Sky!!

Some months ago, we closed our Sky TV package and opted for BT Vision instead, which we are quite happy with. The suspicious ease with which we were able to close the Sky package has proved itself to be just that, suspicious. Since then we have had quite a few calls from Sky, usually asking to speak to the account holder (Keith) about 'your Sky account' which immediately makes me think we still owe them money, which is not the case, of course.
Recently the calls have become more frequent and usually during the day, which means that I answer the phone, if I am around. The problem here is that, although I tell the callers repeatedly that we don't want to subscribe to Sky again, they won't listen to me as I am not the 'account holder'. The fact that, as we have closed the account, there is no account holder as far as they are concerned seems to have passed them by.
Fast forward to Monday when I received a call from a female who insisted on talking over me, reading from her script as I gave my usual answer and asked her not to bother calling again.
"We'll ring again when Mr A is in," she assured me and cut the call.
Tuesday brought another call, this time from a male.
"Ah, I'm glad you've called," I said, "I would like to speak to your supervisor."
He assured me that there was no supervisor present. I decided to ignore his blatant lie and launched into my attack anyway, telling him about Monday's call.
"I object most strongly to someone talking over me when I am trying to explain something," I said, talking over him as he tried to explain to me that it was a question of 'data protection' which dictated that they had to speak to the account holder.
"Well, if it happens again, I shall put in a formal complaint," I said.
"We'll ring this evening when Mr A is in," he said and rang off.
So last night, true to their word, Sky rang again and this time spoke to Keith who told them in no uncertain terms that we do not wish to subscribe to Sky again and not to ring us any more.
We sat back, confident in the certainty that that was the last we would hear from Sky....
This morning, the phone rang, after Keith had gone out of course, which meant that I answered it. Someone wanted to speak to Keith. Who? Sky, of course.
"What? Sky again??" I exploded and launched into a resume of all the recent calls.
"I can only apologise," said the voice at the other end when I finally drew breath. "It has been put down as a 'return call'," and he rang off before I could say another word.
Well, you have to give them marks for not giving up.

Busy!

Not busy with clients, unfortunately. There seems to be a dearth of them at the moment, so I've turned my attention to the garden and done this.
Lots of digging and carrying heavy bags of pebbles - all good exercise.

Our day out

It's been ages since we last took off to roam around north Wales, so on Sunday, we did just that, with Paddy for company this time. You will see from the photos that he had a great time, although he didn't quite cotton on to Keith's attempts to encourage him to dig in the sand, Presumably in his mind, digging is confined to trying to extract cats from the other side of the garden fence. He loved running into the sea and retrieving sticks, which he never does on dry land and was very good off the lead, for the first time since we got him...

Well, he was till he spotted another dog further up the beach and charged off to make his presence felt, completely oblivious to calls to return immediately.

The other dog's owners were not impressed!

Floods

It is June, isn't it? I mean, June, as in summer, the time of year when it gets warmer and we hope to see the big yellow thing in the sky?

Well, today we did. In fact, at 2.30 I was commenting to one of my clients that we had done well today as we had been forecast a day of rain but so far had had only one shower.

That was then. An hour and a half later, the rain came. Yes, it was fairly heavy but not more so than we have experienced many times before but within fifteen minutes, as I saw when I happened to glance out of the window, the road outside was suddenly awash, with the water level fast approaching our (very small) front lawn. Within minutes, the lawn was covered and I was pulling on my wellies to move the car across the road.

Fortunately, it stopped there and slowly began to recede, as you can see from the photos, which were taken when the worst was over because we weren't quick thinking enough to get the camera out straight away. Could have been something to do with worrying about when and where it was going to stop!

No to BNP

The BNP now have two candidates to send to the European Parliament, which is worrying to say the least. However, there is an online petition that you can sign to indicate to the EU that these people in no way represent us.
You can access it through this link.

Chancellor

So Alistair Darling is to retain his position as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Isn't that a bit like putting one of the prisoners in charge of the jail?

Could we fall much lower?

Take a look at this, received from T.K. today. Makes you think!
Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than

600
employees and has the following employee statistics .
29
have been accused of spouse abuse
7
have been arrested for fraud
9
have been accused of writing bad cheques
17
have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3
have done time for assault
71
cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14
have been arrested on drug-related charges
8
have been arrested for shoplifting
21
are currently defendants in lawsuits
84
have been arrested for drink driving in the last year
Which organisation is this ?
It's the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that creates
hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.
What a bunch we have running our country - it says it all.
And
just to top all that they probably have the best 'corporate' pension scheme
in the country!!
Where's our Mr Cromwell we need a Revolution....