'Your infernal cable pipes come up from Hell, Virgin!'

Mailing the dead

I used to work for a hospital which had a charity linked to it. It was common for the charity to mail patients after discharge to see if they would consider making a donation or becoming a sponsor. Nothing too wrong with that except the system didn't check on the reason for discharge.

I don't think the families were very impressed to receive emails asking for money to support the hospital in which their relative died, especially so close to the event. We fixed the issue so this didn't happen.

It looks like the makers of software still don't check all cases when processing their data.

"abusing current tax legislation"

So why are employing incompetent to write our tax legislation? It seems odd that Google get into trouble for complying with legislation while those writing it don't get a mention. I really don't understand how a company is supposed to work if it can follow the laws governing it and still be wrong. What are they supposed to do, throw a dice?

A Good Word for Sky: Best Choice For Dead Customers

When my mum dies a few years ago, and I was sorting through the bills and stuff, I called Sky to tell them that I thought there was two or three months payment outstanding, and that I would see to it. They told me to do nothing until they had called me back. Within a couple of hours they did so, telling me that they had written off the amount outstanding, and sorry to hear about her death.

BT were the least sensitive: they just cut the phone off.

Nice one VIrgin

This guy Jom Boydent has produced a work of Art with his succint portrayal , typical of any big business.

Can we have more such prose please?

I can recollect when they were still NTL and can see nothing has changed. 8 years ago my mother passed away. I had moved back home when I knew she was ill and had a seperate NTL account for my phone and internet access from her one. Almost as soon as she had passed away, NTL immediately changed her account to mine and started billing me for both. Their argument was it was impossible to have two seperate accounts at the same address - despite it had been that way for a few years. Eventually I managed to speak to someone fairly high up at head office. When I explained the situation and the lack of help I had received, the response was, and I quote 'Well what do you want us to do about it?'. They did finally stop charging me for both accounts, but I never got an apology nor a refund. To this day I have still never had either.

To show you what they are like regards their stupid automated systems, I moved into a new property a couple of years back, a new build of flats. It is in an NTL area, but they have no services running into the flats - which most be the only buildings in the area to not be able to get Virgin Media fully (they can utilise some services over the BT lines installed (now there is another company who are shocking with customer all services due to the fact they have no cable running into the property. Thus, I have requested they stop sending me junk mail about services they cannot provide. Has it stopped? Of course not. I still cannot understand how cable can be run into bigger older blocks of flats in this town, but I cannot get it installed here, about 50 yards at most from their box in the street. I would sum up Virgin Media as a shambles.