In this life, I have certain fundamental beliefs which I hold to be fundamentally true. They are:
Everyone is born equal and deserves to be treated equally.
Habitat, despite being a furniture shop, sells the best dressings gowns in the world.
Just occasionally, you come across a product offering which is so good that you'd never want to try anything else. I have two: the aforementioned dressing gowns (big fluffly clouds of towelling, just perfect for curling up with a cuppa on the sofa - wonderful) and Body Shop's Men's Shaving Cream (not so much for any skin benefits it offers, but because the razor always rinses perfectly). I firmly believe that these are the best dressing gowns and shaving creams in the world. Everything else, I could be tempted to try different suppliers - I'm not picky about what sort of bread I buy, or what brand of car I drive (I'm currently driving a bus pass). But dressing gowns and shaving cream... nah.
My question is: do you have things which you'd never, ever buy from anyone else? Products which will leave terrible holes in your life when they finally cease production? Caviar, cars, socks, hairnets, waffles, whatever...
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Amazing transforming fashion (I mean it. Really. Amazing.)
I did have a couple of interesting blogs lined up today on the subject of colour and information presentation, but they'll have to wait, because core77 flags up this amazing video of the work of Hussein Chalayan. Aren't they just incredible? I've never seen anything like this. Such elegant use of smart fabrics - a field which has been promising so much for so long and yet (so far) delivered so little.
Admittedly, it'll still be a while before these are ready for the high street... but by the look of it, not that long. I've never before seen anything that hinted at the possibility, so to me these look just incredible.
The Customer is Always Right (or, A Comedy of Errors)
I have a confession to make.
At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.
It was empty.
Huh?
"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!
So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.
That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.
Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.
And waited.
Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.
And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).
The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.
So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.
Bugger.
At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.
It was empty.
Huh?
"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!
So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.
That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.
Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.
And waited.
Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.
And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).
The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.
So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.
Bugger.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Wee planets - a photoset on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadl/sets/72157594279945875/
Also from core77, but even better than the paean to foil, is this. Also includes tips on making your own images. ARen't they gorgeous?
Also from core77, but even better than the paean to foil, is this. Also includes tips on making your own images. ARen't they gorgeous?
15 awesome uses for aluminum foil - DIY Life
http://www.diylife.com/2007/09/11/15-awesome-uses-for-aluminum-foil/
(via core77, which has a particularly good front three pages right now)
In praise of foil! Yay for aluminum foil. If you can read the comments and keep your temper while all around you are repeating themselves (then you're an Internet Zen Master, my son, as Rudyard Kipling never wrote)... like I said, if you can read the comments without losing it, there are some interesting insights there too. Use a bit of aluminium foil to rejuvenate a stripped thread in a hole in a piece of wood? Who'da guessed?
(via core77, which has a particularly good front three pages right now)
In praise of foil! Yay for aluminum foil. If you can read the comments and keep your temper while all around you are repeating themselves (then you're an Internet Zen Master, my son, as Rudyard Kipling never wrote)... like I said, if you can read the comments without losing it, there are some interesting insights there too. Use a bit of aluminium foil to rejuvenate a stripped thread in a hole in a piece of wood? Who'da guessed?
Monday, September 17, 2007
L'hydroptere
It's not the best photo, but you can see the central hull lifted out of the water.
While I was on holiday, sailing the west coast of France, we stopped one day in a sheltered cove for lunch. As luck would have it, anchored in the same bay was this contrivance - which has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a sailing hydrofoil - a rare beast indeed!
More photos of the holiday here.
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