Ok, I guess you could just search for them individually, but I’m too lazy to do that. Instead, go here.

There’s quite an impressive list to choose from, I wonder if Youtube will take them down?

Over at the Gnome’s Lair, there’s a sweet article on a game that quite frankly, should not be made. The scamps even have a home page where you can download a demo of this excellent-yet-should-be-forbidden side scroller. Gnome’s got the round-up, so you should head over there, but I’ll just point out that according to the most reliable source of information on the internet, that er.. wiki thing (no not wikipedia, the other one), Ninjas hate Pirates, didn’t you kids learn anything in history class?

So we finally got a working ADSL line and an ADSL modem. Shame we ordered two, but I consider us lucky. We’ve managed to cancel the (non-existent) broadband on one line, but still have to cancel the phone line itself.

Our account manager, Sophie Vickery of BT Local Business Newbury, is quite possibly the worst account manager I’ve ever met. Sophie has been confrontational, defensive, innefectual or incompetent and actually hung up on me at one point. Needless to say, I was being my usual diplomatic self at the time.

We had a working line with working DSL and a working DSL modem. I called Sophie to tell her we wanted to cut our losses and cancel the other line. Sophie wasn’t happy. She told me the only way we could cancel it and get our money back was to register a complaint, which I asked her to do, and she then slammed the phone down before I could ask her about the process.

I e-mailed her and her boss about the fact that I wasn’t particularly happy with the fact that she’d hung up (one of my colleagues heard it from the other side of the office). She wrote a bizarre response informing me that she was 33 and didn’t behave that way. Then she told me that she was sorry I thought she put the phone down on me. Way to go, they obviously teach people conflict/dispute management well at the BT Local Business Clown College. She also said she’d raise a complaint. This was on the 11th of August. We never heard from Sophie again.

Maybe she’d gone into hiding, Salman Rushdie style. Maybe she’d gone on a special commando mission to cancel our line for us and get us a refund.

Alas it was not the case. We got a bill for the broadband we never had, so I rang up BT. 4 hours and 8 phone calls later to different departments I found someone within BT Broadband who could cancel our broadband, but not the phone line. Each department I’d spoken to informed me that no complaint or request had been raised, that there was no note on the account to cancel anything.

Now I know what Sophie Vickery of BT Local Business Newbury did. She sat on her backside. She must have learnt that at Clown College too.

So we have a broadband connection going down – next week I’m going to try for the phone line too. I just need to clear another 4 hours to get round to it. Ho Hum.

Of course all of this has been intensely stressful, but whilst I was on hold, some prose popped into my warped and fragile little mind. I thought I’d share it below.

Oh Sophie Vickery
What is this trickery?
Why are you a cl*t to me?
When you’re not being slippery

It’s not very good, but it’s strangely theraputic when sung in time to the hold music.