Silicon Heaven and Body Odour

Well I made a piss-poor attempt at NaBloPoMo. If you were waiting with baited breath for my uninteresting ramblings then I can only apologise.

I’m gonna have another crack at writing more often on here. My life has settled down into something resembling normality following the hectic-ness of organising a wedding (more about that in a moment) followed by Christmas and a well-deserved break on Honeymoon in a remote cottage in Devon.

And then a couple of weeks ago, I also finally got a fully functioning internet connection at home. After months of intermittent service and intermittent complaining to Tiscali, it turned out not to be my ISP’s fault. Rather it was my own fault. After years of being kicked from the socket and knocked from it’s desk the many times, my modem had finally gone to meet it’s maker in silicon heaven (it’s where all the calculators go). So armed with a replacement I was forced to phone Tiscali and ask them to ramp up my speed again (they’d slowed it to snail’s pace in order to try and identify the problem on the line), and voilà! I’m on line again.

So the wedding, I suppose I should say something about that, it is after all, a pretty unique day. I probably could have dedicated an entire blog to the stress and shenanigans involved in organising a wedding. Everything went pretty well though, the only thing we had to complain about was the incredibly bad B.O. of our driver. It really was bloody disgusting.

Rude Companies

A and I are getting married later this year. It's not going to be a massively lavish do, but with all our friends there it's gonna be one pretty sweet party.

Given there are more than 6 months to go, we are pretty organised too; we've booked the church, hall & caterers, A has found her dream dress under budget (best not to ask what the budget was though!) and I have nearly nailed down the bestest student band in the world to play at the reception.

Hopefully it's plain sailing all the way now. Just filling in around the edges, if you will. So last week my job was to try and find a company to set up and run a bar at the venue.

A and I are both fans of real ale and we had hoped to have one of the local breweries run the bar for us, so that we could show off the best local ales to our guests. So imagine my joy when walking home from the station last week I spotted an Abbey Ales van driving through Bath, with the slogan "Mobile Bars - We Bring The Beer To You" (or something to that effect) written on the side. Woo Hoo - I'm in luck here, and I don't even need to dig out the yellow pages.

Next day I rattled off an e-mail with my details asking how much they charge for their services. Hoping that all breweries ran the same service I also fired off an enquiry to Bath Ales, who, in my humble opinion brew superior beers to Abbey ales, and would be my first choice beverage provider.

Two days past and I heard nothing. So I consulted the yellow pages and fired off e-mails to four more companies, this time specialists in providing bars at, what would otherwise be, dry social events.

That was last Thursday, and I've heard diddly-squat from them too.

Six companies; none of whom have even the courtesy to e-mail me back and say "Sorry we can't help you". How do businesses survive if they don't even reply to enquiries from people offering to pay for their services?

I know you always get a much more satisfactory answer from actually phoning people and speaking to them, as e-mails are very easy to ignore, but this is the 21st century, people expect to get replies to e-mails. It's just rude not to.

Pictures from flickr.com