or not you can finish them but how long it takes to do so. This is one area where the internet can't beat printed media.


And where would the internet be without YouTube? Here's a little film for the weekend.

Samsung have done it yet again.
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The Customer Is Always Right

We’ve always accepted that age old cliché here at Instanta but an incident this week has left me questioning its truth. A few days ago a customer phoned up to place an order. We quoted a price to him upon which he blew a fuse and said that the price was not the one that he had on his price list. We courteously told him that we had sent him a new price list in July and that he was on our mailing list and should have received it. Instead of calmly saying that he had not received it (in which case we might have come to a fair agreement and perhaps split the difference with him or even honoured the old price), he continued with such a tirade of abuse that our (totally innocent) employee on the receiving end was visibly shaken. There’s no place in business (or in any other part of life) for bullying, especially when the victim is relatively junior, has no say whatsoever in our pricing policies and is a totally innocent party. So, is the customer always right? Certainly not in this case and I would like to suggest a saying for him to take on board in future. “Do as you would be done by”.

I trudged up to Anfield last night to witness another nail being hammered into the coffin of the football club that I have followed since I was twelve. I know it was only the Carling Cup and Liverpool put out an under strength side but they were playing what equates to fourth division opposition and at least six of the team have plenty of Premier League experience .It was an opportunity to show the depth of the squad. The depth was shown to be severely lacking and it soon became clear that Pacheco (much heralded as one for the future) will soon be one for the past and Jovanovic demonstrated that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys (if you call a few million quid peanuts). You can’t blame every Liverpool player for the debacle. Captain for the night Kyrgiakos gave his all in a swashbuckling attempt to salvage something from the game and inspired the team to a late extra time equaliser and I felt sorry for Wilson the new signing from Rangers who demonstrated a fine passing touch that has been severely lacking but at the end of the day the once Mighty Reds were pretty well outclassed and we had to endure a huge crowd of Northampton fans singing “Can we play you every week?” and then walk back to the car in monsoon conditions. We play Blackpool in about ten days. I’m feeling nervous about the headlines already.

Going to Anfield meant that I sacrificed the opportunity to watch the groundbreaking new reality TV show Seven Days and I even forgot to record it. As far as I can tell, this is an original concept (although Paul will no doubt tell me that it’s been done somewhere else – nothing TV related escapes his attention).It certainly raised plenty of comments on Twitter #SevenDays so it must have had a sizeable audience. It seems that Joe Public can offer advice to the real participants in the show, via the show’s website, on how to handle their problems although I doubt that the difficulties encountered by inhabitants of Notting Hill will provide as much interest as those facing sink estate dwellers in Glasgow. “Just doing the Ocado order online Jemima. Ciabatta or Focaccia?”

Still no Broadband service here at Instanta. I’m starting to feel like a donkey with a carrot dangling on a stick before me as our providers keep telling me it will be back on today. At least today they are saying “today” whereas on every other day they have been saying “tomorrow”. So will today be the day? Today they acknowledged my request for a MAC. Seems that they have a legal obligation to provide one within five days but I requested it over eight days ago. But did I get an acknowledgement of my request they ask? I think that their email says that I did but they interpret it differently. Do I want to get lawyers involved? Always a difficult decision when that carrot appears to be so close.Until then no photos and no YouTube on this blog.

We need a MAC and it's not even raining

The saga of the failed broadband will be into its third week tomorrow and, whilst we have been promised that it will be back on Thursday, we aren't exactly confident. This sorry situation has highlighted a number of serious problems in the broadband system. Somewhere down the supply chain a company called Aspire Internet had a "contractual dispute" which resulted in their broadband supply being switched off.You can't run a business today without broadband so we contracted with a new supplier. But you can't move to a new supplier without a code known as a MAC from your current supplier. But as the current supplier Freeezone can't get a MAC from Aspire, the new supplier BE can't switch the broadband. I have spoken to OFCOM, Freezone and the new suppliers and nobody can get around this problem. Short of getting BT to install a new line there's not much we can do other than accept Freezone's assurance that it will all be back on Thursday at which point we will be off like a shot to the new company. We also need to get a back up supplier as it is intended that all our accounting system will be run on broadband via our Australian group offices one day in the future and this episode would have left us with no book-keeping for two weeks. Time for OFCOM to sort this MAC situation out as hundreds of Aspire customers have been without broadband for a fortnight.



I'm following Kirsty Allsop on Twitter.I've always enjoyed her property shows with co-presenter Phil and it seems that they are working on a new travel programme at the moment.She's currently campaigning on Twitter against homework for young school kids and I have to say that I totally agree with her.Our children had no homework other than reading until they were into secondary school and it didn't do them any harm.They were encouraged to enjoy themselves after school and given as many books to read as they wanted and allowed to watch telly too although they tended to enjoy playing and reading more and only tended to watch the programmes they loved.It was before computers really took of so I don't know how different it would be today but who can forget the enjoyable times we had with books and audio books to quote "The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark" - "That was nice - what's next?"



We went to see Tamara Drewe at Vue last night. A break from the usual Wednesday night routine as Liverpool are playing at Anfield then and I somehow subscribed to buy tickets for League Cup games. The film is based on Posy Simmonds graphic novel in The Guardian and it was a very Guardian sort of comedy based around a literary retreat full of middle class aspiring writers. It was a bit of a rom(p) com and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Posy Simmonds observes the British middle classes with uncanny accuracy and of course,as always with her,there is much more to it than just straightforward comedy with an underlying Thomas Hardy theme (echoes of Far from The Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbevilles)running throughout.The cast is very strong and there is a brilliant performance from young Jessica Barden playing tearaway teenager Jody.Do catch it if you can.

A dog plays a big part in Tamara Drewe. I've never been a dog owner and people sometimes think I am a dog hater although that is not true. I like other people's dogs very much as long as I don't have responsibility for them for 365 days of the year. Who could resist a dog like this who gets a little bit confused about a trip down an escalator?



Taking the dogs theme one step (ok fifty steps) further are the wonderful OK Go. You will all know OK Go as the group who made the famous treadmill video on YouTube and then the paint video last year. Here's their latest. I hope that one day they will record a song that gets played on its musical merits alone but until then let's all marvel in the wonder of their videos. Thanks to Glinner on Twitter for pointing me in the direction of both of these little canine wonders.