Virgin Find a New Way to Deliver Phone Calls
I’ve just had some junk mail from Virgin Media, which of course I opted out of, which is entitled “Excitement? We’ve got it by the bucketful.”
It would be good if they could get me a working landline that I pay for.
I’ve actually got a yellow bucket in the garage. If I put it outside the front door, will they put my messages in it.
As a company they seem to go out of their way to annoy people who might want to use their service. If I was to rate, Sky, BT and O2, all of whom I’ve used without trouble for many years, I would give them perhaps 8 out of 10. But Virgin would be up there with the old Eurovision joke of nil points. And that would be generous!
Bye-Bye Virgin
I’ve now been without my landline for a couple of weeks now. Although, I didn’t realise it for some days, as I was away and also because most of my friends phone me on my mobile number.
So on Friday, I did what I should have done when I moved in; I signed up with BT.
Today after a very long phone call, I cancelled Virgin. I did eventually get someone sensible, but as I had to ring on my mobile and I phoned them for perhaps twenty minutes, I suspect it wasn’t cheap.
It did however cost me over seventy pounds to get rid of them.
Hackney council today wrote to me saying that I could get rid of five heavy items a year by just giving them a call. If disposing of Virgin and their useless service were so easy.
Incidentally, all of their cabinets round here have had their doors stolen.
A Typical Virgin Cabinet in Hackney
In my experience, electrical equipment doesn’t like working in exposed conditions.
I shall now be using BT for phone and broadband, Freeview for television and the pub for watching football on Sky.
How Not To Contact Your Phone, Broadband, Energy or Media Supplier
My Virgin Media service is terrible, so I want to cancel. As an example, I haven’t had a landline for about 10 days now. Every time I try to get through to service, I end up on hold listening to terrible music. It’s probably cost me several pounds on my mobile. In one case they tried to see me more services. If I want more crap, there are many much better places to buy it, where I get some service.
As an aside here, could my terrible Virgin service, be due to the fact that their connection cabinets round here have no doors and are open to the elements.
I didn’t have the phone number to hand, so I did the obvious and typed “Virgin Media Phone Number” into Google.
After the adverts trying to sell me more Virgin services, there are some helpful companies that can connect you. I obvious don’t want more crap, so I ignored the adverts and as the helpful companies looked a bit dubious, I read about them first.
They are call referral services with expensive numbers and cost 10p a minute from a BT Landline and considerably more from a mobile. As I’ve only got my trusty Nokia 6310i, I didn’t even think about ringing them.
Virgin Media were the fifth in the list and there were about 10 of these call referral services.
By the way the number to ring for Virgin Media is 0845 454 1111.
Vodafone Waste Their Money
In the Evening Standard tonight amongst the reports of the riots was a Vodafone advert with the headline Free iPhone4 for summer.
Hasn’t anybody who wants one, nicked it by now?
The phone might be free, but you have to pay forty pounds a month to use it.
C’s Judgement Was Right
One of the characters on the periphery of the phone hacking was well known by C, my late wife. They sat on a committee together and she had a very low opinion of him and felt he wouldn’t rise to the level everybody said he would. He hasn’t! He did at least write me a letter of condolence when C died.
Kelvin MacKenzie’s Voicemail
According to this article in the Telegraph, this is the welcoming message on Kelvie MacKenzie’s voicemail.
I am not here right now, but leave a message and Rebekah will get back to you
I like it.
Is The News of the Screws Too Powerful For Advertisers To Boycott?
I haven’t read the News of the Screws in years. Advertisers are boycotting the paper because of their hacking of mobile phones.
But is this counter productive and against the best interests of the so-called readers of the paper? Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert has said on Radio 5, that he will to continue to write a column for the paper. He stated the reason was that as a crusading journalist, who fights against financial abuse, the best way he can get his message over is in the largest circulation, English language paper in the world. He also said that this week his column would carry a message deploring the hacking.
I admire his stance and understand his point. After all, if you’re a crusading journalist it matters to you, whether you get your message over or not.
It’s the same with the Central Office of Information, who are one of Britain’s biggest advertisers. Should they pull their advertising of such things as benefits and valuable public information from the paper? I suspect they should, as probably News of the Screws readers are too stupid to understand it.
It’s a difficult area and I suspect the best solution would be to impose sanctions against the paper, if any wrongdoing is proved.
The Various Extremes of Phone Hacking
I say extremes here because I’m defining the various limits.
For instance, if the Police hack the mobile phone of a missing person or a suspected criminal, to see if they can solve a serious crime, then that is probably acceptable, providing everything is recorded and it is performed under a set of legal rules. In some cases they may be required to get similar permissions as they do when they tap a phone.
On the other hand, if say I lost my mobile phone and needed to retrieve the various voice messages on that phone and I asked someone who said he could hack the phone and tell me what was stored, then no offence would be committed. It wouldn’t actually happen, as I know how to retrieve my messages from another phone and frequently do.
I’ve also changed my pin, so for an individual to hack my phone and read the messaes would be fairly difficult. But then who would want the secrets I don’t have.
Much more important to me are my text messages and I can’t remember anybody being accused of hacking these. In fact, I suspect that the Police probably use text messages to find out if a mobile phone is working or switched on. I know I send text messages to people I want to contact from my desktop and when I get an acknowledgement they’ve answered, I might ring them.
So did those people get hacked because they didn’t change their pin number? If you look at them, a lot fall into the group of people who have twenty four legs and an IQ of 12. i.e. Z-List celebrities and/or politicians. So I suspect that many were partly to blame.
The Unbelievable Case of the Hacking of Milly Dowler’s Phone!
I wrote a few months ago about how easy it is to hack many mobile phones. Basically, if your pin is still set to the factory default, the averagely competent ten year old can read your messages and do other things with it.
You could make out a case for some phones to be hacked, especially if a compromising or criminal scandal that has ramifications for us all is ongoing.
but no-one, and especially the editor of a newspaper or the child’d parents could sanction the hacking of the phone of an young girl, as appears to have happened in the Milly Dowler case.
Obviously, to hack a phone you need its number and the problem here is that I suspect that the average child has given their mobile number to dozens of friends and some have even posted it on-line.
But at least, it should be possible to find out the numbers of those, who called Milly’s number and when they did it. It should also be possible to find the number of the perpetrator of this horrendous act. But I suspect that the hacker would have used an untraceable number, from perhaps a pay-as-you-go phone that they bought for cash in a no-questions-asked shop.
There is only one sentence for newspapers that do this sort of thing, if it is fact proved that they did. And that is that they have to suspend publication for an appropriate time.
If you read the headlines of today’s papers, the tabloids mention nothing about the Milly Dowler case. In my view, this indicates that they all know a lot more about phone hacking than they care to disclose.
Foolish Virgin
I got two letters today addressed to the occupier from Virgin Media today in addition to a prioperly addressed piece of junk mail.
As they still haven’t transferred my old number from my previous house to this one, I suppose I’m now 60% of the way to changing to someone else.
The Anonymous Widower 