on going back to skool

Much like Teesee, I’m going back to studying very shortly. As I speak, the bits and bobs for my health and social care Open University course should be winging their way to me. I was lucky enough to have work pay my fees (only stipulation being that I can’t leave my job until the course is over – dammit!) and because I work shifts it’s easier for me to study via the OU rather than go part-time at college. I’d like to go the whole way and get the Open degree (not sure if I should go for a BA or BSc) but I don’t know if I’ll have the time or the motivation, or if work will stump up the necessary fees, so perhaps I should wait before planning that far ahead; I’ll see how I get on with this one and then take it from there.

Elsewhere, not much happening. I kicked up a right fuss with T-Mobile and finally got my internet sorted out. I fired off a snotty letter of complaint and threatened them with Trading Standards – behold, contract immediately cancelled and they even waived the ‘get out early’ fee. I’ve since taken out a new contract with 3 – I know some people have had bad experiences with them but I’ve had no trouble so far *fingers crossed*

Can’t believe we’re in September already. It’s always such a depressing month, when you realise that the summer is practically over and there’s to be no more trips to the beach until next year :( My sister said she went shopping the other day and a few places already had Christmas deccies on sale. Scary.

So, what’s new with you?

on things that make me want to go a bit stabby

I know how hard it is to deal with the general public, day in day out. I spend most of my working day with a vast majority of them either weeping and wailing, abusing and threatening me, or else claiming they’re at death’s door (or sometimes all three) – but I like to think that I can treat them all with the same polite and professional manner, and help as best I can.

Unlike the customer service staff at T-Mobile.

As those of you might have noticed in my grumbly tweets over the last 3 weeks or so, my internet connection has been a bit crap lately. When it’s not disconnecting me every ten minutes or so it’s taking forever for pages to load. I made a cup of coffee and drank half of it today in the time it took for Google to make an appearance. My numerous calls to T-Mobile have resulted in the following suggestions/excuses/total bollocks -

“Try switching it off and on again” (I kid you not)

“We’re doing maintenance on the network, it’ll be working properly again by the weekend” (it wasn’t)

“Change it from 3G to 2G, it’ll be slower but at least the pages will load” (in that case why am I paying for broadband? I’ll just reinstall my creaky old dial-up connection)

At the moment I’m waiting for one of their technical support guys to call me back. He was supposed to ring at 5pm; it’s now coming up to 8pm and my patience is really beginning to wear thin.

Now, let’s see if I can get online long enough to actually post this…

on crap web hosts

After  it suddenly and without warning went walkabout to goodness knows where, I finally have my blog back online.  Yay.  Not that I’ve got anything interesting to post, of course, but it’s a relief to know that everything is working again (at least I think it is.) I’ve never experienced such god awful customer service in my life as I have with Dotable.com – a week to move sites from one server to another?  I’m no techie, but even I know that’s taking the piss.

Needless to say, I’ve now removed their affiliate link from my bookmarks page and I’m currently shopping around for a new hosting company.  Any recommendations?