HERE IS a company in the UK called Cleverboxes. Its name may sound innocent and its Web site gloats/boasts about a relationship with Tesco Direct. Well, this is a warning to anyone who considers buying anything from Cleverboxes.

Cleverboxes is a dysfunctional business. It does not communicate with so-called ‘customers’, it does not deliver, it does not even properly cooperate with Tesco, it makes false promises, and it generally makes Tesco look bad. Well, Tesco is bad for having such a terrible partner.

Almost a dozen calls later (at cost of money and time to us) my wife and I cancelled our order, which was made through Tesco to Cleverboxes.

To be fair to Tesco, their staff was quite responsible and was eager to pressure Cleverboxes to deliver; it was seemingly the fault Cleverboxes alone. Do they have have staff there? Is that a real business?

Save yourself the disappointment and avoid Cleverboxes. It deserves to lose Tesco as a partner immediately because all it does is rubbish Tesco’s name.

Very hard, not easy

asyJet’s utter incompetence has wasted not only hours of my time but also a lot of time of several relatives (with computer science degrees). Their site is broken and only a fool would trust the company to keep an airplane up in the air. Their customer support is too hard to reach and would probably be useless in this circumstance.

Save yourself a lot of headache by never even visiting the site of EasyJet. This airlines, EasyJet, is technically defunct.

ver the years I have flown with over a dozen different airlines and never did I have as much problem as I am having with EasyJet these days. Their Web site is broken by design, their customer support is understaffed (been waiting for a long time before just giving up and hanging up), and anyone who considers flying with EasyJet should definitely think twice before doing anything. Upselling, spam, advertising of malicious software is all one ends up with after suffering bad IT and customer service.

EasyJet, based on my experience, is the world’s worst airline.

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.