Hull CC Complaints unit.

Our council here in Hull (Kingston-upon-Hull to give it its full and proper name) has a Complaints Unit. They can be contacted via any means possible except email. I find that in a world where email personifies communications the fact that the one, possibly the most used, area not available via email contact is complaints.

That said, the available complaints procedures are limited in scope and would certainly scare the less intelligent of the local populace (and our Lord knows there are plenty of those here) away from using said service.

We have not as yet used the service but we know plenty of people who have and they say the procedures are so bad the majority would never use it again. In and effort to understand why those who have used the service find it so bad I went out on a crusade to gather as much information from those people as was possible. One area that stood out time and time again was that while it was easy to start a complaint (email not withstanding) once the procedure was underway the nightmares began. Stalling was one complaint. Another was lack of resolution. After gathering as much information is possble over a 9 month period the only conclusion I can come to is that HullCC make it as difficult as they possibly, and legally, can, probably in the hope that the number of complaints go down thereby making it look like the people here have nothing to complain about.

At this time we are considering, or rather was considering, putting in 2 complaints. The fact that there is no email contact has forced us to have a rethink. The 2 complaints we have are as follows:

1) When we were first told of the availabilty of this house we came to have a look. The house itself had had some major work done in it as the previous tenant had deliberately broken a major water pipe (I will leave it to your imagination the   amount of damge that was caused). While the internals of the house had had major work done there was plenty of small to not so small problems that still remained. Before we had moved in the then Housing Officer assured us that any and all remaining problems we found once reported would be fixed. We followed his advice and rang the relevant number with a long list of remaining problems. They sent a  guy round to identify all the problems and he then let the relevant departments know. They all came and fixed nearly all  what the should fix. There are however some remaining and after call after call to them saying what the problems are that still need fixing they remain  steadfastly not fixed.

2) The Housing Officer that was then has now moved elsewhere and we have a new one. She is utterly useless at the job and is frankly totally uncaring. Her attitude is one of "You should be thankful for the house".

3) Before we moved in and with the previous Housing Officer he agreed that the state of both front and back garden should be and would be sorted. 1 year later we are still waiting. The small garden out front is a mass of weeds and a small tree has overgrown. The current Housing Officer has said "The gardens are not our problem". A comment we happen to agree with but as the previous Housing Officer had given us assurances that becuase of the state of said gardens BEFORE we had moved in they remain a council problem and the council should sort them out. We are now in no mans land as we have the agreement with the previous Housing Officer which the current Housing Officer does not care about. Her  exact words were  "The problems are yours and you should pay someone to sort the gardens out". Not exactly nice or correct as the previous Housing Officer has given us assurances that "Because the problem of the gardens was evident before you move in that the gardens are a council problem and the council will send someone around after you move in to sort the gardens out for you". Of course, to this day that never happened and because we have an uncaring Housing Officer for these parts now our chances of getting those jobs done that was a part of our agreement when first signing for this council house are seemingly nil.

It would seem from talking with other residents on this and other council estates we are not alone in having agreements broken and not alone in not liking the current complanins setup of our council. Whether they will take any notice of this or the emails sent or even the written letter sent to them remains to be seen. One thing is for sure though and that is something must change before the council becomes mistaken in thinking all residents are happy as tey have not complained. If the procedure to complain remains an obstical to complaining then that alone explains why people will not complain.

My ISP and ADSL2+

My ISP, Karoo of Hull fame, or infamy, has recently changed over to ADSLL2+. Yay! I hear you  shout but it is not as simple as that. In Hull, as in other parts of the U.K., the telephone wiring system here is old. Some has been replaced, most has not. Because of this ADSL2+ in the main for the vast majority of their customers sucks badly. So badly the majority have seen a drop in sync speeds. Sure, there are some whose sync speeds actually went up but they are so few and far between the move to ADSL2+ can only be seen as a failure. Not by the ISP however.

And that is where the problems start. As one can rightly expect from an ISP point of view slower sync speeds means slower throughput which means less can be downloaded. From a customer point of view lower sync speeds means slower throughput which means Internet applications, including but not limited to downloading in general, such as VOIP, watching video's, streaming music and Internet radio etc stutter and stammer as if we were back in the days of the old modem dialup world dialing into a modern Internet. Basically, from the customers point of view the whole ADSL2+ experience is a poor one.

Some have already requested to be moved back to the older, in their cases, more reliable ADSL while others are patiently waiting for the ISP to somehow magically fix whatever it is they need to fix to improve their connectivity. A few others have left Karoo and moved into the Mobile Internet world where they are finding that their speeds are better.

It is generally accepted that here we on average overall speeds are better than they are in "BT Land" and in some circumstances better then some cable areas. But, when things go wrong here it can be a long arduous fight to:
1) Get them to see the problem
2) Get them to accept that the problem exists
3) Get them to accept that the customer can be right
4) Get them to realise that some customers  are more technically aware than some of their own  technicians and  engineers
5) Get them to fix whatever is the underlaying reason for the problem or problems.

With 5 being the ultimate objective 1 and 2 can be and is the hardest to get across while 3 and 4 are nigh on impossible.

Over the course of the last week or so I have been fighting on behalf of many of their customers to get the ISP to admit they have screwed up. Indeed, during one particularly brutally honest  confrontation I said sod it and quit the forum I was on. He tried to get me to allow him to ring me (isn't that a stupid corporate thing? Asking if one can ring) but I said back that if he wants to ring me there would be strings attached which i laid out for him. So far, he has neither replied nor answered the questions posed. Sort of typical really. When the going get tough, they hide.

We shall see over the rest of this week just how much he cares about his customers and whether or not he was for real when he said I was the most technically minded of anyone outside of his immediate business associations.

Our ISP.

By our I mean it in the sense that the ISP is in our city via our cities telephone system. We are somewhat unique in Kingston-upon-Hull in that we have our own telephone network totally separate from BT/Virgin etc from which the rest of the country benefits in a way we cannot. That benefit is if you hae problems with your current ISP you can simply jump ship and sign up elsewhere. You can do this as many times as there are iSP's available to you. It is that telephone company the provides the city's ADSL offerings. Apart from those ISP's that provide only dialup services and another that supposedly provides ADSL and one other that claims to be providing fibre based services (I say claims to be as I have yet to fine any installations done) our ISP being a child offspring offering ADSL  based services off the back of the telephone provider Mother ship is all we have here.

That being the case. When the ISP in question buggers things up or is, as any child can be, petulant or simply does not offer what customers, home customers in particular, want  then we have no other ISP to go to. Sure we could use 'mobile Internet' but that has problems of its own here, such as low signals which makes using mobile Internet something akin to the old, and now ancient, dialup services.

Right now, there are huge problems with the ISP's ADSL2+ offerings. All over the city, in every single exchange area, people are getting low sync (down) speeds. Lower, in some cases much lower, (down) sync speeds than they had on the older ADSL services. One always knows when they have a problem or two as they do not return emails. Emailing their technical support is a waste of time as they just trot out the company line. Emailing cutomer support is like pulling teeth with a spoon. I.E. something worth considering but once commonsense has kicked in the idea ia forgotten. apart from that, emailing customer support is a waste of time as they too trot out the company line, along with such gems as "have you changed your settings" which is fast becoming the watch word for the ISP's  customer service team. They are frankly a joke. Getting any information out of them is akin to getting water out of a stone. On occasions emailing them does return a decent result but when the shit hits the fan they hide away.

We are in discussions (as part of our normal monthly meetings) with said ISP in an effort to find out why their ADSL2+ is so crap.  So far they have trotted out  'line length'  and 'incompatible hardware (meaning modem/routers and plain modems) which is all well and good for the masses as an excuse but us more techincally aware people know that those are simple excuses. While they do obviously play a part in end user sync speeds in a city such as we are with its tightly setup network of cabling we do not believe  for one minute those are the cause of the low down sync speeds. They are not talking with yor average Joe here they are talking to two people that have years of network and telephony experience between them. So, while they can fob off a lot of folk they cannot as easily fob us two off. Of course there are those within our group that think they know everything and often times come up with utter bullshit but others know who they are so ignore them for what they are.

In the next day or so we should be finding out the waht, why and how come.

ADSL2+

Our ISP has recently moved a lot of their customers from ADSL to ADSL2+ and surprise  surprise everybody's line syncs have dropped.

Why is this not a surprise to anyone except the ISP in question? Because, we users are used to be shafted by our ISP. Some are saying they have deliberately slowed people down to save on bandwidth costs. Others are saying they will use the Consumer Act against the ISP. They are saying that the ISP lied to the cities residents when they pumped up ADSL2+. Advertising everywhere to maximise how many people saw their adverts. Now people have moved over to it they are finding they have stepped back a few year in time with speeds lower than they had on the older ADSL technology.

In our group we have a couple of solicitors and they are looking very closely at what the ISP said about ADSL2+ and what people ended up getting. The two could not be further apart in fact so they will not have to look very hard.

The 'upgrade' to ADSL2+ is a mess and has left a lot of, read,most of, their customers with slower speeds. You cannot believe the depth of feeling generated over this. I have had a weekend of  seemingly none stop emails over this and I am not exhausted of interest.

I have asked the ISP to put me back on the older ADSL to which they replied that could I give them a couple of days to see what they can sot out before 'downgrading'. I said that in the name of helping other customers I would wait until no later then Wednesday. If no solution to the slower line syncs arrives I fully expect to be back on ADSL by Wednesday morning.

We shall have to wait and see what they come up with and see if they can fix whatever it is that is so obviously broken. i will not be holding my breath on that happening. We shall see though.

Top posters.

It cannot have escaped those who have been using the Usenet for any length of time that the vast majority of top posters come in two categories. One, those that are new to the Usenet  and know no better. Two, they use MS Windows and the Usenet program that comes with it.

This latter one can be fixed using something called the OEQuote patch or some similar name. The former can be educated but don't bet your house on them changing if they haven't installed the afore mentioned patch and even if they have the chances of them changing is slim at best.

Even Microsoft caved in and released the OEQuote patch so that Outlook Express defualts to the bottom of the post instead of the unpacthed Outlook Express that defaults to the top of the post thereby giving users of it the idea that that is the correct way to post.

Much contention can be seen around the Usenet over top versus bottom versus intermingled posts and which is the more correct. If one reads a book you do not expect the en to be on the first page. Similarly, if you read a Q&A faq you do not expect to see the answers given before the question. So, why do some people insist that top posting is correct?

The mind boggles at what goes on the heads of such people. Do they live their lives backwards?

Beat them if they won't comply.

This article on the BBC website is all well and good but let us be sure this is what is really needed. Take this quote as an excellent example of what I am aiming at.

"The council's zero tolerance approach aims to reduce the feeling of
neglect and lack of respect within neighbourhoods and to help improve
the quality of people's lives and encourage civic pride."

Read and digest that quote. Does it scare you as much as it does me?

I am all for not littering. I was raised when the T.V. campaign "Keep Britain Tidy" was active and since those days have always made the effort to either take our rubbish home with us or ensure it is placed in the proper bin wherever we may be. As a father i have always instilled this attitude into my children too. But, beating people up by handing out fines over what could be a careless act is just plain wrong.

That quote above shows exactly why the various councils around this country have no respect whatsoever from the vast majority of people. Even less respect is offered to councils that are Hell bent on simply expanding council coffers. After all, that is what "zero tolerance" is all about. It has nothing at all to do with "civic pride". There are surely better ways to proffer civic pride into people then there is in that method of instailling "civic prde".

How about a national T.V. campaign as was done in the 1970's? Splash is all over childrens T.V. so we catch them young as they did back then. We have a whole two generations that do not care about anyone or anything except themselves but fining these people for what is ultimately a Governement problem is wrong.

More rubbish.

More rubbish against eating foods. This article cannot really be called journalism. No matter what we eat it is bad for us these so called experts claim. Yet, our forefathers and generation after generation of families have lived and survived on the very foods they say are bad for us. The reason these people call foul on foodstuff is for the same reason others do it and that is to get more money into their coffers.

I mean, come on, think about it. If these experts didn't say anything who in their right minds would send them donations? No one that is who. So, out they come with whatever the latest 'find' is and how it is linked to this or that. Tell you what, let us say it is linked to cancer because people are scared of the big C.

Colour me skeptical if you so wish but I find all these level of scare mongering exactly that. scaremongering.