Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

I got rather annoyed yesterday despite part of it being my fault.

I went to book a restaurant online as they weren't open that early in the day. It should be no problem .

The site asked the usual details and wanted a credit card in case of a 'no show'. So I went through all the usual online details including having to put in the four digits on the card (it's Amex so has four digits instead of three). They then said they wanted to double check and showed four boxes with two of them crossed out and wanted me to put in the other two.

This was where I went wrong. As it was four digits I put in the missing two from my card and didn't realise they wanted my pin number - which I have not needed in the last twenty years.

As I put in the wrong numbers they blocked my card. So I phoned them and, after going through all the security checks, asked them to unblock the card. They said that I am the only one to be able to do that and have to do that either at an ATM or through my online account. We're miles from an ATM (never used one) and I don't have an online account! Whoops!!!

So she had to take me through setting up an account and had to make a user I.D. and Password that their system thought was suitably safe. That caused another brief problem as it said the password need to be at least ten characters including letters, numbers and another character. Which I duly did and it rejected me. It turned out that the other character couldn't be a forward slash!

Then I had to put in the code they were sending to my email but the internet went down just at that moment! When it came back up (she had to wait on the phone whilst it rebooted) the code had run out of time so she had to send another one.

She then had to explain to me how I can reactivate the card, which I duly did. All done now

Moral of the story from my point of view:- wait until the restaurant is open and phone my booking through.

 

I live within the confines of Slurrey County Council (they don't spell it the same way I do, but I spell it like that because they are full of shhhh.... lies)

Their contractors were out in my street to fill a couple of potholes this week - - somehow they missed the the other three that are within feet of the ones they filled.

 

I would, but the blighters keep changing colour!

 

Had to take Mrs C for an X-Ray this evening (miraculously she managed to get an appointment) - went in at 1655, out by 1720, fabulous service. Parking charge - £4.50!!

At least Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask.

 

It seems to be because the guys that fill the holes or do the resurfacing are purely contractors and are only allowed/paid to fill the bits they have been told to. There is usually a visit by a council inspector first, who marks the area. Worse still though, the council inspector won't come out unless an issue has been reported by a member of the public.

Quite similar to the IT department at work - we had an issue in our department a while back and there was one of the guys from IT sitting in the room as he had borrowed a desk; the issue was literally a 1-minute fix (I could have done it myself, were it not for it being password restricted) and he refused to do anything until an email was sent into the service desk and then passed over for action. As our service desk is operated by an external company (nuts in itself), this took most of the day. The reason... so his boss was able to quantify what work he was doing!

I know what work my staff are doing without any service desk software! Grrrrr....

 

Most faults are PICNIC faults - Problem In Chair Not In Computer...