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The situation at work is becoming more tense, because we now have a very limited amount of time to get the VLE running. With luck I'll be able to save the situation by performing thinly-spread speed testing appointments, but I've been phoning around the testers and it seems that no one in the entire university is in at the moment.
I have never liked using the phone - having a disembodied voice at the other end of a line of communication is far more difficult for me than meeting in person or even typing to each other. They have a particularly bad standing with me at the moment, though, because yesterday I found the phone bill for the last quarter, and it seems that we're now being charged for Freeserve Hometime calls (the clue as to the correct price of the calls is in the name, which was changed to Wanadoo a while ago because it was blatantly misleading).
It seems that if a Hometime call runs over in to the daytime it starts being charged at about a pound for two hours. I could understand this if you could even call during the daytime, but you can't - the service refuses to connect if a call is started during the day, which made me think that the two hour limit was to prevent you keeping it on all day and therefore avoiding any costs. Finding that it charges anyway therefore calls even the necessity for the two hour limit in to question, because I certainly can't see any reason for it - it seems a very artificial way of making sure that your use is restricted on a service that charges more than many others that aren't so selectively available.
For this service, we're paying about £12 a month - a few pounds more than a basic broadband service that would be on all the time. In fact, there are two items on the bill - one for £17 a quarter to Freeserve and one for the same amount to BT Surftime. BT Surftime is the name of the service that we used years ago before we even discovered Freeserve, so I thought that it was an unnecessary charge left over from then. My dad spoke to a woman at BT, though, and she said that it was something that we had to pay for. I'm still doubtful, because I'm fairly sure that said woman at BT was a moron.
On top of that, we don't even own our phones - we've rented them for £7.50 a quarter since phones that actually had a dial on the face became too ancient for even our household. We must have paid about thirty times their value by now in rent costs.
My mum said that she didn't want me to worry about any of this, and had intended to keep the bill hidden from me to avoid me asking about any of it. She hid it cunningly by leaving it in the middle of the kitchen table with the Internet page at the top. It's possible that she was employing some form of reverse psychology.
I've got rid of the awkward gap at the top of my entries with images in them, because I realised it was opening a [p] tag that did it - it seems that LJ already opens a [div] by default. I've therefore changed to using [div]s as well - let me know if it makes your Friends page a disaster and I'll desist.
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Join the Campaign for Telephone Disarmament. |
It seems that if a Hometime call runs over in to the daytime it starts being charged at about a pound for two hours. I could understand this if you could even call during the daytime, but you can't - the service refuses to connect if a call is started during the day, which made me think that the two hour limit was to prevent you keeping it on all day and therefore avoiding any costs. Finding that it charges anyway therefore calls even the necessity for the two hour limit in to question, because I certainly can't see any reason for it - it seems a very artificial way of making sure that your use is restricted on a service that charges more than many others that aren't so selectively available.
For this service, we're paying about £12 a month - a few pounds more than a basic broadband service that would be on all the time. In fact, there are two items on the bill - one for £17 a quarter to Freeserve and one for the same amount to BT Surftime. BT Surftime is the name of the service that we used years ago before we even discovered Freeserve, so I thought that it was an unnecessary charge left over from then. My dad spoke to a woman at BT, though, and she said that it was something that we had to pay for. I'm still doubtful, because I'm fairly sure that said woman at BT was a moron.
On top of that, we don't even own our phones - we've rented them for £7.50 a quarter since phones that actually had a dial on the face became too ancient for even our household. We must have paid about thirty times their value by now in rent costs.
My mum said that she didn't want me to worry about any of this, and had intended to keep the bill hidden from me to avoid me asking about any of it. She hid it cunningly by leaving it in the middle of the kitchen table with the Internet page at the top. It's possible that she was employing some form of reverse psychology.
I've got rid of the awkward gap at the top of my entries with images in them, because I realised it was opening a [p] tag that did it - it seems that LJ already opens a [div] by default. I've therefore changed to using [div]s as well - let me know if it makes your Friends page a disaster and I'll desist.
