AMLinington

If you haven't already, the 'The Hating Game' by Sally Thorne. GREAT read.

Last time I got one of the 'Microsoft Scammers', I challenged him (as per @witch's comment above) and he launched into a tirade of abuse - calling me an 'Infidel W***e' and threatening to send people to rape me. I tried to hang up, but he kept the line open so the call wouldn't terminate. Every time I tried to call out to my phone company he'd be there on the other end laughing and saying foul, abusive things. In the end I unplugged the phones from the wall and called my phone company from my mobile phone. I was in the middle of a bad episode with my depression and anxiety and I was an absolute wreck. I was shaking and retching. The things he said - how he wanted to slit my throat, how they knew where I lived and how I deserved to be raped, how he was going to call me every hour, on the hour, all night. I called the police, but because it came from 'abroad' there was nothing they could do. My phone company immediately shut down our phone line and changed our number, but that didn't change the effect this had on me. So I'm afraid I have very little patience for dealing with ANY kind of unsolicited calls. Even now, none of my phones accept calls from withheld or 'Out of Area' numbers which has caused problems - especially with interviews when recruitment companies call from a withheld number. So I find the default 'You have the wrong number' followed by me ending the call is the 'path of least resistance' so to speak. When I was a teenager, my parents had a massive problem with a double glazing company - 'Bow-water Zenith' (this was around the early 90's too so it was probably the same company as you) - they'd get 3 or 4 calls a NIGHT sometimes at stupid times like 1am. In the end my parents had to get a Solicitor involved (this was in the days before TPS and all that Jazz). These people would phone my parents at 1am and refuse to take no for an answer. They were aggressive and harassing. Sure, they are probably desperate people working a horrible job, but they CHOSE to treat my parents that way. I have no sympathy. In this day and age of easy access to resources, search engines and phone numbers, it seems almost obsolete to me to be cold calling people.

Free shredder for you then!

Answer the phone with "Greg's Sperm bank: You spank it, we bank it!" (Sorry if someone else posted this first - I can't remember where I saw it)

Agreed! I am looking forward to that glorious period in Spring and Autumn where the days are just long enough to be productive, but the weather is mild without being too hot, humid or miserable.

Oh yeah - the scent of coal fires and steam vehicles. AMAZEBALLS. I favour 'Claws on Kittehs' <3

I'll look into this - I have a habit of nibbling the corner of my ID card hanging on my (shiny new Edugeek) Lanyard, so it's worth a look. I bought a 'worry stone' in a gem shop and hung it from a pendant - that was fine for a while but I tended to chew the chain lol. I chipped a tooth. I already grind my teeth lol. My poor teeth go through the ringer.

On that subject, as someone who struggles with Depression and Anxiety, I'm always looking for things to occupy my nervous fingers. So when 'Fidget Spinners' were a thing, I bought some on Ebay - I think they came in sets of 2 and I bought 2 sets. They weren't very expensive, but when they arrived I discovered that the bearings spat out a load of grease when 'spun' and really they didn't do much for my anxiety - they are too bulky. Like your 'Fidget Cube', they have been consigned to a drawer and rarely see the light of day. I was thinking of getting a cube because I am still struggling to find something that just 'clicks' with my anxious fiddling. I'm terribly destructive - pen lid clips get broken, pencils get chewed, anything made of brittle plastic ends up shattered. I tend to bend or break things. I chew my pen lids until they crack. I've tried buying 'bendy people' and stretchy gel squeezers but they end up broken. I like the idea of those 'Bucky balls' but the smell of metal on my fingers would bother me. I have a couple of 'Tangle's but, like Fidget spinners, they aren't really 'working for me'. I'm currently resorting to hoarding those wooden coffee stirrers from Costa and chew the out of them instead of pencils. Can anyone recommend something I haven't tried? Although I think I'm always going to default back to 'chewing stuff' - I used to do it as a child and it's a habit I've never been able to break. I used to use Gum, but I'd go through SO MUCH gum it was ridiculous. Waaq waaahhhhhh...

So is using an incinerator - We set fire to some stuff we ripped out of the horrible old kitchen in our house. SO satisfying. BURN ALL THE THINGS!

The smell of new textbooks. The smell of WHSmith. That crisp feeling of opening a fresh new notebook where all the pages are clean and the corners sharp. The smell of Purell hand sanitiser. I've given myself a nosebleed snorting the fumes from this stuff. I love the smell so much! Laminating things.

No. I kinda love it. Fun fact: The Underground car park at Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth smells the same. Rubber and vehicle grease. I also love the smell of the Cork Grease you buy for woodwind instruments.

My default go-to answer for cold callers either on my home or mobile is "You have the wrong number" regardless of what they're selling. I don't get any calls at work because I'm not customer-facing. "Is this AMLinington?" "No, you have the wrong number." *Click* "I'm calling about a recent motor vehicle accident?/Have you been involved in an accident recently?" "No, you have the wrong number." *Click* "Ma'am I'm calling from BT. Your phone line is reporting a virus on your PC." "There are no computers here. You have the wrong number." *Click* Works easily 99% of the time.

A completely glass-flat, still Swimming pool. Being the one to break that stillness makes me feel... things. When you open a reward chest or loot a boss and get a Legendary. Or a Mount. (WoW nerd) Bright, crisp, sunny days and a freshly bashed Piste. The neat lines of combed snow.... That squeaky feel of fresh powder under your skis. The rubber-and-oil scent of the London Underground.... I know; I'm weird.

I GOT A LANYARD! I FINALLY GOT A LANYARD!!!!! Admittedly I wasn't able to make it to BETT myself, so my friend picked me one up (I've been trying to recruit colleagues to Edugeek so I pointed her in your direction). She also gave me some of the (VIOLENTLY LUMINOUS) postits! Hopefully I might be able to convince people to let me go next year.... We'll see....

Everyone bought my Nephew a bunch of noisy V-Tech toys for xmas but as far as I know none of them are registered or have any kind of sign on. They just sing stupid songs and make a bunch of noise. Although he has one thing which I don't think is V-Tech but my Sister calls it 'Beep-bo' which is a singing and dancing Robot thing with a 'record your own phrase' function - 'record something and I'll sing it back to you' he proclaims innocently..... MUCH hilarity ensued when we recorded swear words and a certain Detective McClane's favourite catchphrase for Beep-Bo to 'sing back to us'.... LOL Kids toys CAN be fun....

Our local hospital The already-pretty-dire Queen Alexandra issued a warning to steer clear of casualty over Xmas due to excessive demand for emergency services... A couple of my Facebook friends have been ill. I had a snotty cold all over Christmas but nothing bad enough to be a flu of any kind. I gave my cold to LeHusband who promptly went down with a chest infection and is now complaining that his 'bones hurt' but I think that's just because he likes to pretend he's not a man-baby but really he totally is when it comes to coughs and colds. I'm hoping to avoid anything too serious - I've already had a bunch of sick leave when my back went and can't really afford to be hassled about MORE.

I'm a weirdo - I actually prefer the 'diet' flavours of certain fizzy drinks - Diet Coke, Diet Cherry Coke (I LOVE this but HATE 'Fat' Cherry Coke) and Diet Irn Bru. But having recently begun suffering with episodes of acute pain due to chronic gastritis, I have discovered I can no longer drink carbonated drinks without ending up in intense pain. So I've been drinking the Suger-Free Volvic flavoured waters instead.... The Chinese supermarket across the road from work sells the most delicious fruit juice drinks - Lychee or Peach with cubes of Nata de Coco in them but they not sugar-free so they are an occasional treat. I have also found that since we bought a fridge with a water dispenser I've drunk more chilled water (we fill it with mineral water to avoid Algae and nasty pink limescale from the horrible water that comes out of our tap) than ever before.

Ioan Gryfford. Star of Hornblower. Which was honestly a shame. I really enjoyed it. To clarify, Ioan Gryfford's character couldn't travel through time - he became immortal when someone tried to kill him in the 1800's on a slave ship. Whenever he 'dies' he ends up in the nearest body of water (in the series, it's the Thames - how an eternal cycle of dysentery didn't kill him off I'll never know). The old man he runs his shop with is his adopted son - a Jewish orphan of the concentration camps of WWII (I believe). I personally loved it and was disappointed when it was cancelled.

LOL Same here. Another thing I LOATHE is when they can't give you a better deal, so they start telling you how rubbish the competitor is. That usually results in me telling them where to go. I hate dirty tricks like that.

I can give you some context for the changes you noticed in support. When I joined the business there were 6 of us in the office. We had relatively few calls per day and so we were able to spend a lot of time on detailed diagnoses. But as the business grew and brought more and more customers on board, we struggled to stay on top of the sheer number of calls we'd get. At this point we were up to something like 10-12 engineers. Now previously we hadn't minded overmuch that customers basically didn't bother to troubleshoot their own issues before calling us, because we had the time and capability. But as more and more customers rang in for simple issues they should have been diagnosing themselves (like issues with their network that were not product-related) we reached the point where we spent more time supporting customers' network setups than actually supporting the product itself. Every minute we spend on the phone costs the business money, so they brought in 'Triage Engineers' which cost the business less than wasting highly skilled 2nd and 3rd line resource on non-product-related calls. So really, you (the customer base at large) really only had yourselves to blame for the decline in support because far too many people made that knee-jerk call to Smoothwall Support because 'teh intertubes r be borked' rather than actually checking their own kit - their switches, DNS, Subnet masks and group policies - I spent 4 hours combing through a customer's Domain controller once because their GROUP POLICY was broken - it had nothing to do with the product at all, but the customer insisted that anything 'internet related' had to be 'Smoothwall's fault'. So Triage engineers were brought in to solve the 'common issues' leaving the engineers with more technical skills to be available for complex network diagnoses. But the problem with this is that all this extra stuff cost money and the original price for the product didn't factor in support costs AT ALL. Smoothwall basically gave customers 'Free support' until it got abused to the point where Support was causing the business to LOSE money. THEN they had to start factoring the cost of support into the product and 'support contracts' and the price of the product rocketed. So it wasn't that they 'suddenly increased the price for no reason', it was because customers abused what was essentially 'Free' support to the point where the business couldn't sustain the loss. I'm certainly no advocate for the company after what they did to me, but as someone who is not an employee, I can tell it how it is, and I can reflect on my own experiences.

Oh I have a fair idea tbh... Around about the time they cared more about Quantity over Quality...

As a former employee of Smoothwall who was unceremoniously dumped, I can't help but take a tiny amount of sadistic glee in posting this in the main forum (it's posted in Direct Support). So it seems that Smoothwall are now dumping their ENTIRE Fareham Development and Support office and 'moving technical operations to Leeds'. I cannot stress strongly enough that ALL the information I have is that which is publicly available via these two links (I am also amused by the fact that their so-called Head of Marketing can't even spell 'Restructuring' correctly....): Global security firm Smoothwall announces plans to cut 45 jobs in Fareham | Daily Echo https://uk.smoothwall.com/restructing-future-growth/ Heh - 'Restructing' Heh. FAIL! As is usual for redundancy, I expect they've all been sworn to secrecy - Non-disclosure tends to be pretty standard in cases like this - I've seen it a few times now. So I don't expect anyone is actually allowed to talk about it beyond the 'Marketing approved' statement. Poor spelling and all.... As someone who has been in the IT industry for over a decade and seen this kind of thing at multiple businesses, and as a pessimist, my money is on 'OUTSOURCING'. It seems all the support engineers you know and love are going (unless they fancy moving to Leeds ofc?) and a whole new bunch of people are coming in. A bunch of people who probably won't know you guys and who will probably be instructed not to do all the above-and-beyond stuff we used to do for those of you who didn't troubleshoot your own networks before calling into the support line... (Again, I stress this is my OPINION, NOT FACT - I am free to speculate regardless of how wrong I might be, and I'm probably wrong, but I honestly don't hold my breath for good news when an ENTIRE OFFICE is made redundant...) But yeah, I bet the Chief Exec gets to keep HIS job. So Merry Christmas to our loyal staff from Smoothwall - here's your redundancy... It's an awful move to announce redundancy just before Christmas and my thoughts are with my friends and former colleagues at this difficult time. If anyone of you based down this way want developers or skilled support engineers, there are a bunch going to be available in the not too distant future....

The focus kept blurring on the right hand side, too. Stop motion perhaps?

I'm not sure how I feel about this - the Yellow Pages has been a household staple for decades, but it's been getting smaller and smaller in recent years and now when it lands on my doorstep I feel really guilty. It's silly but I kind of feel sorry for it - it rarely even gets taken out of the plastic bag, or if it does, it's so I can put it straight in the recycle bin.

Sounds like the Ice Cream vendors are fishing for an excuse for their declining sales so they don't have to acknowledge that the real reasons are because a) they hike prices during heat waves to capitalise on a desperate, captive market, b) they never stay in one place long enough for anyone to actually find them (*See : The Phantom Ice Cream Van of Rowner - I'll explain below) and c) enticing children to come out of their houses and flock to their skeevy vans isn't exactly a stellar business model. Just sayin.... So what is 'The Phantom Ice Cream Van of Rowner' I hear you ask? Well... I can't describe it because I've never actually seen it. We live near the corner of a 'main' throughfare. In summer we hear the peel of Ice Cream Van jingles ring out across our gardens. But no-one I speak to has ever actually SEEN this van. We don't know where it stops or what route it drives but not a single person has ever actually seen it. You'd think it would stop on this corner, right opposite a school, where there is a layby wouldn't you? Alas no. We are doomed to forever hear the torturous herald of tasty Ice-cream-y goodness without ever laying eyes on it.