Virgin On The Ridiculous Part Three

Using Albert Einstein's definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," you could make a case for saying I'm mad. After two previous abortive attempts to sign up to receive broadband and cable TV from Virgin Media (see http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Virgin%20On%20The%20Ridiculous) back in 2012 and 2013, you might think that I would steer well clear of having anything to do with them, particularly since my internet service provider (ISP) have been able to connect me via fibre optic cable giving me decent download speeds. And having bought a NOW TV box at Christmas, I now have some additional TV channels.

But on this occasion it wasn't my doing to engage with Virgin Media, it was they who sought me out. I regularly get mail from Virgin Media offering me their services. These letters go straight in the bin; after all, I know - and so should they - that my address is not serviceable. They have told me that more than once in the past. Well, their engineers have. As far as their sales team are concerned, there is no reason why we should not have their broadband and TV, and in the middle of March they phoned me and asked if I would be interested in signing up with them. Wearily I explained the troubles we had back in 2012 and 2013. Oh, said the lady on the other end of the phone, we have some new technology that means we will be able to connect you. This new technology is apparently confined to new cables, not self-burrowing cables complete with nano technology, just new cables. How, I asked, is that going to overcome the fact that you can't get a cable - regardless how advanced that cable is - from the box in the street to our house? No specific answer was forthcoming, but simply for the hell of it, I agreed to having a site engineer call, on the proviso that he was fully apprised of the previous difficulties.

TV? No. Broadband? No. Phone? No. Mobile? No.

Unsurprisingly, when the site engineer arrived he was blissfully unaware that this was anything other than a standard installation. He reported back to the sales team, who rang me and I again explained that we were in the same position we had been in 2013. Later the area manager called. He was doubtful that the story we were told three years ago (that the cable goes under our neighbour's property and that was where there was a blockage preventing the cable reaching our property) was actually correct. He promised that another engineer would call to try and ascertain exactly where the blockage was. As usual, the sales team were singing from a different songsheet to the installation teams, since the former were promising all sorts of wonders because of the new cabling Virgin have, but as the area manager said - bearing out my existing view - the new cables still have to be able to reach the property; if they can't then the new technology is irrelevant.

Further visits from other engineers ensued. Having been told about the blockages they suggested that a spur could be run from the existing cable that runs down our street and that they could dig up the pavement and our frontage and run one cable through the wall to the study for the phone line and broadband connection and then another round the house to the box on the lounge wall where the TV cabling could come in. Fine, I said, go ahead.

The next communication from Virgin was a text message advising that they would be sending a construction team to install the cabling. They said that I didn't need to be there when they came because all of the work would be external, but if I wanted to be at home when they called, I should reply to the text with Option 2 so they could arrange an appointment, which I did...and heard nothing further. Until one very wet Friday afternoon when I was out shopping and received a phone call from a Virgin engineer who was outside my property, asking where I was. I went home, stood on the pavement in the pouring rain and apologised for not being there, but explained that I had been expecting a call to arrange this visit. I asked exactly what work they were expecting to undertake and was not surprised to learn that they thought that they just had to run the cable through the existing conduit. Digging up the pavement was not part of their expectations. They went to explore for blockages, and guess what? They found that there was indeed a blockage under our neighbour's property. That was that, they said. As I already knew, there was nothing they could do, we could not be connected.  But by this time I had received a letter confirming that on Monday 25th April they would be calling to complete the installation.

I have a collection of these.

And then I got another text. Had the cabling been completed? I replied that no, it had not been, and that should have been that, except that Virgin Media's internal communication obviously leaves something to be desired because I received yet another text. "We'll be connecting you on Monday 25th April," it said. "All OK? Reply YES or NO." I replied "NO," to which they replied that they would call me. Which they actually did, and I explained that they could not install anything because they could not connect cable to our property. They said that they would cancel the proposed installation.

Come Monday 25th April I must admit that I fully expected  a Virgin Media van to pull up outside and for an engineer to think he could connect us up; in a way I was a bit disappointed that no one came. It seems that that final telephone conversation actually had some effect and the sales team and installation team got their act together, talked to one another and cancelled everything.

I only went along with Virgin's offer on the basis that if they wanted to waste their time and money that was up to them. It was no skin off my nose,  cost me nothing and there was always an outside chance that this time it might actually go through, giving me allegedly better internet speeds and some extra TV channels. And I wanted to find out how many times they would call and how many different options would be suggested before they finally realised it was futile. The answer was seven visits and at least as many different stories.

Anyone who has worked for a large company will have experienced a disconnect between different parts of the organisation; Virgin Media are no different. The sales team have a different imperative and different views on what is achievable from the construction team who actually have to do the work. The sales team were confident that their new technology would enable us to be connected, the engineers knew better.

I would have expected that since I have had a letter from Virgin confirming the setting up of a Direct Debit to pay for their services and a letter welcoming me as a customer, I would get some sort of confirmation in writing that the whole thing is cancelled. I don't hold out any hope of that, after all I didn't get anything like that in 2012 or 2013. For a company whose business is communications, communicating is something that Virgin seem to have some issues with. Perhaps I've had a lucky escape; given how poor their communication has been while they have been trying to get me on board, how bad would it have been if I had actually become a customer and then  had something go wrong?

Saturday At Three

The convention that football in England is played on a Saturday afternoon, kicking off at three o'clock, stems from the game's early days in Victorian times when for players, officials and spectators, the working week ended at Saturday lunchtime.  The strength of the church, The Lord's Day Observance Society (LDOS)  and the tradition that Sunday be a day of rest precluded organised football on the Sabbath.  With the decline in influence of the church and the LDOS it is probable that if football were in its infancy now,  Sunday would more likely be the preferred day for the majority of games.  The advent of the Premier League and Sky Sports broadcasting of live games in 1992 brought live Sunday football on TV; then we got live Monday night football, live Saturday lunchtime football, live Saturday tea-time football and from next season we are going to get live Friday night football.

The demands of television and the complicity of the football authorities bring problems for the fans that have been well documented. Inconvenient kick-off times combined with long journeys for instance. In this season's FA Cup, Liverpool's tie at Exeter City was switched to Friday night for the benefit of the broadcasters.  Ludicrously, Liverpool fans who wished to travel by rail found that their last train home left Exeter before the game had even kicked off! The switch, and the inconvenience to the travelling Liverpool fans, was justified by broadcasters on the basis that it was  " no different to their visits to Swansea on a Monday night in the Premier League and a Wednesday trip to Southampton in the League Cup, both of which they have done in the last 12 months." So that's all right then, having been thoroughly inconvenienced twice, by the third time they ought to be used to it.

And if it isn't bad enough when sufficient notice is given when games are rescheduled from the default Saturday afternoon, the broadcasters frequently demand last minute switches to accommodate their schedules. Oh sure, there are rules about the amount of notice they have to give, but at least twice this season these rules have not been complied with. Middlesbrough's trip to Charlton Athletic in the Championship was moved from Saturday to Sunday with only seventeen days notice given, and this after many away fans would have booked train tickets and possibly overnight accommodation as well as having bought their match tickets. Just another example of the lack of consideration that is shown to the fans by the leagues and broadcasters.

This is all a far cry from the days when the Football League ruled TV and radio coverage of the game with an iron fist. Highlights programmes like Match of The Day could not be broadcast before a particular time in the evening - I think it was 10 o'clock - because, in the Football League's view, any earlier and there might be a detrimental effect on attendances at games played during the afternoon. And BBC radio could only provide commentary on the second-half of Football League or FA Cup matches to stop fans staying at home and listening to games instead of attending them. Not allowing games to be shown live on TV at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon was the work of then Burnley chairman Bob Lord, who in the 1960's convinced his fellow Football League club chairmen that televised games at that time would hit clubs in the pocket because of reduced attendances. 

That blackout remains in place, but is now being challenged by Virgin Media, who are proud to claim that they are " the only TV provider to offer all the available live games through one subscription." But, of 380 Premier League games scheduled each season, "only" 154 are shown live. Given their own way, Virgin Media would have all 380 games shown live. And here is why they argue this:

Fans are missing games: Fans are unable to watch their favourite teams live on TV because the Premier League does not allow games to be broadcast at 3pm on Saturdays. Our survey shows that 77% want more live Premier League games on TV.

Fans are not "unable to watch their favourite teams" rather, Virgin Media customers cannot. Fans go to games; customers sit at home and watch TV. And who are these people who want more live football and exactly how many are they? Presumably they are 77% of Virgin Media customers, many of whom may never have been to a live football match in their lives because it is doubtful that they are 77% of the 13.7 million fans who went to Premier League games last season. Virgin Media's claim that their motive for their campaign is that fans are getting a raw deal is disingenuous; they have looked at the number of games that are broadcast and figure that if it were all of them rather than 40% of them, they could significantly boost income by increased numbers of subscribers.

Contradicting Virgin's assertion is the evidence gathered by Against League 3 [1] who found that in non-League football, those polled were 100% against televised games at 3 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and that even among Premier League fans, only 40% supported the concept. Naturally we should treat all such statistics, from either side, with some suspicion; both sides in the argument will have gathered evidence from sources that will most likely support their view.

The argument against televised football on a Saturday afternoon is that it will hit attendances at games, and especially at the lower levels of the game, and it is probably true. Say the choice is going to watch your local team on a dark, wet, cold and windy December afternoon, when they have just lost four on the trot and are likely to be trounced by the league leaders and having to spend money on transport, admission and refreshments, or alternatively sitting in a nice warm living room, with your feet up to watch a top of the table Premier League game without paying a penny more than your existing cable or satellite TV subscription. The given that choice, the "fans" that Virgin Media are talking about would pick the latter. The real fans -as opposed to "customers"- will choose the former.

You can watch football at The Emirates...

or in the pub...

There are already plenty of pubs and clubs showing games live on a Saturday afternoon courtesy of satellite feeds from the Middle East and you can stream games live on your laptop if you know where to look. And if these games are already available to view, then attendances are presumably already taking a hit anyway and legitimising the broadcast of these games may not have an impact. Except if it is made easier for people to watch a game on TV rather than go to one at their local club, then that is what they will do.

but this is how I like to watch it.

Personally, I'm in favour of the Saturday afternoon blackout staying in place, but equally I think that eventually it will be pushed aside. And when that day comes companies like Virgin Media will hail this as a victory for the customer. They won't care that the price of their victory may be another nail in the coffin of grassroots and lower league football.

---

[1] Against League 3 can be found at http://www.againstleague3.co.uk/   According to their website,  "Against League 3 is a collective of football supporters formed in May 2014 to fight proposals from The FA to introduce Premier League B-Teams into the wider competitive football pyramid. The petition against those measures reached 34,000 signatories with the plans defeated in 2015.

Since then AL3 has fought against a number of measures that would severely damage the English lower leagues, including the scrapping of FA Cup replays and B-Teams in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy. We have also tirelessly researched league structures and cup competitions around the world and youth develop schemes employed in other nations as well as highlighted the need for reform and lack of transparency at The FA, notably the FA Council."

If I Could Turn Back Time

Time travel is impossible, but wishful thinking on the part of many writers means that it is a fairly common theme in fiction. And while it was once the preserve of the science-fiction writer, it's fair to say that it is becoming slightly more mainstream and is a device used both in books and in television as a medium to revisit past times and re-invent history. H G Wells pretty much invented the genre with The Time Machine,  although Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court pre-dates it by six years, and other classics include To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and  Slaughterhouse - Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I have recently read Ben Elton's time travel novel, Time and Time Again and am currently reading Steven King's 11.22.63, which I want to finish before starting to watch the TV adaptation.

Rod Taylor in the film of The Time Machine

  

Ben Elton is an interesting character; he first came to prominence as a right-on, Left-wing, stand up comedian, ranting about the uselessness of motorway service tea pots and Margaret Thatcher. Then he became a national treasure when he collaborated with Richard Curtis to write Blackadder. As a novelist, his books are difficult to pigeon-hole; he doesn't fit into any convenient, single genre. His works include murder mystery, talent show satire and life in Nazi Germany. The premise of Time and Time Again is that if you could travel back in time and change one event, would you, could you and if so, which one event? Elton's protagonist, ex-SAS type Hugh Stanton, is sent back to 1914 to thwart the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thereby prevent the outbreak of war. The law of unintended consequences kicks in, and without wishing to spoil the book for anyone who is thinking of reading it, history changes in many unexpected ways and with multiple strands of time intertwining. King's novel has a similar premise. High school English teacher Jake Epping travels back to 1963 (via 1958 - it's a long novel) in an attempt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President John F Kennedy, righting some other wrongs on the way.

Despite the fact that time travel is not possible, most writers are mindful of the butterfly effect and the danger of temporal paradoxes, although stories such as the one in the film Somewhere in Time exploit these so-called bootstrap paradoxes (named for the Robert Heinlein time-travel story, By His Bootstraps) - in fact the whole story in the film is predicated on one such paradox.

If time travel were possible it is safe to assume that there would be a comprehensive set of restrictions imposed on anyone wanting to travel back in time; less so (if any) on anyone wishing to travel forward, presumably. So, if you could go back, when would you go back to and what, if anything would you change? Let's set aside the idea of travelling to the 1930's and killing Adolf Hitler, or preventing the assassination of Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, or just going back and putting a bundle of money on Red Rum winning three consecutive Grand Nationals, what would you do, what could you do, that would actually be useful? (and even then, should you do it?)

Red Rum on his way to Grand National glory.

Perhaps the most likely thing you would do is correct your own mistakes, or more usefully, prevent yourself making them in the first place. It's apparently quite common for people to write a letter to their younger self; it is supposed to be cathartic. But apart from absolving yourself of guilt over any past actions, misdeeds or mistakes, these letters change nothing; imagine what the impact would be if your letter could actually be delivered to your younger self. What would you say?

Perhaps you would try to prevent your young counterpart having to face a traumatic or life changing experience. For instance, my first wife, June, died of a brain haemorrhage which the doctors told me after the event could have happened at any time and which it might not have been possible to have prevented with surgery before it occurred had anyone known it was going to happen. It's probable that even with prior knowledge of her condition, her life might not have been saved; would I change the past by preventing my younger self from marrying her, or even dating her? Yes, it would have saved me so much grief, but I would have missed out on much joy and happiness too. And who knows what (different) distress and heartache I might have experienced had my life taken a different course?

If I could deliver that letter, I would not tell myself to change anything specific, what I would do is attempt to change my mind set. I would say, "Don't say No, don't accept No, but don't worry about being told No." For a lot of my life I said No to things because I worried about the consequences; I probably missed out on a lot of things by saying No when I should have said Yes. They say you should not regret the things you have done, only the things you haven't and looking back I wish I'd been braver and not said No at times. A lot of times I was told No when I asked to do something (particularly when I asked my parents if I could do something); I wish I'd been braver and not taken No for an answer (well, not without a damn good reason anyway). And I wish I hadn't been scared to be told No at times.  I suppose I cannot be the only person who has been so daunted by the prospect of a refusal and therefore not asked the question, whatever it may be, rather than be told No. The rationale is that if you don't ask, you can't know if you would be rebuffed and you'll be happier that way. But if you do ask, your request may not even be denied, so what do you have to lose? For a very little word, "No" has a huge impact on our lives; a lesson for us all - regardless of the fact that we cannot educate our younger selves about it - is that we should pay less heed to the word. Mind you, I am a fine one to talk. I have often been told that I am a quite negative person (although I have tried to shake that off over the years) and "No" has played a significant role in my life, more so that it should have; if I could go back and berate myself about anything it would be about not being so negative.

On the whole, it is fortunate we cannot change the past, better that we learn from it to influence our future.

Age Is Just A Number

It was my birthday last week. As usual, I only got a handful of cards, which doesn't bother me much since I have never made much of my birthday; the last time I did was when I was forty. The only thing that concerns me as I get older is that time seems to go so much more quickly. Oh, and the aches and pains that seem more frequent, albeit that most of them are fairly trivial. It is inevitable that with age come issues with one's health and I suppose that (touch wood), I have been fortunate. I'm on tablets for high blood pressure and to control my cholesterol, but that makes me fairly normal for my age I suppose. I had a growth cut out from my tongue a few years ago that had me worried while waiting for the biopsy results; fortunately it was benign, so compared with many of my peers, I've been lucky.

An inevitable consequence of getting older is an inclination to look selectively at the past. There are some people who look back wistfully and believe that everything was better years ago, while others embrace the changes they have experienced and write off all that came before. I sit somewhere in between; there are many things that were better in my youth just as there are many things that are so much better today, and of the things that were better in my youth, a lot of them were better simply because I was younger. Actually I consider myself to be very fortunate to have been born when I was. In terms of the new technology that we have seen in the last twenty years, I was old enough to really appreciate it and benefit from it, while not being too old to be daunted by it. Many of my parents' generation have undoubtedly been bewildered by the pace and complexity of the changes in technology and by the ways in which the new technology has invaded their lives. The internet is now so completely integrated into our lives that being disconnected from it is almost physically painful to some people, and our increasing reliance on it for both our work and our entertainment has probably now reached unhealthy levels. And, to borrow an expression from a TV advert for an internet service provider, becoming an 'off grid spoon whittler' is becoming increasingly  less of an option.

Get broadband or be a spoon whittler.

Over 46% of the world's population have internet access, but there are nearly six million UK adults who have never gone online and in a world in which goods and services are increasingly only available online - or at least are becoming more and more difficult to access without an internet connection - there is a large group of people who risk being excluded from accessing these services or at least disadvantaged. On a trivial level the growth of internet broadcasting - Amazon Prime, Netflix and the like - means that those who rely solely on terrestrial TV broadcast have increasingly limited options. More importantly, as organisations like local authorities and utility companies move progressively towards offering access to information and services exclusively through their websites, the older generation and those in social housing (of the six million UK adults not online, 4.1 million of them live in that type of accommodation) are having their lives made more difficult due to their lack of access. And even for many hundreds of thousands of people who do have an internet connection, they may be excluded from some services that require higher download speeds than are available to them. So while, for the moment at least, I can consider myself able to cope both in terms the technology available to me and my grasp of it, who is to say how long that will last?

There is plenty you can do on you local council's website. One day, you may not be able to do it anywhere else.

Some changes are inevitable and I am happy to adapt to many of them. Sadly, however there are some changes that come along that are irksome, and technology is one of those where it is easy to feel that some changes are not for the convenience or benefit of the consumer, but for the advantage of the suppliers. Take Apple products. There is a lot to be said for Apple; for instance I think that their customer service is second to none, but their constant refinements  and new releases (of both hardware and software) make it difficult not to become somewhat vexed. The iPhone 4 was released in June 2010 and while six years is not a long time, in terms of technology it is an eternity. I got an iPhone 4 a year or so after it was released, and there is no reason why I should not still be using it, if I wanted to. As it happened I switched to a Samsung phone two years ago, which is probably just as well since my old iPhone, which I have kept and have been using to run a few apps, like the BBC Radio iPlayer, is becoming increasingly useless. My iPhone is running an old version of the operating system and doesn't have enough storage space left to upgrade to iOS 7.1.2 and guess what? the apps I tend to use it will not work with the version of iOS that is on the phone. Thus I'm in possession of a piece of kit that I can only upgrade by deleting the very apps I want to use to free up enough space to install the new operating system.

The iPhone 4, once cutting edge, now pretty much redundant.

This built in obsolescence is not confined to Apple, and with the frequency with which people upgrade their hardware, be it phones, tablets or laptops, second hand gadget shops are full of relatively new equipment that their owners have deemed past its sell-by date, either by choice or by necessity. I have now decided that my old iPhone is ripe for consigning to the scrapheap, but I might as well get something for it rather than just bin it. Selling it to someone like Mazuma would get me £15, or I could sell it to Apple, who will give me £75, but only in vouchers to spend on their products, a handy way of locking the consumer into them.

It may be a cliché to say that age is just a number, but as time goes by the age at which we define people as 'old' increases, and not just because people live longer than previous generations, but at least in part because of the demands made on us by the way the world, particularly technology, changes. By necessity as well as choice, we stay younger longer.  And whereas twenty years ago I had no clue as to how important the internet would be - we had only just acquired our first PC then and only went online in 1999 - who can tell where we will be twenty years hence? What technology will we need by 2036, and what skills will we need to operate it? Increasingly we need to be more adept and capable, particularly in embracing change and new ideas, well into our old age.