uk services, ha ha!

Well, suddenly the American capitalist-driven system seems elegant, sophisticated and efficient once again...

Oh, I still appreciate an economy that provide universal health care, and I'm the last person (perhaps literally) to complain about the Tube services, and I love the country-wide train services (London to Edinburgh every 30-60 minutes!), but once in a while...

We returned from a fun weekend in London with the Vellas (more about that in tomorrow's posting) with the expectation of problems with phone, internet, etc. Lynn had commented that the internet wasn't working when she left on Friday, and her phone stopped working around the same time. In the meantime, we'd gotten strange emails from Paypal about troubles with our bank accounts, and my NatWest card gets rejected about 50% of the time.

Here appears to be the strange confluence of problems:

1) My NatWest card expires this month. According to NatWest, it expires at the END of the month, and is valid through the month. They claim a new card will be sent "2 weeks" prior to that. In the meantime, my card is getting rejected roughly 50% of the time. At the hotel on Friday, some restaurants (but not others), and so on. I can get money out, and when I went to the branch at Imperial on Thursday I was assured the account was active and the card working. It is what it is-- in other words, it's only working part of the time. Prediction: no new card arrives, the account becomes inactive at the end of the month. Near-term fix: move all the funds out of the account to our Bank of Scotland accounts, although...

2) Bank of Scotland, which has generally batted above .400 (which is VERY good for a UK bank) with us, transferred the direct debits from Natwest to them. After all, we were dropping NatWest anyway, since they are almost totally unhelpful and, in effect, leaving Scotland (something their London compadres are in fact, unaware of). The process appears to have batted about .400, which I suppose makes sense. The biggest problem appears to have been with 3 (our mobile provider). Lynn lost mobile service on Saturday, with a text message that direct debit hadn't gone through and therefore our payment was late. We've restored it today by paying the bill by phone (rather than online, see #3 below), but the explanation from the 3 customer representative was that they received the information to debit the new bank account but when they tried to do so it was rejected by the bank because (and I quote) "the bank had received no instructions." So, apparently, when BoS offered to transfer our direct debits and, by extension, pay our bills out of that account, they didn't actually mean they would, in fact, PAY OUR BILLS. What sort of instructions did they need? Something like "Since you said you'd pay the bill, PAY THE F'ing BILL!" ? Who knows which of the other direct debits have been similarly f-ed up? I guess we'll just wait and see which services stop working.... which brings us to #3...

3) Our internet is down. So our first theory was that VirginMedia ran into the same problem as 3, so (once we'd re-established phone service) we contacted them. But it turned out that there is some sort of network fault covering our entire neighborhood, reported initially on 3-Nov, and they hope to have service re-established on 10-Nov (yes, that's Wednesday). In the meantime, we're stealing bandwidth from some kind soul in the neighborhood running a non-password encrypted wi-fi network, and aside from that Lynn's iPhone runs faster on 3G than this does. We can't, in a bit of irony, perhaps, actually LOAD OUR VIRGINMEDIA account on this borrowed bandwidth, because it's too f'ing bandwidth intensive (attempting to get us interested in current culture, I suppose).

Oh for the simplicity of American industries driven by the flawed but pure intent to make as much money as possible! My comment to Lynn was that while such mechanisms might not be appropriate for health care, they damn well appear to make sense for financial systems and telecommunications. They may be evil, but they get the job done.

Cheers from chilly and dark Edinburgh!