Dear Classic FM

According to a Christian Voice press release, they have succeeded in stopping you from broadcasting promotional material for Eric Idle’s Not the Messiah.

You spineless bunch of hopeless, lilly-livered fools.

Are you really satisfied that this action is for the general good? Or are we just pandering to the delusions of a bunch of mistaken old farts who wouldn’t know science, comedy or parody if it shot up their collective tight-arses and danced around their eyeballs singing “God made me a moron” .

Do these hopeless idiots have such a shaky grasp on their beliefs that it will slip and fall in tatters at the slightest threat?

If Classic FM considers it a duty not to offend its listeners then you should consider that attacks on free speech constitute the greatest offence of all.

Do not go down the bland, politically correct path of skipping around everyone’s sensibilities because you will be forever the prone bitch of the loudest descent.

It isn’t my intention to turn this blog into a N97 or Nokia bashing site but I here’s just one more link:

This guy has a nice way of putting his frustration with the N97 and Nokia.

The full site is here: http://www.tehkseven.net/news/video/a-message-to-nokia/

Others have been driven by their frustration at the N97 to go to extreme lengths to publicise their stories. If you’re still in some doubt about whether this phone is worth having, I suggest you take a look here: Don’t Buy N97. It’s worth reading.

I’ve just received a call from a guy at Nokia.

After apologising for all the trouble I’ve been put through, he assures me that he has personally put a full refund through on to my credit card.

His knowledge of the case meant he’d either read this blog today or it had been passed down from my letter to the MD, Sales in Farnborough, UK.

So that puts an end to this three month saga and an end to me or anyone in my family ever being a Nokia customer again.

If you thought the story of my N97 ended with my decision to send it back – not so. Next, I had to get my money back.

Having decided to send the N97 back, it got a stay of execution when I learned that a software upgrade was to appear shortly. If the upgrade cured the serious software problems, I’d put up with the keyboard and other hardware niggles.

Unfortunately the software update took several weeks to appear and after I applied it, I had a phone pretty much as it was before. Not one of the problems that bothered me had been addressed.

I called Nokia Customer Service and arranged to send the phone back. It was a curious conversation. It seemed like I was the twentieth person he’d just dealt with who asked to return an N97. With barely any questioning, he gave me a URL for a form to print and which has a Nokia freepost address.

The next day, 10 August, I posted the phone in its original box and got a proof of posting from the Post Office.

Then I waited.

After two weeks, I started calling Nokia Customer Service to find out what was happening with my refund. No one I spoke to could find out anything. I was promissed calls back which never occured. After

I started keeping a log.

2009-09-07
10:00 Called Nokia Care UK
Selected option 5 – N97 -> black hole

10:02 Called Nokia Care UK
option 5 – N97 -> black hole

Obviously, there was a special option for N97 callers which dumped the call into a hole. Was Nokia already getting more calls than they could handle?

Tried going for the sales dept – just to find someone.

10:03 Called Nokia Care UK
option 1 – sales -> can’t help and not interested in trying.

Try a different option:

10:07 Called Nokia Care UK
option 4 – after sales for Nokia shop
-> 10:10 answered by someone who transfers me…
-> 10:12 transferred to N97 dept
-> 10:18 silence for 6 mins – black hole

Again – the N97 queue with nothing on the end of it.

10:27:59 Called Nokia Care UK
-> option 5
10:34:53 answered by operator. Transferring…
10:36:05 back on hold
10:36:54 pre-recorded announcement
10:37:10 answered by Billy
10:40:30 on hold
10:41:30 back with Billy
10:44:36 Billy took details. Someone will call me back.

No one called back

A week later and another go.

2009-09-15
09:45:20 Called 0800 331 6021. Told to call 0845 045 5555
09:46:51 Called 0845 045 5555
09:47:35 Pressed 4 -> in queue
10:01:00 Answered by an American?
10:05:36 on hold – checking…
10:12:17 back. S**** D**** Online sales support SF USA
10:20:11 she will call me back in 24-48 hours. End of call

She didn’t call back

Two days later

2009-09-17
09:54:17 Called 0845 045 5555
09:56:15 Answered by operator
09:59:32 on hold. Hold tune is distorted all to hell and truly vile.
10:08:45 D**** in Finland. Explained problem.
10:16:55 “Give us 24-48 hours. We’ll call you back”
10:20:20 end

He didn’t call back.

2009-09-28
10:05:10 Called 0845 045 5555
10:05:24 Recorded announcement: “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and will not be able to handle your call.”
10:05:48 Called 0845 045 5555
10:06:14 Call dropped
10:06:18 Called 0845 045 5555
10:06:45 “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and will not be able to handle your call.”

No pretence any longer. They really can’t be bothered to offer a phone service.

2009-09-29
23:30:00 appx Sent web form from Nokia’s web site explaining problem. Web page and acknowledgement email says they’ll be in touch in 48 hours:
—
Thank you for contacting Nokia.

You will be receiving a reply from one of our Customer Care Representatives within the next 48 hours.

Have a good day.

[This is an automatically generated acknowledgement. Please do not reply to this e-mail.]
—

2009-10-01
No response to web form.
10:57:49 Tried 0800 331 6021 (sales) got through quickly but sales bod utterly useless.

10:59:15 Called 0845 045 5555
10:59:38 STILL Recorded announcement: “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and will not be able to handle your call.”

For three days Nokia Customer Care phone line has been out of service. Clearly this was a pointless avenue to follow.

2009-10-07
Email from Nokia:
—
Thank you for contacting Nokia Care. We appreciate you choosing Nokia N97 as your preffered device. With regards to your enquiry, we do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and thank you for bringing this to our attention. How did you send your mobile phone? Is it via freepost? The reason why i’m asking this is just because when I checked your IMEI no. here in our system, it say’s that no records found.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us again if you have any further questions.

Yours faithfully,
RollyS
Nokia Service Professional
UK & Ireland Team
Nokia Care
—

I replied immediately with:
—
Hi

Thanks for the reply but it has taken you over a week to do it.

Mobile was sent via freepost to the address on the form downloaded from your
web site.

The phone is back with you. I sent it on August 10 and I have a proof of
posting from the post office.

As it is now nearly two months since I returned the phone, I think I am quite
entitled to get my money back.

Please arrange for an immediate refund.

Thank you.
—

2009-10-08
Another Email from Nokia
—
Thank you for contacting Nokia Care.

Hi Dale. Regarding your concern we will be escalating the case to the next level of support and they will take over the case. Some one will be calling you back with in 24-48 hours to sort things with you. We do apologize for the inconvenience that this has cost you but rest assured that everything will be dealt with properly.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us again if you have any further questions.

Yours faithfully

KristianV
Nokia Service Professional
UK & Ireland Team
Nokia Care
—

It goes quiet again so I fire off a prodding email:

2009-10-13
—
Where are we with this, please?
—

I get a reply which I think is asking me to wait a bit:

2009-10-13
—
Thank you for contacting Nokia Care. We do apologize for the inconvenience it has cause you. With regards to your email ill be making a follow-up on this but as of the moment please kindly monitor or wait for the callback of the next level of support.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us again if you have any further questions.

Yours faithfully,

Menard C.
Nokia Service Professional
UK & Ireland Team
Nokia Care
—

This is another approach that is clearly not going anywhere.

I get the address of Nokia’s UK headquarters and send a letter to:

Managing Director, Sales.
Nokia House,
Summit Avenue,
Farnborough,
Hampshire
GU14 0NG

Laying out the story, giving my original order number and IMEI number and giving two weeks for them to investigate and organise a refund.

Five days before the deadline of October 21, I send another copy recorded delivery.

I’ve heard nothing.

I’m no Nokia basher, in fact until very recently, I would only buy Nokia phones for myself, my wife or children. I come to this from a line of Nokia phones, the most recent of which was the N95 8GB
This, I thought, was a great phone and I used it heavily for a wide range of tasks. In addition to being a phone, it became indispensable as my calendar, address book, still and movie camera, music player, movie player, games machine, route planner, document viewer, VoIP phone, quick web browser and WiFi access point. That’s an impressive list from one little box of electronics – and that’s just the really important stuff.

It was such a useful little gadget that it was never out of arms reach.

However, many applications were awkward or downright impractical on its numeric keyboard. A qwerty was required.

So it was with considerable anticipation that I received the announcement of the N97. A qwerty keyboard and a touch screen: the potential to be the perfect phone.

Nokia N97

After months of waiting past shifting launch dates, I eventually got my N97 from the Nokia Online Shop, paying the full early adopters fee of £500.

The keyboard is a huge disappointment. They keys have no travel whatsoever, feedback is hopeless but more importantly and an utterly unforgivable cock-up is that you can’t read the key legends. How hard is it to use two high-contrast colours for the keys and legends? Too hard for Nokia, it seems. In anything but perfect light (or darkness when back illumination comes to the rescue), you can’t see which key is which. This wouldn’t be so bad on a standard QWERTY keyboard where all but a novice has a rough idea where things are but this three row effort has everything except the main alpha keys scattered all over the place. You end up having to arrange secondary lighting just so you can send a text. How the hell did they manage to get it so wrong?

The whole system is slow, unresponsive and buggy. I’m told I should expect this, it is version 1, after all. What rubbish! I don’t pay extra to get one of the first phones available so that I can spend my time testing it. (This is a wider industry problem which I won’t dig up now.) Nokia should be utterly ashamed of itself for releasing software that is simply not finished. A good example of this is switching on the screen. You can use either the key lock switch: screen comes on quickly; or open the phone to use the keyboard: screen comes on after a long wait.

The user interface shows many signs of being in a transition between keyboard and touch operated and with a lack of agreement on how to complete the process. Scrolling is achieved variously by grabbing a scrollbar with your finger or swiping up and down on the page. You won’t know whether swiping will work in an application until you try it. Similarly, there is no consistency in choosing items from lists. Sometimes a single tap works; in other places you need to tap twice.

The phone was promoted as being an ideal media device with its huge storage space and long battery life. Unfortunately, it fails spectacularly here too. The volume control is hopelessly unresponsive and sometimes simply fails to operate at all. Cataloguing your music collection after copying tracks to the phone takes forever but the real peach is using Bluetooth. If you listen to your music on Bluetooth speakers it is virtually impossible to answer calls. This phone, unlike others, doesn’t recognise a split between phone audio and media audio and pumps it all through the speakers. If your speakers don’t have a microphone, you have to disconnect them before you can talk to the caller using the phone’s mic. Trying to do that after answering a call takes so long that the caller has usually hung up. The problem is made worse by various pop-up messages about the phone’s state appearing over the on-screen buttons so you have to wait for them to slide away before you can continue. It’s an utter shambles.

The other major feature pushed on this phone was its Internet capabilities. It has a good browser that rarely struggled to render a modestly sized page but will get bogged down in large or complex ones, responding very slowly. Again, attention to glaring problems has been poor. While it’s downloading a page there is a status bar along the top of the screen. This vanishes when the page is complete causing the page to jump upwards to fill the gap. If you’ve already aimed a tap at a link, you’re going to miss it and hit something underneath. If they had simply made the status bar overlay the page instead of displacing it, the problem wouldn’t occur. Sounds like a minor problem until you tap the wrong link in search results and end up on a huge page that takes ages to render before you can go back and try again. It adds minutes to simple tasks.

And, of course, the browser crashes. How it can crash and lock the whole phone is a mystery but it does and it makes a habit of it. Battery removal is the only remedy here.

There are many more problems, like network connection being a bit of a gamble when switching between WiFi and GPRS. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you end up using mobile data when WiFi is available. Often you end up with no connection at all. The constant warnings that your mobile data connection might get expensive. Is that OK? Yes. Just get on with it. Why can’t it ask once and remember the answer?

Installing software is torture. Mostly it works but is so slow it is best left to run overnight. But on the occasions that it doesn’t work, you get a useless message about there not being enough memory with no clue as to what you’re supposed to do about it. Have I got too many programs running? Have I filled the flash drive? (Surely not, it’s 32GB and I haven’t started yet.) You’re left most unsatisfactorily with just switching off and on again to cure the problem.

I really wanted to like this phone but it was determined not to let me. In the end I found it frustrating and annoying to use and had to get rid of it.

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Castleton

When you go out to eat, you’re looking for two things: good food and good service. If the food is good but the waiters are sloppy or slow or rude or there are long delays between courses, you probably won’t go back.

Last weekend, we spent a few days in Castleton, Derbyshire. Castleton is a small town surrounded by hills in the Peak District (UK). The nearest pub was Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese – which was recommended so we had dinner there the first evening.

The food was great and there were no problems with the service.

The next evening, we didn’t even consider going anywhere else. We were keen to try other dishes on the menu. I ordered a rump steak – medium.

When it arrived, it was well cooked. So well cooked, that I could have walked the 200 miles back home on it without it showing undue signs of wear. It was also tough and grisly. I left half of it; considering it inedible.

When we finished the barman came and dutifully asked if everything was alright? “Well, no, not really.”, I said. “The steak was tough.”. “We spend an awful lot of money on our meat” he replied. My wife chipped in with a friendly comment: “and sometimes you get a duff one.” “I wouldn’t call it duff”, the barman replied as he took our plates and left.

That was it. No attempt at a remedy. Not even an apology. As long as they spent a lot of money on their meat, that was good enough for him.

So why bother asking if everything is alright if you really don’t give a toss whether it is or not? Just going through the motions isn’t good service. Good service is about making an effort. The chefs can be working their socks off in the kitchen but if the waiting staff don’t understand good service, you won’t drag customers back for another visit.

What should the barman have done? I would have been a bit happier with an apology but the clever approach would be to offer me a good discount off my next meal. First, that would have repaired my good will. Second, it would have given them our custom for another day. Even with a discount on a single meal, they would have been up on my wife’s meal and our drinks.

Good service is so very easy and ensures repeat business. If you give poor service, you look cheap and mean.

We didn’t go back.