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You can either just read through this page by scrolling down from here or click one of the links below to jump to that part of the page (useful if your mouse hand/scroll finger/something else is getting sore) and just to save anybody from having to over exert themselves further , you can click the word "TOP" at the end of any section to return here. Greedy Telecommunications Companies Product Designers Toasters Australia Post - liars ODD SOCKS SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S HOSPITAL SYSTEM SBS On Demand TV Scabby Product Manuals RSGB Shop Search engines are SHIT Computer designers?? ID-1-OTs Bloody Blue LED's

First off the rank - Greedy Telecommunications Companies.

Because we don't make a lot of phone calls, we had a fairly cheap mobile phone plan covering two mobiles, which was wandering along nicely and suited our usage. Then last August (2019) comes a letter increasing the price by 25%. Now the plan pricing hadn't changed in a few years, so we lived with it. Come February 2020, greedy telecommunications company cancelled our old plan and put us on a new plan and a further 60% increase in cost (although they magnanimously gave us a $10 a month per phone credit "To help you transition smoothly" - transition to what - more expensive plans? - fucking tossers). Included was a mediocre data allowance, but there would be "no excess data charges in Australia", just slowed data speed if we went over our allocation. But wait for it, LESS THAN 30 days later came another letter and guess what, we've decided to rip you off for another $100 PER PHONE (per month) if you go over your data allowance - profiteering or what? As an example of how money hungry they are, 6.64 MB (yes MB, not GB), cost me $13.28 in this last bill, that's about $2 per MB. Both letters started of with "As part of the commitment to simplify our products and blah...blah...blah...bullshit...bullshit...bullshit". I know what I think and it has nothing to do with "helping the consumer". Well, dickheads, people on a pension (which are well below the poverty line in Australia) are not being helped by your rank greediness. If it wasn't for the fact the wife likes to talk to the children and grandchildren on the phone, I would be telling said company where they could shove their phones and they can do it sideways to boot. Addenda - Greedy Telecommunications Company has been told where they can stick their "service" and I now pay for a much better service at considerably less than what the previous mob where ripping us off for. TOP

General rant about product designers.

Have you ever had some kitchen appliance or utensil that is either impossible to clean properly because of small cavities/spaces that are impossible to get anything into or looks like it was designed to be operated by somebody with two left hands? It is about time that the "people" that design your everyday utensils and appliances were made to use and clean them a minimum of 100 times before they get to market. And while we are on about designers, who is the total fucking nitwit that designed the vacuum cleaner with the exhaust or blow side of the system facing the same direction as what you are trying to suck up? I won't name the, oh bugger it, it's a Pulman wet and dry vac. TOP

Toasters

When, oh when, is somebody going to make a toaster that actually makes toast properly? We've had the $19 cheapies from the supermarket that burn one side while hardly colouring the other and we (currently) have a $100+ toaster that isn't any better. In fact it's worse. We sent the first one back because it broke within 5 minutes and got a different brand. That was replaced because it was no better than the $19 one and the replacement cooks the bottom half of the slice and not the top half, pops up when it feels like it (usually after incinerating the bread) or won't lock down. Just as well I don't eat much toast or there could be a flurry of shiny metal things flying through the air around here (in fact, I gave up eating toast because of this useless piece of junk). TOP

Australia Post Loses Medical Equipment and then lies about it not having been received by them

My wife is in dire need of two operations, one to replace a hip and another to replace a failed knee and is incapable of taking anymore than a couple of steps without assistance, so we ordered a wheelchair. This we did at the beginning of March (2020) and got a tracking number with a delivery date of the 6th March. The 6th March came and went but no wheelchair arrived. So Australia Post was rung and asked where it was and after a few days we were told it was nowhere to be found. A subsequent call to the supplier resulted in another one being sent and again, a tracking number was supplied with a delivery date of March 31 to 2 April. Guess what - 2nd April came and went and again - no wheelchair. Australia Posts own tracking site even said it was "On time" for delivery. Again, another call to Australia Post, with a request to speak to a supervisor, the result of which was we were told that they didn't have it and that they had never received either of them. If they didn't receive either of them, why did Australia Post's own tracking site show a time and date that they received it at their sorting facility? And how come I received an email from Australia Post (while I was on the phone to the supervisor) indicating that they indeed did receive the wheelchair in spite of the supervisor blatantly lying about having never received it? Either Australia Post is the most incompetent postal service in the world or there is rampant thievery going on within the postal service. Yes, I know there are delays because of the Corona virus, but to lose TWO wheelchairs? It's not as if they are that small they could fall down the back of something. An update: several days after writing this, one wheelchair turned up, looking like it had been run over by a truck. You would think that at the rip-off prices Australia Post charge to deliver stuff, they would take a lot more care with stuff that doesn't belong to them. TOP

ODD SOCKS - GRR!

Odd socks? Yes, your thinking "Oh, the ones the washing machine eats". Not this time. Being a cheapskate pensioner, I used to buy cheap supermarket brand work socks, but they only lasted 6 months before achieving papal status (all holy holey), so, although I should have known better, I decided to buy some supposedly "better" branded ones (in 3 packs). Well, that was a mistake. Oh, they lasted longer alright, but you would think, being from one manufacturer and in packs of three, they would all be the same length. Not a chance. Out of two packs of three pairs, I ended up with six pairs of socks, all different lengths. I'm not talking a 1/4 inch (~6mm) different, but up to 2 inches (50mm) different. Quite obviously, the manufacturer has no idea about quality control or just doesn't care. And just to top it off, when I went to ring "Customer service" earlier this year, the prerecorded message I got was along the lines of "Unless this is an emergency, try again another day". Just another example of an Australian company (Hanes Innerwear Australia Pty Ltd) that has no idea what "Customer service" actually means. TOP

SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S HOSPITAL SYSTEM IS SHIT

Unless you have bags of money, don't expect to get the medical care you require in South Australia in any sort of timely fashion. As mentioned above (the Australia Post rant), my wife needs two fairly major operations and has done so for the last six years or so. Well, we finally got a date for the first one (early October), but no sooner had we got that, it was pushed back a week (I have my thoughts on why this might have been so, involving golf, but I could be wrong). Ok, shit happens so we rearranged things for the new date and in a surprise phone call a few days later, an earlier date became available. Great, maybe things are starting to move in the right direction. Don't fucking believe it! After 5 days of prep, 3 days of not taking some vital medications (that resulted in increased pain levels), 2 seconds (yes, literally 2 seconds) before we were to get in the car and drive the 200 odd Km to Adelaide, comes THAT phone call "Your operation has been canceled to a date to be advised". What is wrong with these people, don't they have any idea of the damage they are doing to peoples wellbeing, both physical and mental, when this crap goes on? That's 3 - count them - 3 - different times this all could have been fixed and saved a lot of distress, the air was a very dark shade of blue around here for several days after that phone call. To give you an idea of the process we had to go through, once a date had been set, we had to go and get a 'pre-admission' check 6 weeks before the operation. This involved the afore mentioned drive of ~200 Km to Adelaide to be at the hospital at 12PM. X-rays, blood tests, talk to the Ward Nurse, talk to the anesthetist and various other people, repeating the same thing over and over again. Don't these people talk to each other? This was, we were told going to take, oh, about 4 Hrs or so, which would have meant driving back in the dark. Not going to happen we told them, we are leaving at 3.30PM whether you lot are done or not (I get night vision blindness and can't drive at night). I mean, for fucks sake, most of what we went through could have been done over the phone or at the local health centre. Talk about a dysfunctional system. To be fair, the actual on the ground staff (the nurses etc) did a great job of getting us through this check-up in a timely fashion after we explained the problem and arranged for some things to be done outside the hospital so we could get off by 3.30PM. You may ask why didn't we arrange to stay overnight in Adelaide and drive back the next day - we were going to. But, the only two people we knew who could get into the house without being ripped to shreds by the dog to feed him and the cat weren't available, so we had no choice. Come the day before the operation, we had to ring the hospital between 1.30pm and 4pm to see if it was still going to happen. Obviously, who ever thought up this system of doing things has no idea of what it is like to live a great distance from hospital and get everything arranged in a couple of hours plus drive for more hours to get there. We had arranged to go the day before as we had to be at the hospital at 8AM and it is just as well the accommodation provider understood and didn't charge us any cancellation fees. So now we wait and see if the next date we have been given (late October as I write this) goes ahead as scheduled. Addendum, Dec 2020. The 4th date in late October nearly didn't go ahead, but after a lot tears and tantrums, the wife finally received a new hip and now (7 weeks on), she is up and almost ready to run a marathon. Part 1 complete, let's see how part 2 (the knee) goes. While I'm on the subject of our fucked hospital system, who was the puerile dickhead that classified hip and knee operations as "elective surgey"? Nobody in their right mind goes "I think I might have my hip replaced for the fun of it". These sorts of things are caused by disease, ageing and accidents, there is nothing "elective" about it. May this prick suffer from something horribly degenerative and debilitating sooner rather than later (nasty you say? So what I say, I'm more than pissed off - remember, I'm old and grumpy). TOP

Website designers - SBS On Demand TV catch-up

Being as my internal clock seems to be getting screwed up more and more lately (I blame daylight saving - stupid idea), I decided I might have a lazy relaxing afternoon watching a bit of the idiot box (yes, I know there's nothing on the free-to-air channels - why do they bother), so I promptly plonked on to the SBS On-Demand website, only to find some juvenile fuckwit of a website designer fiddler has beeen there and totally screwed it up for ordinary people. Whereas the "Programs A-Z" button is still there, which you would think would list programs in, oh, I don't know, A to Z order, the phantom website fucker has put these "tiles" ("tiles" are what you put on the floor and walls, dickheads, not computer screens) that you have to swipe left /right/up/down to scan through, along with a "load more" button at the bottom of the page. So instead of being able to go to section 'Z', you have to sit there and starting at section 'A', swipe until your bloody arm is almost falling off to get to section 'Z' (I didn't bother - I got a couple of swipes in to section 'A' and decided SBS can shove their TV channel, their website and fucking Streaming services up their fucking arses and choke on it). Ring them up and complain I hear someone whistling - you do it. I've been there, done that. All you get is their patronising AI phone answering system suggesting how you can make things better - I'd like to make things better by shoving several kilovolts up the AI's internal wiring (and their website contact/complaints system is even worse). Needless to say, I am now far from relaxed...... I do have to put my hand up and say that at one time I did work in the television industry and a lot of what you may have heard was true (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - ahh...the good old days), but it it would appear the calibre of the technical/marketing/idea's staff is sadly lacking these days. TOP

Scabby Product Manuals

Not having bought much in the way of consumer appliances in a while, I don't know how long the following has been going on, but geez, Scrooge has nothing on the misers who produce user manuals these days. The last time I bought anything, you got A4 or even A3 sized pages with text large enough to read from 100 metres away, sometimes you even got a book as big as a decent magazine. In order of purchase over the last 2 weeks (mid May 2021) - Western Digital 4Tb external drive, Kingston 64Gb USB stick, Samsung tablet with case and "screen protector" and a free gift with a recent order, an S530 Bluetooth Eardud Earbud. I'm not going to say anything about the quality of any of the above (oh, really?) as I really haven't had them long enough to form an opinion (well, I have the start of one on one of the above I may share later) but first up, the "manuals" that come with them - all of them - Superman with his better than average vision would be struggling to read any of them without an electron microscope so how these wankers expect anyone of average vision to read them is beyond me. Lets start with the Western Digital drive. Most of us are well aware you take it out of the packaging, plug the (hopefully supplied) cable in and get on with using it - so a no brainer. But I do like to read the warranty conditions occasionally - this lot spend more time trying to weasel out of their legal responsibilities in what we used to call "the small print" over 30 odd pages of nano sized print (in many languages) than doing anything else. There are two small drawings about how to use the drive though. Now for the Kingston USB Stick. On the back of the packaging are the warranty "details", but because Australia has somewhat better consumer protection laws than most of the rest of the world, they stuck this micro-miniature scrap of fold out paper to the back (in an almost impossible way to open it) with conditions specific to Australia - again in print so small you can't read it even with generally available magnifying items. Ok, the Samsung Tablet has an electronic manual on it but, assuming you've never had one and/or know zilch about tablets, how are you supposed to find it? The scrap of paper that comes with it that is supposedly the quick start guide is worthless as far as providing any useful information and that assumes one has a big enough magnifying glass to read it in the first place. The case we got to put it in is, well, a case, nothing special but the screen protector (from the same maker as the case), that's another story. Again, "manual" so small as to be unreadable and those bits one could decipher didn't make any sense at all, to the point we ended throwing the bloody thing in the rubbish after it ended up with more bits on it than fleas on the dog. Total waste of $50 dollars on that piece of Cygnett rubbish. As for the Bluetooth Earbud, well, lets just say that as it was free, if I can't find a proper, readable manual or instruction sheet for it, I wont feel any guilt about dropping it in the nearest rubbish bin*. The bit of paper that it came with is in print even smaller than any of the above and bad quality print at that. Scanning it and trying to blow it up only made it worse. * I might actually put it under the wheel of the car and see if it makes a satisfying 'pop' as it meets it's maker. TOP

RSGB Shop

First up, I'm not a memeber of the RSGB (there are only so many clubs/organisations that a pensioner can afford to pay to be a member of), but I don't mind a quiet cuppa and a read of Radcom when I can get my hands on a copy. To which end I used to have a friend that would lend me a copy now and again (sadly no longer possible) and it didn't matter if said copy was months or even a year or so behind. Anyway, back in 2019, I bought the Radcom 2018 USB stick and thought I would shout myself a Christmas present this year (2021) and buy one of the archive DVD's. I would rather have had a USB stick, but it seems they aren't capable of getting more than one years worth on a stick (get bigger sticks ya misers). Clicking and filling in the appropriate boxes, I got to the page below, talk about a shock, if I didn't have a dicky ticker, I sure as hell have one now - £100 to ship a DVD to Australia - really? Now, I had tried this back in August and when I saw that ridiculous price, I did send an email querying it and actually got a rather prompt reply mentioning the EU and Brexit and so on and the suggestion I should order it and 'they would look out for the order and charge me the normal price'. All well and good although there are two problems with that scenario - I have to provide my credit card details in the shopping cart and the £100 will automatically be taken off my card - I don't have a spare hundred quid to leave floating around in cyberspace (remember - Grumpy Old Pensioner). Secondly, it relies on "somebody" to follow up and sort it out, issue a refund of the extra etc etc - previous experience (mine and others) says definitely not a smart idea. I did email back asking if there was an alternative way to order, but they didn't bother replying. Here is the RANT - why can't you !#Q%@^ people get off your oversized backsides and fix your shopping cart, for an organisation of your size and income - regardless of whether 99% of the workers are volunteers or not - this is just a lousy way to do business - it certainly leaves a very dark brown stain across the image of the RSGB as an organisation. You make a reasonable amount of money from the shop, just think of how much you are losing because you can't be botherd sorting it out - most people will just walk away when confronted with shit like that. Your shopping cart accepts address data and unless you have been ultra cheap and used shit software, it should be a simple matter of updating the shipping database to show the correct shipping price for the various world postal zones - not that fucking hard people!!! Update Jan 2023 - maybe somebody has been reading/listening - the shipping cost problem has been fixed. TOP

Search Engines are SHIT

Have you noticed that the results returned by search engines these days have all turned to shit? I need a database to catalogue the index pages of (currently) 87 years worth of magazines and not being at all good with writing a databse from scratch, I figured there must be somebody else that has done this before - apparently not. Jump on the 'net using several different search engines and it appears they don't understand a single word you put up as the search term, "magazine index database" being one example I tried. Apparently I must be using a language not understood by any search engine (perhaps I should try Klingon), as most of the results either gave me "How to layout a magazine" or database examples that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for like "stock inventory" or "sales contacts" or "keep track of your businees" type databases. Remember when you would get literally thousands of responses to a search term? Not now, you might get a couple of pages of totally unrelated crap, half of which will be links to virus infected scam/phishing sites or worse. To blame for this rotten state of internet searching is the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the backbone of the search engines - well Mr Search Engine Operator - your AI is fucked, so how about doing something about it and let us plebs get back to getting proper results when we do a search!!! A tip - if you are logged in to your account with the biggest search engine who shan't be named - log out - you will get a lot more results (although most of them will just as much useless crap). TOP

Computer designers?? ID-1-OTs

I'm not one that needs "the latest and greatest..." piece of modern technology crap that seemingly comes out every other day, but due to a fat fingered exercise recently, I needed to replace my PC. Basically, I was getting ready to archive a ton of paper material and converting it to pdf and decided that perhaps the old faithful PC could do with a bit of an ugrade viz upping from an i5 CPU to an i7 and doubling the ram to 16GB. Changing the ram, no problem, but changing the CPU is where it came unstuck - basically, without going in to detail, the PC was bricked. Now, being a financially constrained pensioner cheapskate, I have normally bought a refurbished PC at much less than what a new one would cost. This time, while asking around about a suitable replacement, it was pointed out that all refurbed PC's currently (early 2023) on the market here in Oz weren't compatible for the Win 11 upgrade, so a new 13th gen i7 was purchased (those older persons amongst us will recall the "bread & dripping or bread & jam but not both for dinner option" 😁). OK, so said new PC arrives in timely fashion and boy does it whip along - nice. Now we get to the ID-1-OT problems (for those confused by that acronym - "Idiot"): The case has the power button, reset button, audio in & out sockets, 2x USB2 & 1x USB3 socket on the TOP of the machine - do these fuckwits not realise that dust falls down and said sockets are the perfect receptacle to collect all this stuff, so rendering them useless in short time? Don't know what drugs these losers are on but I sure would like some. And it's not just one brand, they're all doing it. Next on the list - remember when the fronts of PC cases had numerous bays covered by the pop out plastic fillers? Not on this new baby - it's got one, rendered useless by aforementiond top mount shit. To top that off, behind the now one piece plastic front is a metal screen that is going to mean some serious metal bashing to move all the top mounted stuff to a more convenient place. Am I finshed - not on your Nelly. We will move on to the PC motherboard and again the following is not restricted to any one particular brand. Everyone would be aware by now that it's USB this and USB that to connect to whatever your trying to stick it in, so why in the fuck do they put the majority of the USB sockets on the BACK of the PC!! ?? Common sense (anybody remember that beast?) would suggest that perhaps it might be a good idea to make more of these sockets available on the front panel WERE THEY ARE EASILY ACCESSIBLE. But no, they have to follow the 'standard' thought up when Noah was in shorts and woe betide any manufacturer thinking that the standard should posibbly be looked at to see if it might need modernising. With the motherboard in my new PC, to get just ONE extra USB3 socket on the front meant purchasing a card, yes a card, that supposedly went in aforementioned vacant front "hole" (which I was going to use for a DVD burner - yes, I know, I'm a dinosaur). I didn't bother following that one up as it wouldn't be a cheap exercise judging by the pictures of it. Still not finished 😉 My PC is all solid state re storage media, no spining disc's in there. Two of the drives are NVMe units (one 500GB and a 1TB unit) but I don't understand why anyone would put one of the NVMe sockets immediately under where the heatsink of the graphics card is located, restricting airflow for cooling these things. OK, I feel better now. TOP

Bloody Blue LED's

Ok, to keep things straight, I have no problem with Blue LED's the component. What I do have is a problem with all the electronic gear in the house that seemingly has to have their Blue LED indicators/clocks or whatevers driven as hard as they can, particularly as the missus can't get to sleep if there is the slightest inkling of extraneous light in the house at night. The above PC has a blue power LED. At night it used to look like a UFO was floating around the ceiling blinking away (my PC usually resides in Sleep mode when not being used). As for the microwave oven, the clock/timer/whatsit is so bright that it hurts the eyes, even in the daytime and yes I know, some have a dimming option in the menu, but not this one. Item number three, the water filter again has a blue LED that comes on when the cooler part starts up and again so bright it hurts (plus a Red one and a Green one - *reminds me of a song 😄 - that are just as bright). Actually, I don't know why we have the cooling function on, we never use it - must open it up and kill it. I have got a solution to all these, just need to refine and patent it - ahh whats the point - we stuck thick cardboard over the water filter and the microwave has a fold down flap of thick card as an adjustable dimmer, the PC has my 6 inch steel ruler lying on the top. Pity the designers of these things are so thick they have no idea how it upsets people, but then they probably don't care anyway. *Pete Seeger - Little Boxes TOP