arlier today I was horrified when I attempted to print plane tickets that I had purchased last week. Check-in is possible now as the flight is less than 30 days away (that’s the standard accepted by several companies). Upon attempting to obtain the tickets (as PDF, also a common standard among airlines) I was greeted with nothing at all (no download). I proceeded towards an oblivion of cyclical links and cruft. Both Firefox and Chromium were tested for this, even the latest Android. Nothing would work. When pressing on “check in” I’d be redirected to the Adobe Web site. It’s absolutely impossible to do anything else. Adobe would then pressure the visitor to download and install (with full/root access to the system) a piece of spyware/malware known as “Reader”. In the process, by linkage, EasyJet was forcing one to receive more Adobe ads (proprietary software). Everything in the process is proprietary despite the fact that the Web is “open” and all the software I use is FOSS. Worse yet, EasyJet has me running through screens of non-ending malicious advertising while just trying to log in and check in. Without Adobe’s proprietary Reader, on the face of it, one cannot check in at all. EasyJet ought to take a closer look at who’s hired for its IT team to avoid such embarrassment.

EasyJet should know that Reader is not required to open PDFs. Every IT professional should know this.

“Bad service” the understatement of this decade

atWest (National Westminster, part of the Royal Bank of Scotland) used to be pretty good, but it became absolutely terrible a few years ago, not just for customers but also for staff (what’s left of the staff that’s qualified). There were systemic changes that were covered here before. Earlier this year it was the last straw (much had happened beforehand) and we decided to ditch the bank. We decide to transfer all the money elsewhere after they had made many mistakes. But it’s not easy. Even then they make a mistake (not passing all the money, forgetting to pay interest) and later, only upon visiting the bank again, they finally admitted their error and then refused to issue a letter that would enable us to ask the new bank to compensate us for NatWest making its mistake. Basically, NatWest had an innocent party, Nationwide, blamed in vain and it caused hours of painful work and nuisance (for all sides which were innocent victims). But wait, it gets worse. NatWest then closed the account and forgot or failed to send a closing statement. How can a bank be so incompetent? Many arguments were needed to make a resolution reachable and no resolution has been reached yet. It’s chaos because the staff if not skilled enough to deal with the scenario. This is just typical NatWest as of recent years. The staff member there don’t know what the heck they are doing.

It is worth adding that NatWest still advertises in many pamphlets everywhere that it is saying “yes” to almost every loan request, gloating about accepting 90% of applications, essentially gambling with savers’ money by giving it to people who cannot pay back. This is a recipe for bankruptcy (or taxpayers-paid bailout), especially when banks are allowed to lend around 10 times the amount they actually possess. This is corruption.

In summary, NatWest is a terrible bank these days and those who try to leave it may find that even upon departure the bank is unable do work properly. A lot of problems can be spared and avoided if one quits NatWest or never joins them to begin with. Learn from other people’s repeatedly-horrible experience. My friends who are with NatWest say the same about the bank.

Y endless Seagate nightmare began last September, just under a month before my Maplin warranty for the Seagate drive (3 terabyte of storage) ended and over a year before my Seagate ‘warranty’ (2 years) ended. I went a long way to Maplin (where I had purchased the drive) only to be told that I should contact Seagate directly. Their Web site was hard to use, handling RMA was hard (I am not an idiot when it comes to user interfaces), and the instructions they provided (far too long) were self-contradictory (not just ambiguous but self-contradictory). If I criticised them publicly, then Segates’s PR account would jump in and try to appease. Words do little to improve things. Then they wanted me to volunteer to improve their manuals.

What was wrong with the drive was physical errors. I did not drop the drive, it did not get wet, and it was not mishandled as far I can tell. Files would vanish, the drive would not get mounted sometimes, and the kernel would panic a lot. It was useless. It became totally unreliable. In an attempt to salvage what I still could I quickly bought another 3 terabyte backup drive (foolishly I paid Seagate again) and spent weeks copying — manually (due to errors) — a lot of files over from the faulty drive to the new one. The new drive cost me about 100 pounds (150 US dollars) and days of my life. It also cost me in lost (permanently) data, but hey, drives do have faults sometimes, right? Sure, it happens, but what happens when a company like Seagate sends you another faulty drive to replace a faulty drive?

So many days and even weeks (dozens of hours of work) later I wrestled my way through Seagate’s bizarre and complicated RMA process, having to print all sorts of papers and ship at my own expense the faulty drive which was still under warranty. What did I get a week or so later? A well-packaged “refurbished” drive. I regret not tossing it right in the bin when I got it. That pile of garbage was just a faulty drive spun off as “new” (or “refurbished” as Seagate likes to call faulty old drives). I spent a huge amount of time replacing (swapping) one broken product with another. To make things worse, I did it at my own expense and Seagate’s support people are hardly even replying. I spent hours yet again trying to get justice in this case, and by justice I don’t just mean explaining to people what a horrible company Seagate is and why it deserves no business. True justice would be compensation for all these hours that I spent working with these faulty drives, never mind that data I lost in the process. There is no excuse for sending faulty drives out to people. It can drive them nuts. It ruined a whole day of mine, including my appetite.

A lot of people may not realise this, but the California-based company Seagate makes a lot of money helping the criminals at the NSA and its equivalents (global espionage). Seagate helps entities which unquestionably break the law store innocent people’s personal data, and probably shipping to them (not just to private companies) drives which actually work and last, ensuring that those who have no rights to that data get to keep it for good, whereas people like myself lose personal data (not to mention vastly reduced productivity), simply because Seagate ships faulty drives and hardly bothers fixing what’s unjust. This post need not delve much into the relationship between Seagate and the NSA (see for instance “SEAGATE SECURE SELF-ENCRYPTING LAPTOP HARD DRIVES EARN NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY QUALIFICATIONS FOR NATIONAL SECURITY SYSTEMS”); the point is, for regular clients that don’t purchase drives by the millions (to illegally copy citizens’ personal data from around the world) Seagate is just an arrogant, heavyweight beast. It helps those in power hoard data about us, while hardly helping us — mere mortals — keep our own data safe.

I could go on and specify just how much data and what type of data I lost (measuring the damage and the time would be in the thousands of dollars). I could specify the tests I performed and explain where and how time was wasted. But even the writing of this rant, almost 5 months after this whole Seagate nightmare began, would add up to the pain and anger. I tried to be patient with Seagate. I did not disparage them (using facts) until months later and this is my first blog post on the subject.

Seagate deserves no more purchases. It’s not because its hard drives become faulty. It’s because when they do get faulty (and are still under warranty) Seagate would continue to do damage (or damage control) and patronise/ignore those who are not big clients like the NSA.

Seagate is a malicious company. Boycott its products. If not for the NSA connection, then for bad quality, bad customer support, preinstalling Microsoft patent trap on all hardware, etc.

T lies in many areas of its business, ranging from DPI (sniffing) to alleged back doors in its equipment (for surveillance). Well, BT support, both the technical and non-technical side that is, also makes some false promises and utters sheer lies that serve an agenda, usually covering up misconduct and incompetence. I have given numerous examples over the years.

My latest encounters with BT show that it is negligent and incompetent at the core, going all the way up to management. As pointed out some while ago, BT is still failing to send something it says with great clarity that it is sending (false promises which complicate things more than honest refusals) and when contacted two weeks later it has no record of the promise or any explanation. What’s more, a manager then fails to call back when (second lie) he said he would and when approached about it he merely makes another false promise (sending he would sent something, but never actually doing so).

If BT wants to lie to people to their faces (and managers do that too), what does that say about BT’s attitude towards clients?

The truth of the matter is that here in the UK swapping ISPs can involve weeks — yes, weeks if not a whole month — staying online (while landline changes assignment to brand of ‘choice’), so to drop one ISP for another is a big deal, especially if you work from home over the Internet (as my wife and I do). All I can do is warn others about BT. Avoid, boycott, ridicule. BT does not deserve to be in business.

ODAY I was supposed to receive a callback from a BT supervisor over a problem that I had reported. The problem was a false promise from BT that they would send a letter. Why make a promise if they’re not going to do anything? That in itself is an enigma.

Well, for the second time in less than a year I needed to stay home during working hours in order to receive a callback about this issue (a case of BT support incompetence) and the supervisor seemingly ‘forgot’ to call.

I am writing about all these terrible experiences in order to warn people who consider becoming BT customers.

oday I chewed the last straw. I went very eagerly and quickly to ‘my’ bank, having received an outrageous commission-related invoice (which the bank later cancelled). What a waste of time.

I am still with banks only because of hidden taxes like inflation; I wouldn’t bother otherwise. The financial circumstances imposed by the banks-funded state/government force almost everyone to become a customer of the big banking cartel, where choice is superficial and scarce (different flavour of the same pile of something). I can’t speak about other banks, but NatWest I just know well enough. Eagerly I went as I was close to closing my account, for all sorts of reasons I wrote about before.

The pain of moving standing orders, direct debit, ISA, all sorts of paperwork and a different kind of site, addresses, etc. is a very big pain. Aggregating it all may add up to entire days of a person’s life. It’s one heck of a project moving banks. But principles matter.

I raised all of my concerns with a consultant who sat there before me, speaking to my wife and I. She was losing the arguments all along and while she wouldn’t acknowledge that she agreed with me some of the time (agreeing with me would betray her employer and put her job in jeopardy), her face spoke volumes.

Among the topics discussed were privacy violations (not valuing customers, except as products) the bank’s devaluation of workers, and of course the bank’s huge risk-taking. Later today I spoke to a longtime friend who also had complaints about NatWest and he has just taken 50,000 pounds out of there. He closed his account, so it’s clear that I am not alone.

Dealing with the topics in turn, the bank realises that sending/selling financial details of customers to another country/ies is embarrassing and potentially illegal. Even domestic data-sharing such as this is dubious and very offensive to customers. It depends on the country.

Regarding workers, bogus claims and illogical arguments are used to dodge the reality that tellers are replaced by machines and those who insist of speaking to people will have fewer tellers available to serve them over time (longer queues or no tellers at all). Banks are becoming rich people’s gambling machines which they make accessible to poor people only via monitors. This time, unlike in previous visits to the bank, it seemed like the consultant actually absorbed the idea that redundancy might be around the corner. She said that they merely moved people from the back room to the front desk, but surely this is hogwash. The bank is lining up people for the next round of layoffs (or “cost savings” as they euphemistically call it).

The last point is the most important one; I confronted or at least questioned the marketing pitch which says they give a mortgage to nine out of ten applicants, essentially throwing away savers’ money under the assumption of stable house prices and stable employment. The consultant admitted that the bank almost went bankrupt 5 years ago; I told her that it did, but taxpayers including myself (through national debt) paid to prevent this. She said they had become more strict, but this contradicts the mortgage marketing. She said the chief of the bank was changed as if that in its own right means much. My wife was especially amused by that. She also said the bank was profitable last year, ignoring the fact that it cannot be measured based on years of recovery rather than a slump. What happens when the balance sheet changes and people cannot keep up with payments, let alone default?

Citing Cyprus, I asked about assurances. The consultant said that assurances for up to 85,000 pounds are provided per person, but she admitted (upon being challenged) that these rules have been changed over time and can still be changed. A seemingly independent (but connected to banks) entity is responsible for this. She wrote down an address for me to check out. She said it would be wise to save in another bank for sums higher than that. Ain’t that reassuring? NatWest saying it may be unsafe to save there….

The bottom line is this: NatWest screwed a saver like my friend by not properly informing him about terms; he quit them as a high-sum saver. NatWest has not much confidence that it can secure savings when there is a run on that bank. It even points to other banks. As for mortgages, it just gives them to anyone more or less; the consultant nodded when I said they can lend out around 10 times what they actually have and small players cannot do this (it would be called a Ponzi scheme or something). When a bank sells out its customers and staff and is giving mortgages so tactlessly you just know it’s waiting to burst. Don’t put a penny in NatWest.

An epic fail

his rant is about Argos, a British retail giant/chain that can’t get some of the very basics right. Today I was scheduled to receive a wardrobe I had purchased a week earlier. It is a birthday gift for my wife. I paid effortlessly on their Web site (they’re good at taking money) and selected a 5-hour delivery slot 6 days in advance. Well, guess what? Nobody showed up. Then, at the very end of a 5-hour wait that kept me out of bed and out of work they have a robocaller call me to say they can’t deliver. No chance to say a thing, I could not speak to a person.

I phoned a couple of people at Argos (waste of time guaranteed), the latter said he would look into it and promised to call within an hour. Guess what? He never called back.

So I phoned Argos again. They struggled for 15 minutes in vain to just bring up the order on the screen. What a mess. They changed me, did not deliver, and now cannot even find the order by number, search on postcode, search on name, etc.

Don’t buy at Argos. They’re only good at charging people.