Other What's ruining your life right now?

They train you for it. You have to assume that no one else has seen you; even when you make eye contact with someone, and you damn well know they've seen you, it still doesn't mean that they won't do something stupid. Most of the time it isn't even malice, laziness, complacency, etc - bikes are genuinely hard to see, your door pillar or window pillar can easily block your view of a motorcycle at a junction. The biggest danger to a biker is usually themselves; observation, anticipation, and forward planning are your friends.

Of course there's also the grade-A crapstains in their 10+ year-old Clio's (or whatever) with body kits & fart-cannon exhausts who try to race the biker when the lights go green... Mostly those guys (and it is usually guys) are just comical; maybe 1 in 10 cars I see on the road on a daily basis could accelerate faster than I can, and I don't even have a particularly sporty or high-powered bike.

That's sad, it sounds like she was at least comfortable at the end .

 

Yeah, I've had her since she was six weeks old and she made fifteen, literally half my life!

I think it will take a while to get over, even knowing she was on the way out it seemed so sudden. Sorry about your grand old lady, twenty is quite the score.

 

Even in Cambridge, a city literally notorious for it's volume of cyclists, I pretty much have to either take avoiding action or drop the anchors every morning - I had a coach realise it was in the wrong lane the other day, I was probably 2/3's of the way on his outside when he decided to switch lanes at this junction and squeeze me against the cars in the lane on my left, so much so that my bar end was touching and I was being pulled along with him. Managed to detach and slip myself between the closing gap before ending up under his rear wheels or on the bonnet of another car.

And the bus drivers? Bunch of utter and complete expletives...

 

Building/sourcing a gearbox for my invention is proving to be impossible. ugh

 

I'm torn between being principled or swallowing a cost that's fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things to get a thing I could really do with.

Scenario: I want to upgrade my 200GB EE home 4G tariff to their new 300GB tariff. I'm on a 30 day contract and want to keep it that way not because I'm planning to leave, but because when they launch new, larger packages, I literally can't throw my money at them quickly enough.

Problem: My options for upgrading are the same as any new customer. A) lock into 18 months (non-starter for aforementioned reason) or B) pay £100 for a "new" LTE router. This is the same LTE router I already have that I was given 6 months ago. The same LTE router that I don't use because I bought my own which is faster and more reliable.

So I speak to EE over a week ago, chap says "yeah, no worries, we can get it upgraded without you needing to buy another router, I'll just need to do some things and call you back". No call. I call this morning and another chap says "Nope, you totes need to sign up for 18 months or add to your useless router collection for £100". He can help me no more.

Thinking that both of these scenarios are a bit daft given I'm an existing customer and all I want to do is given them more money for more data (nearly linearly, I might add), I post on the EE communities with the query. My post is almost immediately deleted with the reason "spam". Soooo... just because I'm expressing unhappiness at the situation? I do something which is very rare for me and take to social media, posting the query on EE's FB page. Someone is on it in a jiffy and arranges a callback. My EE communities post is subsequently reinstated, and I'm advised that apparently automatic spam recognition went rogue. I'm sceptical.

I just received the call back from EE and I'm once again advised that my only option to keep 30 days rolling is to pay £100 for another identical router to sit unboxed in the cupboard with my other 6 month old unit. This is likely to be the scenario when 400 or 500GB come rolling along, and I'll build quite a collection of these things.

The reason for this is isn't because the cost of the router props up the tariff cost, or because it's an updated model that does something my old model doesn't, or anything else that might be borderline reasonable. It's not like we're talking about a £600 handset on a £30 monthly cost here - £100 router on a £90 monthly cost.

The reason: "because the computer says so". Far be it for humans to intervene.

So now I'm stuck, I can either:
- Stick to my principles and stay on my 200GB tariff, despite the fact that I could really do with more data, because both the scenario and inflexibility of EE is ridiculous
- Deal with it, swallow the cost, and just enjoy the additional data allowance and try not to let it bother me

Arg.

 

I accidentally forgot to enroll for my re-exams in september. Was in full preparation when I noticed they still hadn't shown up on my uni calendar. Uni helpdesk refuses to help, I "had one week to enroll, but didn't". That's basically over half a year's worth of courses lost and means another year of uni for me to finish my master's degree.

OOooooh boy, I am not in a good place right now.
I don't even know how I'm going to explain this one to my parents.

 

That's a pretty major thing to "accidentally forget", but can't you try to old "the system wasn't working when I tried" approach??

 

Or the "Are you crazy? Of course I enrolled! You think I would forget something this important!?", though sounds like the cat may already be out of the bag.

 

First thing i'd do is talk to my tutor see if they can attack if from top down.

 

Hospitals

 

Teeth.

Specifically the rest of my wisdom teeth deciding at my age it's time to join the rest of my mouth.

 

Or C, take the hit on a new router, then sell both routers on ebay for moar profit.

 

I was wondering how much those routers would go for.

@Mister_Tad If you need more data you need more data. If the likelihood is you'll be offered more in the next 18 months take to router and sell it. If not, take the 18 months.

If you, out of principal, reject the router and keep rejecting it for 18 months then you're in the same position but with no extra data for that time.

Tricky one. You could just hang on as you are if you think there'll be a larger data offer just down the road and make the choice then. Trouble is it'll no doubt be the same choice.

 

Looks like male 'rent had had a stroke... ****ing wonderful...

 

Well, I could've sworn I did enroll and I've told them that, but they've received nothing in their system - and they made it pretty clear from the start they would refuse to do anything no matter what, "deadline is deadline".

The enrollment week for re-exams is normally right after you get your grades, but this year I got my grades earlier so it wasn't possible to immediately enroll like I usually do. In the week after I was busy contacting professors to look into my exams and make arrangements for extra assignments so I figure I just assumed everything was in order.
Still, I could've sworn I did enroll, but if their servers don't show me in the logs I guess I didn't.

 

Yo ... send me your account number or the phone line associated with the data SIM and your address in a PM or to my phone number in WhatsApp/iMessage - think you got my number but if not I will provide it if you want - and I'll log it with the "deal with complaints of friends and families" team at BT. Can't promise anything as it's technically EE but this is not great customer service and we're supposed to call it out and help and stuff...

 

They don't go for much sadly, and my biggest gripe is the stance EE have taken and the understanding of some of the reps that have been on the other end of the phone.

If they called the £100 an admin fee I'd certainly question it, but would have probably swallowed it by now anyway.

Principles, y'see!

Seems to be a pattern of new tariffs emerging every ~8 months. It's the reason that gets me here more than anything though - you don't need this router, we know you don't need this router, we know you already have this router, it's actually documented that due to some quirk in your area this router isn't particularly suitable and you had to buy your own router 6 months ago, this router isn't a way of levying a one-off fee to the contract, this router is completely useless.

You just have to buy it because the computer says so.

No human touch, no understanding that perhaps the scenario is a little bit ridiculous, this is just what the computer says.

Hero. Thanks man, YGPM. Even if it gets me nowhere, I'd feel better if someone in EE would just take a step back and take it in, to say "well that's kind of dumb"

 

Very true, it comes to something when you feel a sense of relief when you talk to someone who sounds like they are able to use commonsense rather than just a script.

The thing is I imagine on some systems if you don't have a high enough access some options are just not physically possible unless the default is overridden.

But yeah, having to pay through the nose for doorstops you don't need, well it's the lack of sense that sounds the most annoying thing.

 

I've sent it out internally for a first pass. The guys in the team should see it and come back to me even with a "That's EE, so we can't touch it, try XYZ" I hope.