Just a rant...

[Shadowe]

Let me see... 20,000 customers... each with roughly £20,000 each in their plans (this figure is intentionally low)... that's... £400,000,000.00

1.5% of that is £6,000,000.00.

Now, 45% of out customers haven't responded, so that's how much of that we have available...

£2,700,000.

Now, due to some complex jiggery-pokery, I'll assume a real investment growth rate of 6%, which is pretty reasonable, over 5 years... Means that in 2012, you'd have the tidy sum of £3,613,209.05

Yeah, I'll have a slice of that, too.

[Ves]

Now, due to some complex jiggery-pokery, I'll assume a real investment growth rate of 6%, which is pretty reasonable, over 5 years... Means that in 2012, you'd have the tidy sum of £3,613,209.05

Yeah, I'll have a slice of that, too.

Yay me!! When I decided to invest a bit of cash I was able to get a nice 6 year plan with a minimum 20% growth (so long as I leave it alone for the 6 years)

HOWEVER..... Free money for not spending is just too good a chance to miss, why are people saying no? are they mental?

[Kitmarch]

Then you can afford to buy me a purple lightsabre for xmas.

[corpos]

New rant topic......

"Outsourced" call centres....

I had to call Orange last night to register my shiny new mobile and give them my "PAK" code to transfer my old number over....

Having spoken to a very nice and helpful young lady in Scotland (yes, I asked!), I was transferred through to a gentleman of Indian origin. Now I'm FAR from racist and have friends from all communities and nationalities, but the person I was put through to last night was APPALLING!!!! He was asked my name and then having been given it by me completely mispronounced it for the remainder of the call, asked if he could call me by my first name and then having been told I prefer a shortened version continued to call me by the full one and then got every piece of information I gave him wrong until I'd confirmed it three to five times.

By the end of the call, I was ready to scream and cancel my brand new contract, but I kept reciting the following litany to keep from doing it: "Free Playstation 3, Free Playstation 3, Free Playstation 3.......!!"

[Shadowe]

That, my good man, sucks. I'm inclined to agree - if you're going to outsource a contact centre at least staff the blasted thing with people who can SPEAK ENGLISH.

My latest personal rant is about a couple of colleagues. Corp will be able to back me up totally on this one.

There are a couple of girls in our (small) team, and they tend to be a little... picky... about people's timekeeping and attitude to work. They're really close friends with each other, and chat lots.

So, Corp and I had our lunch break starting at 12.00 today, which meant that these two girls had theirs at 13.00. Fair enough so far. Everyone was working smack on time, so at 13.00, Corp and I got back into the office, and logged back in. At the same instant, the girls hopped up and left.

Lunch break is, as you may have guessed, 60 minutes.

At 14.05 I queried with Corp where they were.
At 14.07 I queried with my manager where they were.
At 14.13 they waltzed back into the office, muttered something to the manager and didn't say a word to Corp or myself or apologise for leaving us in the lurch for the best part of quarter of an hour.

My understanding of their reason for being late is that they were stuck in a queue in a clothes shop.

I am fuming.

[Ves]

Order The Orange Box, much joy at it's arrival.
Log from CoH last night to install and give Portal a whirl.
Install borked 70-80% complete, have to restart.
Woohoo!! install complete, time to begin downloads and sleep.
Awake to find TF2 sat at 1% complete, Portal at 5% and big nasty error report.
Send error report, restart Steam, try again.
Sickeningly slow download rate, TF2 only at 23%.

Ves hates Steam, want to shoot people with crazed weaponry, but it won't let me!!!!

[Shadowe]

*winces*

Damn sorry to hear that, Ves.

I got away with this by the simple expedient of purchasing an Orange Box off the shelf.

It does mean that you get to join us crazy people in TF 2 at some point, of course. I look forward to shooting you.

And Portal rocks. It took me 8 hours to complete (I understand this is quite long), but I guess starting it at 3.00 in the morning, playing solidly for a few hours, taking a break, playing again, taking a longer break and then managing to finish it at 11.00 that same morning isn't alll that good.

[Ves]

Ordered mine from Play.com, so if I'm missing something (and being really stupid) that could speed the process up any, please tell me.

[Shadowe]

Hmmm... odd.

My method of dealing with it was to install everything that wasn't already on my PC, all in one go. Only needed to use one of the keys that came with the box. The downloads after install weren't too long, either (took a little while, admittedly, but not a huge amount).

Can't think of anything off the top of my head that you could be missing. The only alternative I can think of is to see if there's some way to use your key to download the games in their entirety (don't know how to do it, but someone here will) and install from the download. Perhaps reinstall Steam from scratch, too, as a corrupt install of that would bork things quite handily.

Oh, and my Steam Account name is Chemlak. Look me up!

[Ves]

Gonna put it down to my oddly poor connection speed.

Anyways, have put HL and the 2 expansions on hold for now, just wants TF 2 and Portal to play with for now, but I'm gonna be waiting a while yet it seems.

And already wandered over and joined RC's little gang, looking forward to beating you round the head with a bat as soon as possible

[Shadowe]

Excellent news. I'll be home around 6.15, 6.30 at the latest. 'Puter will be all booted up within 5 minutes. Plas will probably be around at about the same time - depends how work goes for him today.

[Ves]

Yay!! Up to 27% complete, should be up and running by weekend at this rate.

[Shadowe]

Zis is good news. Play Portal when it's ready. Well worth it. It's kinda freaky the way it works, but it's such good fun (especially when you watch yourself going through a portal). And prepare yourself for some pain in TF 2.

[Kitmarch]

"Pain" being roughly translated as "Plas with a flamethrower" and "Shad as a huge fat guy with a minigun".

Portal GOOOOOOOD.

"This was a triumph...."


I personally have never had a single problem with Steam, unless you count my d/l rate inexplicably going through the floor for a while a couple weeks back. But for some people, it is awful.

You can download entirely any game you've added to your Steam account. As this will include the entire Source engine to run this stuff, it'll take a while. Installing from CD if available is always recommended.

Oh, and Steam ID "Daniv". Don't ask.

[Shadowe]

Returning this thread to 'Official Rant' mode.

When a woman phones through to my office (which is the wrong office for what she wanted), and asks me to fax over to her a note saying "The customer does not have this particular type of protection" when there's no way for us to actually know if the client does have that type of protection, I think I have a right to get a little pissy.

So I wrote this little gem:

Dear [Name of idiot]

I can confirm that [my company] has no record of the client having [protection] that would affect the above plan, which has been transferred to your company.

The above statement does not preclude the existence of such protection, however, as there is no requirement for us to be informed of such protection prior to a [particular type of event], which had not occurred prior to us transferring the plan.

Regards,

[Shad]