Never ever buy gift vouchers.

Never ever, ever buy gift vouchers or book tokens. 30% of gift vouchers are never cashed. Most gift vouchers have an expiry date of between 6 and 12 months, but if the retailer who issues them has old stock they can be expired before you walk out of the door.

I was treated like a criminal because I tried to use £50 worth of gift vouchers I won in a competition in work. I was trying to spend them before they expired. After spending hours on the telephone I was told that because of fraud I needed to write a letter to get issued new vouchers.

Most issuers of vouchers don't do refunds or replace expired vouchers. This is corporate theft as far as I can see. I had £20 of vouchers from Capital Bonds that were short dated. I did not know where I could spend them until it was too late. When I contacted them I was told "We don't reissue or honour expired vouchers". We need a change in the law or at least someone to make a test case.

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Gary Moore - RIP

When I was a teenager all my heroes were all motorcycle racers and I remember one day lying in bed thinking that most of my heroes were dead. They were not all that much older than me. Move along 30 odd years and I keep loosing my musical heroes. Rest in peace Gary Moore, he too was not much older than me. Gary was best remembered as one of the guitarists in Phil Lynotts brilliant band Thin Lizzy, but he was so much more. Gary's solo career spanned the globe and he was a big name in Japan. I rate Gary as one of the best rock guitarists of all time and have a stack of probably 25 of his CDs not including my Thin Lizzy collection. I recently watched one of his concerts on Sky Arts channel along with some of his old Thin Lizzy pals it was an absolute cracker. It is incredibly sad we will hear no more Moore anymore :0(

http://www.gary-moore.com/

Going Postal!

The British Post Office can go to hell! Yesterday I had an A4 card through the door telling me I had mail with underpaid postage. It would cost me £1.19 and I had to collect it from the sorting office. So I drive five miles only to find it is a Christmas card. Why I ask is the post not enough? Due to a small diamanté jewel on the card it would not fit through their slot. So what do I want with a Christmas card for in the middle of January? I told them to stuff it where the sun doesn't shine.

So be warned if you send Birthday or Christmas cards with badges or are a little thicker than normal it needs to be posted as a large letter. A normal 1st or 2nd class letter needs to be less than 5mm. Not that 5mm means anything to half the population who where raised on Imperial measurements and who measures their letters before sending anyway?

The GPO is so screwed, if only there was an alternative like electronic mail. We could call it email for short. I think I will refuse to send anything through the mail in future if I can help it.

So if you sent me a Christmas card in a gold envelope with a small diamanté jewel on I never got it.

Where have all the Clacks towers gone?

Tax Rises Fund Criminal Activities

So VAT is 20% and it stinks. I don't really blame the present government for the rise, that was brought about by the mess left by the last lot. I do however think it is the wrong move on so many levels. In a faltering economy it is going to slow growth and plunge us headlong in to a true recession. Even those with a good income are already crippled by 40% income tax, local taxes in the form of rates and insanely high taxes on fuel for both our homes and cars, then there is road tax and so on. You are not safe with money in the bank these days either. Because interest rates are so pathetic prices are rising faster so you just loose, loose, loose. Whenever a country gets in to this sort of mess the way out is to start a war and it would not surprise me if this time it did not erupt on our own streets. I am quite afraid that if someone does not get a grip of things soon then all hell will break loose. Modern communications mean the people are the press and they cannot gag us all. When the riots start the word will spread faster than has ever been seen before.

Hopefully I am being too pessimistic about things and we will not see a civil war in the streets of the UK in 2011, but what is unavoidable is a growing black economy. If you can avoid paying income tax by going "Underground" and sell your goods VAT free you can be making a profit of at least twice what you could as a legitimate business. One can see the attraction.

I already know of businesses on the edge who have offered to service my car, supply tyres or electrical goods for cash in hand, no VAT. If I visit people I know who live on council estates I often see the visitors they get selling cigarettes and booze smuggled in to the UK from door to door. The higher the taxes go up the more people are tempted to buy from these criminal types, for that is what they are. They may start out as doing what they have to to make ends meet but at some point they cross the line between what is tax dodging and what is downright criminal. So effectively by increasing tax the government is funding criminal activities.

Tonight the price of Diesel is up at my local petrol station from £1.24 per litre to £1.31 so a full tank of gas now costs me £107.83. When the 1973 oil crisis was in full swing my father complained that it cost him just under 10 shillings to fill up, that is 50 pence in today's money or a 21,566 % price rise in 38 years. If we look at the average UK wage in 1973 as being £38.10 then the average wage in the UK today would be £819,508.

Crisis what crisis? We are on the Titanic and we are not about to hit the iceberg we have already hit it.

Hang on it may be a bumpy year.

A few bad jokes

A few bad jokes but not quite as bad as those in Christmas crackers...

It was Thursday and the Booblie Oobulie bird was sitting in his favourite tree when he spied a Boa Constrictor passing by. "That's a big worm" he thought "I'll have that for my tea!" He flew down and tried to attack the snake, which crushed him and swallowed him whole.

The moral of this story is ambition can be a good thing but an over estimation of your abilities can get you in trouble.

...Or maybe "He should have gone to Specsavers."

I was in a bar the other night waiting for my pal Louis when a short wrinkled guy came in wearing a Parka. As we stood at the bar waiting to be served he told me he was an Eskimo. His name was near impossible to pronounce but said "Everyone calls me Ig." Just then my friend walked in and I was able to introduce them. "Ig, Lou!" I announced.

An officious looking man walked up to a woman who was breast feeding. "Mrs Walker" he said "I know breast is best but you cannot feed your son here." "But" she protested "that woman is feeding her baby." "Yes Mrs Walker" said the man "but Johnny is 25 and you are freaking out the other passengers on the bus."

The Scandal of Unsorted the Mail

Great Britain already has one of the most expensive postal systems in the world particularly when one takes in to account income levels. Royal Mail continues to deny that fact by saying stamp prices for letters weighing up to 100g are among the lowest in Europe. The price of a first-class stamp will rise by 5p to 46p in April and a second-class stamp will cost 36p, an increase of 4p. Posting a large letter will also become more expensive, 75p ,up 9p, for first-class and 58p, up 7p, for second-class mail.

Why the hell do we even have a second class service when sending a first class letter to an address in the same town can take over a week? Personally I have been keeping track of my mail and I very rarely get mail other than on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I may get some mail on Fridays but until this week I have not had anything on Monday or Saturday since forever. So imagine my surprise when I was woken a 08:30 on Sunday morning by a Royal Mail delivery, it was a parcel that needed signing for.

So why is Royal Mail so crap? There may be a clue in the conversation I had with a postal worker the other day. This chap told me he is working overtime doing extra rounds. "Some off the guys are going out three times a day" he said "but my bag is not even half full because no-one is being given overtime on the sorting side." Apparently the sorting office is floor to celling but there is little or no sorting going on. It is not just the Christmas post that has caused this. I was told that the condition has been like that for months. For anyone familiar with the TV adaption of Terry Pratchett's book 'Going Postal' the Royal Mail is rapidly becoming the Ankh Morpork Post Office, but Royal Mail has no Moist von Lipwig to pull them out of their rapidly spiralling swan dive in service.

The latest news is Royal Mail had announced they are to commence evening deliveries to try to catch up with the backlog caused, they say, by the bad weather. So now not content at waking me up on a Sunday morning they want to disturb my evenings tucked up by the fire too. I am sure the postmen and women are looking forward to working sixteen hour shifts as well.

There is one good side to the price rises; Direct mail services are facing price rises of up to 19%. Hopefully that will cut the crap coming through our mail boxes. Why do I get half a dozen mail shots a week from Sky television when I have it already? How the heck can a local Indian Restaurant afford to send me their menu three times a week? Never mind recycling to save a tree, if we banned direct mail services we could save a whole forest every week. If the postal workers did not have to deliver this junk we might have a postal service that works and one we did not mind paying for.