This morning I spent 1.25 hours trying to install the drivers for this printer. The user doesn't have admin rights so I had to use runas when installing the software, but the cd they had was so badly scratched it couldn't be used. Instead the drivers had to be downloaded. Unfortunately the website has about 10 different drivers and it took two attempts before I could find the drivers that it was after - in this case it was the larger of the two downloads - the 40mb one instead of the nice quick 3mb file.
However after extracting the download, the installation program kept asking for the driver location and the requested driver files were not in the driver directory created when the software was extracted. Instead they were automagically installed in the windows\system32\drivers directory and also located in the root of the extracted software directory. So if you are going to install this software be warned!
I finished the conversation by telling the user that if he even thought about purchasing the same printer again I'd come over and break his legs - it's not often you can get away with saying that :-)
Recently in Rants & Complaints Category
I really wish the tv companies would increase their fees for advertising so that the politicians couldn't afford to run their stupid mud slinging adverts which tell you absolutely nothing about what they will be able to do for the voter and that contradict each other. Some of the advert breaks are getting ridiculous with the number of political ads running one after each other. If the kids tv channels weren't already running their christmas adverts I'd be watching the kids channels for the next week.
Politicians - grow up, stop slagging off the people you may well have to work with and get on with your job of improving the country and letting us know what you are going to be doing for the next few years.
Argggh - the state of Ohio has now come back and said they can't find the fax that I sent to them containing my social security number, drivers licence and full address. This is very worrying as it makes you wonder just *who* has this information and what are they going to do with it. I really can't be bothered to go through the whole i-filing process again (which seems very haphazard and not secure at all) so I'm going to paperfile my Ohio return. The only downside is that it takes longer to get a refund.
In other annoying news, Roadrunner have still not been able to send me a correct invoice for my service with them. Each month it has been wrong - so far they have lost two checks and started me on autopay despite the fact that I requested them to stop autopay until they could get their act together and bill me correctly. I am seriously considering switching to another supplier, but there isn't really anyone else unless I drop from 5mb connection down to 150k and who in their right mind is going to do that?
I thought things couldn't get much worse with the state of Banking but today I got a letter to my US address from Abbey saying that they can't change the address to my US address! They need a notarised copy of my passport sent to them. The last time I spoke to them on the phone they only wanted a photocopy of the passport. I thought the easiest way around this would be to just close the account but it seems that despite having a valid login to my Abbey account, I don't have any accounts attached to the account to make any payments from it. They don't have 24 hour banking via phone, there is no email address to contact them and then they have the cheek to suggest that I might want to use their offshore banking facilities!
You have probably seen the ads on tv for Capital One - where they are training the telephone guys to say NO all the time - well I think 53rd Bank have also been watching this too many times.
After not giving me a credit card and then sending a letter saying they want to do everything in their power, I arranged to get a secured credit card - apparently all I needed was a savings account with $300 in it....but they neglected to tell me that I'd only get a $300 limit on the card - not much use if I'm putting work expenses on it!
I come home, feeling annoyed that I wasted my trip to the bank (and they farted around before finally paying attention) and went to pay a bill online - you know, the service that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - unless its Friday night and you have a bill to pay and the service is temporarily unavailable....or if you need to speak to customer service about online banking, then they are only open during business hours...grrrrr. I really need to change banks, one that provides a credit card, free checking, no atm charges and a decent online service - know any?
In the meantime I think I'll be fighting for a refund of my cheque charges and a closure of my account.
I knew it was going to be a naff day when I managed to knock the new toilet roll off the top of the cistern into the toilet this morning, thus wasting an entire roll of bog roll and the rest of the day didn't improve much either.
I don't think I managed to get any decent work done today. This morning I decided to try and do some more vb.net programming on the microsoft training course and got as far as the online labs only for the website to come back with an "error - please contact support" message. I then spent the next 2 hours chatting with support trying various things, none of which made any difference. The only thing that I did get working was the screencapture of this process using Microsofts media encoder. This tool is great for doing screencams to send to support people and for some reason I had been getting weird error messages saying that the input stream was invalid, but this morning it worked!
I'm still waiting to hear back from Microsoft on the reason the web page doesn't work though.
So this afternoon I decided to do some more job hunting and started to apply for a job with verizon wireless as a techie. However, part of the way through they wanted to know the date that I received my mcp qualifications. Trying to access the Microsoft site I found that they had now integrated their logins with their passport scheme and so I didn't have any username or passwords that worked (my combination was pre passport). On the phone to Microsoft Support and I realised that using the cordless phone (the only option down in the basement) disrupts the wifi signal and I can't use the internet and be on the cordless at the same time. Eventually I get sent a new username and password for the website, based on my mcp id, so it was a good job I could still find my mcp card which had the details on it. However, by the time I had got all of this information the verizon site had timed out due to lack of use and I had to start again as a new user even though I had originally gone through the username/password signup on their site - it doesn't actually save these details until you hit submit a resume.
So I finally managed to apply for the two jobs and I thought I'd take a self assessment test before doing the Microsoft desktop support qualification exam (which starts to bring my qualifications uptodate). The microsoft website shows the self assessment test as being available until the end of august yet when you click through to the measureup site it expired end of May. Not only that, but half way through this process I somehow managed to get the passport site to say click the *logouticon* to log in to the website. Anyway, if you ignore the date information and continue on to register when you finally get to start taking the test your 30 questions are generated and the next page says "error '80020009'
Exception occurred. /test/Display_Question.asp, line 526" I then got on the phone to Measureup and walked them through the problem and an email has been sent to the developer so hopefully by tomorrow morning I may be able to take the test.
I went to a 1 hour dry cleaners this afternoon at 2pm to get a suit drycleaned. However they were unable to accept it for 1 hour cleaning and the earliest I could get it back would be 10am tomorrow. If I had wanted 1 hour cleaning I needed to have had it dropped off by 1pm. What I can't understand is the shop closes at 5 at the earliest so that still gave them 3 hours between arriving at the store and them closing for them to clean the suit and they were advertising 1 hour.
After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched :-)
DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY - YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS - FOR JOINING OUR 'COMPLAINTS CLUB' - I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON'T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN'T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS - YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY 'FIRST' MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU 'HONARY LIFE MEMBERS' AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY
Animal Airlines really seem to be a cowboy company and are really unorganised and I really recommend avoiding them.
I'd be intrigued to see if anyone has had any success with importing their cats to the states with them. We fly out on the 20th April (hooray!) and are having major hassles getting straight answers out of "animal airlines" who are meant to be the people to send the cats with.
We are flying continental from Manchester to Columbus Ohio and have been quoted £1500 for the three cats by continental who say we need to go via animal airlines. However animal airlines gave us a quote for £735 but when we tried to book it they then bumped the price up by £135 by saying we needed to have the cats sent to cincinatti (and we would have to pick them up from there - a 3 hours drive from Columbus). When we reluctantly decided to try that route, the price went up ANOTHER 3% as we wanted to pay by credit card - NOW they are saying that they could decide to use Continental and we might have to pay that - but they'd decide on the day - oh and we'd have to throw the cats out of the airplane window as they can't be dropped off at the airport until an hour *after* our flight has left. The fact that a quote (which is meant to be legally binding) has increased in value by £135 is just not right and I wonder if trading standards would have something to say.......
This company seem to make the rules up as they go along and I just don't trust them - but £1500 is VERY expensive for three cats and I'm not sure we can afford that with everything else we have to pay out in the first weeks of moving.
The whole experience is really frustrating. Kristen managed to speak to another company this afternoon who said that they had had a lot of people coming to them after getting the runaround from Animal Airlines and who had not been very happy with their service.
(Hopefully this rant will get a high rating in google as I couldn't find much on them in google (which is a bad sign by itself))
After my last shopping experience with them when they couldn't make up their mind on shipping, this time they've cancelled an order I placed as the seller can't accept amazon payments. Yet the item is still on sale this morning AND they have an identical item selling for 1p if you can name the number of tracks that the item can hold. Something is not right here....
apparently all I have to do to fix my linksys problem is open a webpage to http://192.168.1.1 and log in as......
I think they didnt read the bit which says that the router returns a connection refused when you try to connect to it with a browser,ftp,smtp,pop3......
However I do have access to another linksys router which i'll try to install later in the week but I've not seen any good reviews on this product at all - stay away from the Linksys WAG54G
Neil posted about a woman getting knocked down at a zebra crossing in Bradford. Last night in the space of 10 minutes we were almost in 3 accidents in Congleton.
The first was coming up a steep hill at about 7.30pm and a car came towards us with no lights on. Thankfully they had to stop as there was only room for one car to pass. They couldn't work out why I was flashing them to turn their lights on and wouldn't roll down their window so they could hear me saying "put your lights on". Eventually they got the message.
3 minutes later there was a car parked in the middle of the road outside the shop. As it went to move off, it didn't bother to look or signal and almost hit the car that was forced to "undertake" it to get by.
Then outside blockbusters a car dropped off a lady passenger who then tried to run in front of our car. The car stopped about 50 yds down the road with no signal but looked like it was stopping. As I overtook it then started to pull out into my path. As I hit the horn the driver jumped in his seat.
Was yesterday "Bradford and Congleton drive like a lunatic day"?
I thought libraries were meant to be places of peace and quiet? So how come people are allowed to bring their mobiles in AND then stick them on loud at the bottom of the handbag so the entire library can listen to the first 3 bars of some slightly recognisable "pop" song 10 times?
6 weeks and 1 day after Gateway Peugeot took my radio out of the car as it wasn't getting a signal, the replacement has finally been fitted. The excuses for the delay ranged from "Peugeot will not send a replacement out until the old one is received" (which was the first excuse for a couple of weeks), then I got "They have to be shipped from abroad" (I could walk "abroad" and back again in 6 weeks). Finally last Wednesday I told them to have one fitted by the end of the week and was told that "we will have to contact Peugeot head office to get that authorised" so I told them they'd better hurry up and do it. I also complained to the head office last Friday @4.36pm (a week ago) via their online website contact page as there was no contact phone number supplied. Monday at 11.51 I got a reply acknowledging receipt of my email. 3pm it was given a case reference. So it looks like it takes 3 hours for emails to travel between departments in Peugeot.Yesterday (Thursday) at 6pm I got the reply "Thank you for your email dated 15th March. May I first of all say how sorry I was to learn of your disappointment with your vehicle and apologise for the delay in reply. Indeed, it is always a cause for concern should any customer express disappointment with eitherour product or the service that our dealer network provides. I should explain however, that although we are of course, interested in the overall operations of authorised dealers, they do operate independently and are therefore, responsible in their own right for their day to day trading activities. I am sure that in view of the aforesaid information, you will appreciate why it is difficult for us to comment in detail at this time and therefore, I have sent copy of your letter to Gateway Motor Co. for further investigation. You should expect to hear from myself in due course with the outcome of my investigation. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Yours sincerely, Aina Ogunade-Paul Custoemr Care Manager"
So basically the company can trade under the Peugeot name, they can sell Peugeot cars (and only Peugeot), goods need to be authorised by Peugeot but they are totally independent and Head Office can't do anything about it.
The only good side of things is that I didn't have to order some bright paper and a pen to create a sign for the window saying "If you buy a car from this Gateway Peugeot dealer you may end up waiting 6 weeks for spare parts and have a car in the garage at frequent intervals - Beware!" and then park the car outside the showroom.
Incidentally the first song I heard on the Radio was Shania Twain's I'm gonna get you good which has some weird misheard lyrics
6 minutes into the first day back (for most people) and I have a sales person ringing me up - do they not understand that most people will be busy deleting all their spam for the first hour??????
Another shopper has the misfortune to purchase something at ebuyer and he chronicles his experiences, including the numerous enotes he had to (re)open.
I'm sure that looking after loads of screaming toddlers has got to be less stressful and easier to deal with than BT, Demon, ISDN Dialups and ADSL installations!
Grrr - I am unable to send mail via pipex at the moment as the server smtp.dsl.pipex.com is immediately dropping outgoing connections. Call Logged
Update 2 Reboots later and its all working again - no response from pipex though.
Why would someone who's paid a fortune for one of those phones with the polyphonic ringtones, stick to the annoying nokia ringtune and even worse take forever to answer it at the breakfast table?
I wouldn't have thought that organising an adsl modem to work in conjunction with a hardware firewall would be that difficult. But I've been receiving conflicting advise over what routers/functionality needs to be installed. All I need is an router/modem that is effectively invisible to the firewall so it thinks it is connected to the internet and can get on with its filtering,vpn's and protection. However I am being ignored by BT, the company we are probably going to buy Broadband from (yet another reason to not use them - if they are this bad when we *want* to spend some money with them I hate to think what they will be like when we have a problem), our existing firewall support won't help unless we buy one particular make of router and get broadband from one particular supplier, and the firewall company won't help as they say its the resellers problem - so back to square one.....Almost makes me want to go to dialup modem! The fact that we can't order broadband until the physical line is installed and live also makes a mockery of the whole broadband ordering process.
Talk about one law for some and another entirely different one for coppers! The BBC reports that two BBC policemen beat speeding charges because warning signs had the wrong colour border......whats that got to do with the fact that they were speeding? Surely it doesn't matter if there were warning signs or not? Just shows that speed cameras are a load of rubbish.
Meant to mention that I received a voucher for a free pizza - from the same place that caused me to complain in the first place! ot sure whether we'll go back and take advantage of the voucher though.
Well it looks like there is only one pipe in Congleton for water as there is a burst a couple of miles away that has stopped our water. Water tankers for collecting water are near the scene of the burst but nowhere near here.....grrrrrr. Phone number for the latest status (for my benefit later) is 0845 746 2200
Excuse me if I pong this morning - we have no water :-(
As you might tell we didn't get our pizza tonight. The extended details has the complaint I submitted to Domino's. Note that this is a complaint so appropriate language has to be used (and yes I do realise its only a pizza!! Papa John's doesn't have a pizza outlet near us - their nearest one is a good 35 minute drive from home) In the meantime I strongly recommend that nobody attempts to order a pizza from Domino's in Macclesfield.
Whats the point in requesting a repeat prescription for asthma inhalers after having an attack, leaving a phone number in case there is a problem with the request and then finding out 4 days later when picking up the prescription that they won't give you the medicine without seeing a doctor first???? Don't they understand the point about the contact phone number when they know that you have to give notice that you are going to be ill a week in advance at this dr's? now I have to rearrange some work appointments and go to the Dr's in the middle of the day to have them ask "what can I do for you", my reply "I need a asthma inhaler" and them to reply "ok - here you are".
Grrrrrrr
We shipped a server out on Friday afternoon via UPS - what a waste of time. When the driver turned up to collect it, he complained that the box was on a wooden pallet. If it wasn't then the box would have split in two. We got it on a Express + service, which is meant to be pre 8.30 delivery. When the server had not arrived by 9, we got a message to say that the driver got lost and had to fill up and he'd definately be there by 9.30. At 10.15 I complained that it had still not arrived and the customer service man said there was no 9.30 am delivery slot (as that is what I originally thought we had booked) that the server was at the back of the truck, the driver hadn't seen it (this is a 6' * 4' *4' package (or bigger)) and therefore I wouldn't get it until midday!!!!! Needless to say ANOTHER complaint went in and we've got our money back. In the meantime I wasted 3.5 hours waiting for the shipment to arrive....and that was just the start of today!
I was stupid enough to buy something else from ebuyer last week - a dvd player. When it arrived in the post there was a big dent in the top of the unit. Since then I've been trying to get them to provide me details on how to send it back to them free of charge for a full refund. I was originally told to post it back at my cost, then I was told they would refund up to £5 of postage.... I weighed the box on our stamp scales in the office and the cheapest was £7.84. Another email back to them, this time quoting the good old Sale Of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) and threatened to request a chargeback on the credit card if they didn't arrange arrange return transport by 1pm today. Within an hour I had a response saying they would send a courier to pick it up! Just shows how much rubbish certain companies will try to get away with.
Arggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Spot the problem with this picture....You may want to click on it to get the close up
