Eclectic Memes

I am a sucker for charity appeals. Doubly so for children’s charities. So, when I was contacted by someone purporting to be from the Child Safety Initiative I was pleased to help out. But. You knew there was going to be a but right?

Here’s how this worked. I first received a call from someone who presented themselves as a worker for the charity, thanking me for committing to sponsor books that help children understand how to deal with issues such as bullying. What? Well, I may have done but I was away from my office when I received this call and it is the sort of charity I like to help, so I may well have said I would help out in the past. Then this person says I will be contacted by one of her colleagues who will take the relevant details about my company so that they can be printed on the covers. Curious, but fair enough.

Almost immediately I am called by someone else who informs me the call is being recorded ‘for training and quality purposes’ (by the way, the reason for this separate recorded call is to give the appearance on the recording that their sales pitch is straightforward, without all the bullshit about charity work from the first salesperson). They then steamroller through the details and finally announce that 60 books will be £700. Damn! But okay, this is for charity and for kids and I may have said I would help out.

Two days later an invoice arrives demanding settlement within 7 days (note that period) and things become complicated. Firstly, the invoice is so amateurish as to be comical. The first thing that immediately concerned me was that nowhere on the invoice was the registered charity number. (I checked later with the Charities Register and CSI is not a registered charity.) There was a trading name for the ‘Child Safety Initiative’ a publishing company New Media Marketing, which was odd. I must point out that there is a legitimate child safety charity, the Child Safety Education Foundation, which should not be confused with the Child Safety Initiative.

Having received this suspect invoice, I checked through my records and found nothing about agreeing to sponsor books, worse I did find a note that I had asked CSI to remove me from their contact list back in January 2009. Well, I was incensed that I had been misled, so I immediately attempted to call the company to cancel my order. There was, of course, no answer.

There are a number of points worth highlighting at this point. So far, all contact (barring the invoice) had been by phone. The call from the CSI had been made in the afternoon of 3rd December 2009. This means that any agreement was covered by the UK’s distance selling laws. This very clearly provides a 7 day cooling off  period during in which the contract made on the phone can be cancelled (remember that invoice settlement period?). This cooling off period is to protect people from assholes who pressure sell like this.

The seller is also obliged to confirm any phone arrangement in writing (presumably the invoice would satisfy this condition in part), but the seller must also provide  ’additional information’  and this additional information must include:

• the conditions and procedures to enable the consumer to cancel the contract;
• whether the consumer must return the goods to the supplier if the consumer cancels;
• whether the consumer or the supplier is responsible for the cost of returning the goods to the supplier if the consumer cancels;
• in the case of contracts for the supply of services, information on the consequences of agreeing to performance of a service starting before the end of the usual 7 working day cancellation period ;
• the geographical address of the place of business of the supplier to which the consumer may address any complaints;
• information on any after-sales services and guarantees; and
• the conditions for cancelling the contract, where it is of an unspecified duration or a duration exceeding one year.

I had received virtually none of this information. The invoice has only a phone number, fax number, address, trading name notification and the ‘Children’s Safety Initiative’ banner. No information was provided about the conditions or procedure for cancellation, the only confirmation of what was to be provided was the line on the invoice, no details, nothing.

Furthermore, this information must be given to the consumer either:

• prior to the conclusion of the contract, or
• in good time before or during the performance of the contract and, in contracts for the sale of goods, at the latest at the time of delivery of the goods where goods not for delivery to third parties are concerned. This means that where consumer A orders goods to be despatched to consumer B, the information must be given to consumer A prior to the conclusion of the contract.

Summing up, New Media Publication had failed to provide almost all of the information they are obliged to provide.

So, back to the story. I had tried to call, and failed to get an answer, anyhow I should cancel in writing according to the distance selling law so I wrote a letter and sent it to CSI on the 5th December 2009. I then realised that they could ‘lose’ the letter easily as I had not sent it registered post. Had I been confident that they were a legitimate charity or business I would have not been concerned, but I was concerned.

I was still failing to contact them by phone, but I faxed a cancellation notice to the fax number on the invoice on 7th December 2009, I used a fax service rather than my own fax so I had a witness, a receipt for the service and I kept the fax send receipt. All well within the 7 day ‘cooling off’ period so regardless of any other issues I had made all good faith attempts to cancel the order.

I tried once more to cancel the order by phone. And finally got an answer. To be safe I recorded the conversation. I asked whether they had received my cancellation, “No, we have no cancellation.” I pointed out that I had both written and sent a fax. “Oh, well I’ve only just arrived, perhaps its on the fax machine.”

“Okay,” said I, “can you assure me that this order will be cancelled?”

“Yes”

Result. That, I thought, was the end of the matter.

Oh, how wrong.

I received a call today (8 March 2010) from CSI. Their opening gambit this time was “we are about to remove you from our list”. This is well over a year since I asked to be removed and apparently they were just about to do so. Hmmm!

“Just before we do, I can confirm your books are printed and ready. Which school would you like to receive them?”

“Hang on. I cancelled that order months ago.”

“But the books are printed.”

“Tough. The order was cancelled”

“Well, the invoice is £700 so it’s tough on you. Goodbye.” And she hung up.

Now, I deal with many legitimate charities and businesses and none of them would deal with a customer this way.

Following my initial suspicions I had looked into this high pressure publication selling and it’s a scam, plain and simple. They operate barely on the right side of the law. They do indeed provide books to schools (they are apparently very shoddy, certainly nothing like the quality one might expect given the amount charged), but there their similarity to a real business ends. As you can see from the previous story, they use high pressure sales, rely on people’s poor memory, prey on their good nature, constantly call back, ignore instructions to cancel order, and basically behave in a very shoddy way. The Child Safety Initiative (or more accurately New Media Publications Ltd) are either monumentally incompetent or they are dishonest. I suspect it is actually both. There are plenty of reports of this scam in various forms and Trading Standards bodies have information on dealing with them. This advice is, in summary, ignore them.

I am of course never going to pay their invoice. What is more when they phone in future I will keep them on hold (they are calling a Call-Sure number, paying something like 43 pence per minute so there is  a certain piquant thrill for me here) besides the cost, the longer they are on hold with me the less time they have to call other people. I shall also record all conversations with them. I suspect that as soon as I inform them I am recording the call they will hang up. We shall see.

I shall also be reporting them to Ofcom (who police the telephone selling system), Data Protection (because they have repeatedly failed to remove my details) and Trading Standards (for fraudulent practices). This is all a but of bother and I doubt that any of this will do any good (they have a history of shutting down the publishing company, restarting a new company and carry on without pause), but one can but try.

I once had a friend at university, well more an associate really, who complained, ‘why can’t they write books simple enough that I can understand them?’ This is a common complaint, and the answer in many cases is as follows.

Firstly, there often are books that present simple information but the same people who complain about books not being simple enough will also complain about these books being too simple. The fact is, when you are learning a new subject it is probably going to require an effort in understanding on your part.

I read a great deal. I read a lot of technical papers that deal with my professional subject matter and even now, after twenty years of reading this sort of material, I still run into papers that take several read throughs to appreciate and fully understand. Now, I could say that the authors should have simplified their presentation, but they are addressing an audience that they, reasonably, expect to spend some time understanding the subject matter. They write in technical shorthand. They write using jargon specific to the field. And they write for an audience that they presume is expert in the field, and one which may well challenge their material. It is reasonable then that reading this material requires an effort. One must first understand it, then interpret it, then integrate it with your existing knowledge. Once this is complete, one analyses and criticises the material in light of all this comprehension.

Case in point, I recently started looking into graphs and hyper-graphs. Now, much of the material on these topics requires a good understanding of the mathematical notation around graph, group, and set theory and it has been a while since I studied this sort of thing even superficially. I looked through the papers and understood maybe 60% of the material. I had to go away and read a lot more material on the various notation methods and some ‘Janet and John’ versions of the theories before coming back and re-reading the original material. It should be no surprise that when revisiting the material after this research it all seemed much simpler than after the first read through.

The reason I bring this up is that I recently produced a paper, for a technical audience, but unfortunately I presented it to someone who was unprepared for the material. They requested it, but they were not ready for it.

The response? ‘This material took me a long time to understand.’ Well, of course it did! It was a technical subject. It dealt with some difficult concepts. And it was written for a technically competent audience.

Once the reader in question had grasped the content of the paper he concluded that it was very good. Very clear even. Before reaching this condition though he complained that the paper was ‘too difficult’.

He complained that he could not present this information to a non-technical audience. And I agreed. This particular paper was not written for a non-technical audience. He had not requested that the material be accessible to such an audience.

One writes to a specific audience. In my own field I present to many different audiences. Presenting to developers is different to presenting to process engineers. Presenting to project managers is different to presenting to company directors. There is no one presentation that can be given to all audiences because there is no one message that can be universally presented to all audiences — each audience has its own agenda, its own existing knowledge on the topic, and its own required outcomes.

Bottom line, if you read something and do not understand it, do as I do; reread, research, or abandon.  Try reading the material through again, it may make more sense once you have the entire message in mind. If you encounter specific concepts or topics in the material that you do not understand, go away an research those topics. Revisit the material once you are confident you have a grasp of this underlying material to understand the original topic. Finally, if you do not understand something, and it is not really important to you, put it aside and focus on something important.

So, you’ve gone through all the discomfort of shaving your haven (or more painfully waxing your lyrical). It is now a pubic hair free zone. Proud to be Hollywood. The Full Brazilian. Your next thought for your denuded mound is naturally to replace the unsightly hair so fastidiously removed with a mineralised merkin. Well, I figure it’s your pubic region so you can do with it as you please, but who would want to (and I hesitate to use this awful word) vajazzle?

I can’t imagine it’s particularly comfortable and if I can face-to-pubis with something that looked like a cross between a disco ball and a diamond  cutter my reactions would be, in order; What the fuck? Why the fuck? Are these things safe to eat? Closely followed by, ‘Ow my fucking tooth, you’re getting my dental bill you crazy bitch’.

I suppose it might be funny once, but to do this to make yourself feel better about your crotch (as Jennifer Love Hewitt claims she does) is a whole bag of crazy. If your self esteem is so low that a crotch full of diamonique makes you feel better you need therapy, not vajazzling.

Looking at the profile of visits to my blog I notice that some articles attract much more traffic than others. This is, of course, to be expected. But some articles are so disproportionately visited it started my thinking.

Do I use this information to target my blog posts so as to attract more views, or do I continue to blog about whatever is buzzing around my head at the time?

The conclusion I reached was that on this personal blog I should maintain the latter approach. Attracting visitors is not what this blog is about. This blog is more about mind dumping, writing for the sake of writing, entertaining and informing friends. This blog is not ‘about’ anything in particular, the only theme (if indeed one can call it a theme) is that everything written here comes from me, it’s something that interests me at the time I am writing, and interested readers will, over time, build up a fairly accurate picture of who I am, how I think, and what I believe.

As for my professional blog, well I guess I should take the former approach. That blog does have a theme and it serves two purposes; to inform people about topics and ideas in lifecycle management, and to promote me and my business. This last one requires that people visit the site, and I hope that by serving the first purpose the second is also served. People seem reluctant to tell me directly what interests them, but the statistics provided by the WordPress system provide enough information to at least guide my writing, telling me what type of article attracts attention to the blog.

So this blog continues to be me in written form, while my other blog will be shaped by the visitors.

Well, so far my change in eating habit has been successful. I’m losing just over a pound a week, so slow and steady.

It requires a little mental fortitude, but not an excessive sacrifice of life’s small pleasures. Eating once a day, cutting out snacks during the week, and only drinking a pint with my meal seems to be doing the trick. At weekends I allow myself some snacks and either a few shots of whiskey or a bottle of wine. Once a week, if the mood takes me, some junk food (though the urge to eat junk food seems to have abated as the weeks pass, I guess my body has less cravings as it is weened of fat, salt and sugar).

Now, none of this success is particularly attributable to virtue on my part. I’m not sure that I’d be half as inclined to self denial during the week if I were still working at home (I have the breaking strain of tissue paper when it comes to self denial). However, it’s working and hopefully, by the time I return to solitary work at home, my body will no longer be craving food in large quantity or with lots of fat, salt and sugar, making it easier to maintain a healthier diet. This, however, remains very much to be seen.

Well, despite my best intentions, I’m slipping with my goal of a post each day. It’s not that there is a lack of subjects to post about, it’s simply a matter of time and effort. Producing a post, even a short one like this, takes time and at least some thought. Frankly, dealing with bigger subjects takes more time than I have in an evening.

Anyway, I will continue to try maintaining a reasonable flow of posts. I have several posts in draft form but they need some attention before I cast the forth.

In the meantime, a song…

Nah. Just kidding.

Actually I’m currently listening to Newsnight, on which some appalling self-righteous religious assholes are promoting a law to make homosexuality punishable by death in Uganda. It really is revolting that these vituperrious shits select one passage from their story book and use it to abuse other human beings. Especially as they ignore the vast majority of the rest of the book.

Okay, that’s pissed me off so I’ll leave you now and go steam quietly in the corner.