Surprise, surprise! Barclays couldn’t be arsed to call me back as they had promised.

So I rang 0845 7555555 again and went through thus usual palaver of them not being able to find the account on their system before I was transferred to a supervisor. I asked her for the direct dial telephone number before she transferred me through, which she gave me before … cutting me off!

I rang the number she had give me which was, of course, the wrong one. I managed to get yet another number from this department to ring which was 01202 648773 and I rang them.

No apparent notes on their system. After a few minutes, the woman took all my details, gave me a case reference and said that someone would call me back within 48 hours and hopefully find out what had happened to those cheques.

I asked why my account had not already been credited with the money given that they had acknowledged receipt of the cheques and that it was clearly their problem and not mine if they chose to lose them. She said she would put a note to that effect on the case notes…

So opinionated motormouth Jeremy Clarkson has done the equivalent of wearing a sign saying “kick me” by publishing his bank account details in an article in the Sun newspaper.

And guess what?

Yes, someone managed to get £500 out of his account!

Got to love this bit though:

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.”

Ah! The Nanny State, eh?

Beware if you dare to want to accept cheques in any other currency than Sterling.

The UK Banks really don’t want to know - in my experience - unless you are a business. If you can find a bank that will open a US Dollar account, they usually ignore the money they will be making on holding the foreign currency and instead they will want to charge you a significant sum for holding an account in a foreign currency.

Barclays do have a “Currency Call Deposit Account” though which does not make a monthly charge but instead pays no interest on the first $2,999 but then pays a massive 0.25%. Wow!

Then of course, there’s the small issue that that account does not give you a cheque book or debit card to make any withdrawals or payments nor does it provide you with a credit book to pay cheques or cash in with!

The problem then comes when you go to your local branch - the one who allegedly holds the account (it’s their sort code and branch on the quarterly statements) - to try to pay cheques in. They’re used(ish) to people presenting cheques on a “negotiation basis” into their Sterling accounts. Barclays charge a fee for this and you then get credited with the balance at whatever the then excahnge rates are. I don’t want to halve the face value of the cheques I receive and I live in hope of being able to eventually use my US Dollar account to trade with US-based companies and individuals.

So presenting a US Dollar cheque or cheques for payment into a US Dollar account, I want them handled on a “collection basis” which is how they I presume they should be handled.

Unfortunately, most of the local branch staff DHAFC and frankly I get fed up of going through this palaver every time I have a cheque to pay in, so I tend to wait until I have two or three and then pay them in at once. Depending upon how the staff at the branch have mishandled the credit slip, I sometimes get a letter acknowledging receipt or telling me they cannot negotiate the cheques and are simply going to present them on a collection basis instead.

So on 7 September 2007, I paid in three US Dollar cheques totalling just $88.99. On 12 September 2007, I received a letter which said:

“We have received your cheque(s) for the sum of USD$88.99, which you have requested we present on a negotiation basis…”

I just want the cheque paid into my account with as little fuss (and as little fee) as possible.

Then on 22 October 2007 - 6 weeks after I paid the cheques in… - I received a letter telling me that they had “received payment for this collection and have today credited [my] account … USD 38.40…”

And the statement arrived today showing only $38.40 has been credited to my account.

So I rang Barclays on 0845 7555555 which is the number which appears on my statements and on the letters they write (unless they simply don’t state a number anywhere which is a regular occurrence too).

This puts you through to a call centre on the Indian sub-contintent after you negotiate the electronic call system which doesn’t like you failing to enter a bank card number or telephone banking password, neither of which are provided with the account…

Eventually you talk to someone who asks you repeatedly for the sort code and number of your account. You know full well they cannot find it on their system as these accounts are ‘handled’ by Barclays International in Poole (the ones who once sent back a large fee deposit from an Italian client because despite quoting the sort code and account number for my account, they didn’t recognise the - incomplete - branch address and apparently Barclays are happy for more than one customer to have the same account number, just at  different branch…).

So after 37 minutes and two transfers, I eventually spoke to a guy in Poole who is as I type this trying to find the cheques in their system. As I said to him, I paid them into my local branch and they acknowledged receipt of the cheques, so if they’ve lost them, that’s their problem not mine.

He’s going to ring me back when he finds them…

I wanted to re-order some contact lenses this morning. My prescription should be reviewed on 18 May 2008, apparently, so I was not allowed to order six months’ supply.

Now by my reckoning, I ought to be able to order four or five months’ supply but Tesco only offer me the option of three, six or twelve months and as they’re blocking me from ordering beyond May, I’m kinda stuffed.

So if I ordered just three months’ supply, what would they want me to do for April and May? Walk around blindly? Use lenses I should have binned?

Stupid system.

So I have placed two order for three months’ supply each! We shall see what orders they will accept…

I went to top up my kids’ mobiles with some calling credit and as usual wanted to pay with my debit card. O2 have recently changed their web top-up so that you don’t need to log-in: just enter the number to top up, card and address details and voila!

For the first one…

When it then comes to topping up a second mobile with the same card, it gets refused every time. Great system, eh?

Here are my numbers for 2007 (2006 stats. in square brackets):

356,032 e-mails received (plus the GMail ones) [322,853 so plus 10%] .

319,499 Spams filtered by MailWasher Pro [284,680 - plus 12%].

With Labatt apparently gone and no word - either to confirm or deny - the sale of ezboard, Inc. and its bastard offspring yuku, you do wonder why whoever has bought them hasn’t seen fit to publicise the purchase with a press release.

In most industries - and especially anything to do with the Internet and online services - anything and everything of hardly any importance is greeted with a flurry of press releases and news items on web sites.

So why not this? Or is ezboard such a dirty word these days?

On Boxing Day, Demon’s DNS servers/records basically died. This meant that customers’ web sites disappeared but more importantly because there were no DNS records at all, e-mails also disappeared.

I first noticed this when my e-mail server wasn’t apparently responding - we have the SMTP e-mail service so all e-mail for a domain name is pushed to this server - and when I checked on Demon’s network status page, nothing untoward was reported.

So I waited for a while in preference to banging my head against a wall, also known as ringing the non-UK technical support [sic] call centre. Since Demon was taken over a few years back and the first line support out-sourced or otherwise transferred abroad, ringing them has been a complete waste of time as they Don’t Have A Fucking Clue which, coupled with a Cannot Be Arsed attitude, adds up to more annoyance for the poor customer.

In my case, we’re being billed incorrectly still - the wrong rate and the wrong name - which is why our bills are almost double what they should be (and there’s the small matter of a one-off charge for £700 recently…) despite two phone calls recently and a letter earlier in the year. Yes, a letter. To an Internet Services Provider. And to cap it all, I recently received two letters with identical content from them on the same day both saying “as you have not been in touch…”.

Pathetic!

It’s just as well the broadband product itself is pretty good, though at £40+VAT (or £69+VAT as they haven’t managed to sort out the billing yet) per month, it bloody well should be good. And yes, our 20:1 contended, 8Mbps service is actually only performing at around 2500kbps but hey…

So anyway. Back to Boxing Day. I eventually decided to ring them and chose the option for the automated status line which was a good call as only then did I discover that yes, they were having a complete DNS failure, which was eventually resolved very late on.

So what does their Network Status Message of the Day have to say about it? Nothing. It’s as though it had never happened!