The Official Nonsense Thread

[Minty]

Your problem with cables being swapped is a common one & one of the main moans amongst the Virginmedia engineers (so they told me). If you sign up for a new package or change your existing one, an outside contractor (often self-employed) does it. But if there's problems, it is Virginmedia field staff that deals with it, including repairing the faults.

You can see where this can go wrong. To give his customer a guaranteed faultless connection first time, the contractor pulls out someone else's cable rather than use one of the unused connections (as he has no way of knowing if any of those have been reported faulty) & shoves the existing one any old where in the box without bothering to check if it's working or what the power levels may be on that connector. Job done, & if this has messed up someone else's service, by the time the other poor customer realises their TV/broadband isn't working (when they come back from work), most times they've long gone to cause chaos elsewhere.

The other problem is that if 3 people within a one mile radius phone them, it is automatically escalated into an area fault without taking into account local geography. If 3 near neighbours are all having broadband problems, common sense tells you the problem will be a stones throw away, not the main junction box serving their half of the town. But instead the engineers are instructed every time to fix the main box, without being told the addresses of the complaining households & trusting the engineer to use their own intelligence to solve the problem. End result: a month of hassle for a technical support system that doesn't work.

Back in my school days I played Parris (press-ganged would be nearer the word, but never mind) during one of their idiotic attempts to make us all more cultured. The way they all said "Goody" in the play always made me laugh. The play is much better than the film version, although the latter does include the condemned saying the Our Father on the scafford as they're about to be hanged (witches were supposed to be unable to do this), the turning point in the whole madness although too late to save those on that day.

At uni, the trend in academia at that time was to blame it on mass hysteria caused by hallucinations brought on by fungus spores on local crops. Personally I think the world was so mentally screwed up in that period in history it didn't need naturally produced LSD to make everyone mental.

Sad to hear about Custom Sims 3 closing. I'd considered joining there once but never got around to it. I suppose they had their reasons, but still sad.