Rupert Murdoch can suck my ass, LL swear police and I am a twittering little bitch
2009-08-04
Right, first off, quick update. I've just returned from my holidays driving down to Barcelona and back via a bunch of campsites in France. I will post a proper entry detailing my adventures. Annoyingly, the french people were very friendly... Great for the holiday, rubbish for my whingy little blog. Might be a column about how awesome France is... YAWN.
I will also have a proper whinge about a Manchester summer. What I won't be writing is a part two to the Switzerland trip as promised, simply because I don't feel like giving those cuckoo clock making motherfuckers another ounce of my brainy thinkjuice.
You will also be getting my two latest LeftLion columns sent directly to your inbox. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the first one. I included some stuff about becoming a citizen of this country, much of which you will have already read. The second one on Skegness is better (in my humble opinion).
In case you haven't noticed, LL have decided to get all respectable and shit so there is no more profanity in my column. Which is cool, I'm happy they are going for a bigger audience, maybe one day they will make enough money to actually pay me. However, it's interesting to see what words make it through and which ones get stopped.
The obvious ones are no goes (fuck, cunt, shit etc), but they go even further by cutting out piss, bastard and even dick which hamstrings me a bit, I must say. It sucks, because one of my favourite lines ever describing Skegness as a "veritable cornucopia of eyeshit" was changed to "eyesores". I can't even say "c-word"... no, not "cunt", but "c-word", they replaced it in my last column with "swear word". Oddly, "fook" and "effed up" are ok. Most of the bad words were put back in the columns on my site.
Anyway, I had a right horrible time with Sky digital who decided to charge me for their services seven months after cancelling. I would go into a rant here, but I actually did my first proper British thing... I wrote a letter to complain (which I've included below). I even got all highhorsey and mincy and threatened to "write about this in my column!" I'm sure they were shitting themselves.
I didn't get the free Sky Sports for life like I asked, but the money was put back into my account tout suite. GO POSTAL SERVICE GO
One final thing, I am now on twitter. @Canuckilimey if you want to follow me. It will probably be all about nice dumps I've had.
Enjoy
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Hi,
My name is Rob Cutforth and I am writing to tell you about my dealings with Sky Digital.
Let me start by saying I was a (very satisfied and happy) Sky subscriber for three years before I cancelled my account last October. At the time, when the customer service person asked me why I was cancelling, I said it was because I was moving to Manchester from Nottingham and I would be living with the current tennants (our friends) for a couple months who had already had Freeview installed. I mentioned that once they'd moved out, I'd hook Sky back up.
It will be a frosty day in hell before I do that now.
Two months later I noticed that Sky was still billing me. "Oh well", I thought to myself, these things happen. I called customer service (at my expense, don't get me started...) and was assured that they would stop billing and refund me the money. A month or so later I noticed I was STILL getting billed so I called again (at my expense again) and was told that it had not stopped because of "a technical error". Fine. I was fairly agitated at this point, but he had spotted the error and assured me I'd be getting my money back again.
Fast forward to this April. After numerous calls and assurances I noticed that I was STILL getting billed. I called Sky AGAIN for the umpteenth time where I was told that you HAD stopped billing back in October by a Scottish man called "Gordon". If it were possible to wring a person's neck through the phone, poor little Gordon would've been no more. Luckily for him technology has not moved on that far and he corrected himself quickly saying that it was indeed Sky's error and that you were in fact still billing me.
Gordon was the first person I had spoken to who'd actually apologised. In fact, he practically fell over himself apologising to me. He even went so far as to say "This is a disgrace" , "I will make it my mission to get this sorted" and "this will be fixed, not tomorrow, but TODAY". Maybe it's because he cast some ancient Celtic spell on me or perhaps it was the two pints I had at lunch prior to my call, but either way, I, like a complete and utter moron believed him.
Guess what? It's now May and I have been billed again! I love paying for things I don't use, it's the best.
This is what needs to happen to avoid a letter to Ofcom:
- Another apology
- A stop to the monthly billing
- A refund of all the money you've taken from me since last October
- A refund for all the phone calls I've had to make.
If you're feeling generous, Free Sky Sports (1 and 2) for LIFE might go some way to winning me back (It might even stop me from writing about this in my column), but I doubt it. Lord knows it would probably be more trouble than it is worth anyway.
My address in Nottingham was:
[REMOVED]
My address now in Manchester is:
[REMOVED]
I don't have the account number anymore (I may have mentioned it's been 7 months since I cancelled), but you should be able to find my account (and hopefully notes from all the customer service people I have dealt with) with one of those addresses.
I can also be reached at this email address or on [REMOVED]. I trust you will deal with this promptly.
Thank you.
Rob Cutforth