A frugal life is an easy life!

A typical scenario, I believe, is happening everyday in the UK:

• Customer has a fault with equipment and/or a service
• Customer rings company to report it and have it repaired
• Company promise an engineer will be sent out to correct the fault
• Customer sits in the house all day, which involves loss of earnings or inconvenienced as regards time
• Company engineer does not turn up
• Customer rings up company the next day and gets, "I can only apologise" then company rebooks the appointment
• Customer has another day of lost earnings, time, etc.
• MAYBE, the company turn up to fix the fault, but not always

It is a disgrace that when a customer reports a fault, should the engineer not be able to find a fault or blames (incorrectly or not) other factors, the customer must then pay a "call out fee"

At present, British Telecom charge their customers £99, should an engineer not be able to determine a fault, per visit to a customer's property!
Sky TV fitters charge a call out fee as well.

THIS NEEDS TO BE STOPPED AND STOPPED NOW!

Eon (Yes them again) had a fault with our electricity meter reported.
Despite claims by the company that they do not recover debt from pre payment customers, who have no debt, our meter clearly displays that £1.05 per week is being taken from our pre paid credit, to pay for a debt that doesn't exist.

Yesterday, their "advisor" (I use that term loosely) informed me that this should be cleared off the meter when an engineer visits to correct the emergency credit fault.
"Don't worry sir, once the engineer has fixed the problem, the debt recovery on the meter will be reduced to nil and then we will be in touch as regards a refund for you."

All day we sat in and waited, as time ticked away and passed the 8pm cut off time for repairs. No engineer came.

Today when I rang them, the advisor states, "There was no appointment booked for an engineer to visit your home!"
After checking the account notes, there is nothing on the notes for yesterday's call regarding the £1.05 per week being taken off the meter, or even looked at with a view to a refund being issued.
"An appointment was booked, but this was cancelled by our office and this was relayed back to the advisor who you spoke with and they should have notified you that an engineer would not be calling."

"I can only apologise for this," said the advisor,
"No, I do not want your apology, I want reimbursing for a days earnings that we have lost due to your incompetance!" I replied.

"Sorry sir, we do not offer that!" I hung up in disgust.

How many more people are going to lose money because of companies who fail to turn up when booked to do so?
How many more times must the customer take any losses on the chin, money lost from the family pot?
How many more times are rules/laws only going to benefit companies?
How much longer before customers are at last, be entitled to some financial reimbursement for a company's failings?

Good customer service and equal rights for both parties go hand in hand.
If a customer has to be paid when a company do not turn up at a customer's home to fix a fault, just watch the customer service improve and the number of times a company fail to turn up will drop dramatically, overnight!

I cannot be the only customer that has been left out of pocket because of this?

Have you ever tried to send a picture message (or MMS) to the USA?

I sent one the other day, to a friend in New York, all they received was a text message, telling them to visit the o2 website to collect the picture.

So, as I was sorting out my contract with o2, I asked them why a picture could not be received.

• My o2 phone settings are working correctly
• Their cell phone/mobile phone settings are fine, as they can receive pictures and MMS from vodafone and orange networks
• There are no other reported problems.

Here is o2's explaination:

"The problem must be with the servers in America, not being set up to receive o2 picture messages!
The problem is nothing to do with o2 as our servers are sending the pictures out, as they are receiving a text message."

When I questioned this account of the problem, the o2 advisor denied that o2 were to blame.
O2, like every other mobile phone operator, have agreements with mobile phone companies in other countries. In effect, they hire foreign mobile phone operator's network.
It is obvious because other UK mobile networks operators can send pictures on my friend's network in America, the fact that o2 cannot, suggests they are not willing to pay this same network in America, to enable UK customers to send MMS or picture messaging.

MMS or picture messaging sends more data than a standard text message, so will cost more. The cell phone receiving the picture message from the UK, receives a simple text message, pointing to where o2 has stored the image, on their own systems.
The regular text message shows that USA networks are set up to receive messages no problem, but for the picture to be blocked from being sent and stored on o2's own internet servers, shows that no agreement is in place.

The only reason no agreement is in place, is because o2 will not pay the fees the American network are demanding.

So no, I do not believe the o2 advisor, who blamed American networks for the problem.

I also think that o2 should be forced to state exactly how many other networks around the world, that they refuse to pay for their users to send pictures or MMS to.
This way, people are made aware of the limits of o2's service, BEFORE they sign up to a contract that can last upto 2 years!

Supermarket's make huge profits on the exploitation of their customers!
They know for example, that if winter's coming, that people will buy more heinz soup. Guess what happens in the run up to winter?
That's right, the price shoots up for no apparent reason.
Our Asda increased the prices of Heinz soups from just under 60p to 84p in the run up to winter.
So what does the customer do?

Well Supermarkets know that when presented with the new higher price, the customer may not like it, but they will still buy it as they imagine where else they can buy it from and then consider the inconvenience of going there to get it.

This is where the thrifty shopper escapes price hikes.
You can almost guarantee, that after a month or so of sales falling flat, an end of aisle offer appears, to boost sales and/or clear their stock.
The multi buy offer can, if used correctly, save you some money. Many of these multi saves can also cost you more!

RULE OF THUMB: MULTI PACK BUYS - Always calculate how much each individual item is costing you!

Four tins of Heinz beans for £2 sounds good - it is in a big dump bin - with big red POS (Point of sale) all over it - it has prime location in the aisle - but stop and think!
Prior to this "offer" the regular price for an individual tin was 37p.
Then the price of an individual tin went up to 54p.
Now it is back, in a prime location at 4 tins for £2

Compared to the current shelf price - you would save just 16p - not good value as you are taking 4 tins of the product (Buying in bulk is supposed to be alot cheaper!)
Compared to the former shelf price - you are actually paying 52p more for your 4 tins!
The individual price of a tin of Heinz beans in this "special offer" is of course, 50p per tin, not good value when compared with the former shelf price is it!

On the other hand - I have about 20 tins of various flavours of Heinz soup in the cupboard.
Once increased in price to 82p per tin (from 58p per tin if memory serves me correctly), they remained this price right through the Christmas run up and after in the cold weather, I stopped buying them. I also didn't fall for the "own brand" soups at 2p cheaper than the over inflated price of the Heinz tins!
Having lots of stock, the offer was not long in coming just as I thought.
5 tins for £2 was the offer - at 40p per tin, 18p per tin LESS than the old regular shelf price, I'll have some of that!
So I stocked up on the various flavours.

The offer lasted about 10 days, as quick as it came on, it was taken off.
The price of an individual tin now is being advertised as a "rollback" at 74p - but this is 16p per tin MORE than the regular shelf price was before winter - not good value at all!
I now walk past the area where they are, with a little smugness - I bought those same tins from their shop at 40p each, everyone else who cannot resist the urge to pick up a tin or two, are now paying a staggering 34p per tin MORE than I did - and it is the same stock on the shelf as they had weeks earlier!

GOLDEN RULES OF SUPERMARKET SHOPPING:

1. DO NOT assume that a "Multi pack" buy is good value - work out the individual price per item - surely if you are buying 4 of an item it should save you more than 16p?
2. RESIST THE URGE to pick up a product that you know is over priced - if you have to go without it for the next couple of weeks, then do so. Don't be forced into paying over the odds for a product just because it is something you normally buy.
3. WATCH THE PRICES and wait - if the price increases then sales will fall and in a month or two weeks later expect a "sale" to start - especially if it is a popular seller.
4. DON'T FALL FOR THE "OWN BRAND" TRICK - supermarket's own brands used to be very cheap alternatives and therefore good value. This has not been the case for many years now, the branded product is artificially high in price and the "own brand" is then reduced to just a few pence below the artificially high branded product price. This is because the "own brand" profit made for the supermarket, is considerably higher on it's "own brand" products.
5. KEEP WATCHING PRICES of things you buy regularly every week or so. Even if you don't need them one week, make a note of the price.
6. IF YOU FIND A GOOD DEAL on the price you pay for the items you would normally buy, then stock up, keep in mind any sell by dates though.

When you walk into a supermarket, you are at the risk of a multi million pound business, who have spent millions on exploiting the shopping habits of their customers to make profit!
You can expect products at premium locations in aisles, varying prices to try and catch you out, etc, all to persuade you to buy things you would normally never buy.
Even warming up bread and wafting the smell around the store and locating it is done to influence your decisions on what you buy.

Put your cynical head on and be aggressive in resisting all their marketing attacks!

The purpose of any media player, is to play media, DVD,CD, MP3, etc, all on your computer, easily, quickly and error free.
So why are there so many problems and issues with windows media player?

Mrs frugal has a laptop, she uses it rarely, but on occasion she likes to surf the internet and listen to her music and watch a DVD if others in the house are busy with something.
Today, her latest work out DVD landed, so on goes the laptop, it had not been used for a while, so I logged onto windows updates for her and downloaded and installed more than 120 security and updates, so she was safe to browse the net.

Amongst those updates, was the update to install windows media player 11.

All complete, she restarted her computer and placed her DVD in the drive ready to watch and burn?
Then up comes the windows media player 11 error message: "Windows media player cannot play the DVD as there is a problem with your decoder, DVD drive and video card. Try downloading new drivers for your video card to resolve the fault" - How helpful... NOT!

Like many people, Mrs frugal is as likely to know how to do this, as she is likely to know how to milk a cow.
Her computer came over to me, along with various mild insults and stories of bad luck "always happening to me!"
Now windows is always stressing the importance of only running files from a trusted source and keep upto date with security.
So my first port of call was the microsoft website. After looking through various lists to "troubleshoot" problems with various versions of media player, none of which dealt with our problem, (why do they sell programs that are fundamentally flawed?) I reached for google.

Amongst the list of links to our problem, was a website that had exactly the same problem, listing updated codec files (suggesting this to Mrs frugal would have got me a smack in the chops) I verified the link before downloading the file... not good, it linked to another website of a dubious nature, so I gave up without downloading.

After 30 minutes of messing around reading rubbish and angrily shouting abuse at the microsoft website, I reached for a trusted and never failing alternative, VLC media player.
First rule, get a program from a trusted source, so downloads.com was visited and VLC was typed in their search bar.

It is an open source player, which is free to use, to date has been downloaded more than 19 MILLION times from the site.
Downloaded and installed in 3 minutes, Mrs frugal was happy as she could now watch her exercise DVD with ease and no messing about!
So good is the VLC player, I have linked it to this post and will put up a link in the sidebar and over at our LINKS section for you.

Windows media player failing to work is an example of why I like Rhod Gilbert's work so much, he simply asks the question, why does everything have to be so complicated?
A global company, microsoft,  employing vast numbers of staff and people who tells us all how good they are, yet their simple products fail when trying to do the basics is not good at all.

At the age of 17, I was diagnosed as a migraine sufferer.
This meant that after a few serious headaches in the previous 3 or 4 years, I finally had an explanation about what was happening to me, each time I was knocked off my feet for three days at a time.
I had been putting it down to after effects of too many late nights or as a result of drinking alcohol, which I am still not overly keen on today.

Mother nature stopped me in my tracks (as it so often does when the human body is neglected) with a migraine so bad, I honestly thought I was having a heart attack and frightened me so much, I immediately stopped making excuses for them and sought help.
After having pins and needles in my tongue (I kid you not!) for about half an hour, moving to my lips, the pins and needles stopped. Five minutes later the fingers in one hand started to get pins and needles and then went numb as the pins and needles moved their way up my left arm.
Right upto my shoulder they went, then the pain vanished.
About two minutes later, I started getting spots in my vision and then the worst feeling in the world for me, a weird vision, where I could only see a narrow "tunnel" right ahead, everything to either side of me could not be seen out of the corners of my eyes.
This lasted about 20 minutes, swilling my face, etc, did nothing to relieve it, I just have to ride it out.
Then...... nothing!
The relief is great, but as I know now, it's a false dawn. Then I start going white as a sheet and feeling sick, after a bit of vomiting, as I start to settle down and stop throwing up, everything goes calm, then BANG!
Like an explosion in my head, a headache of such ferocity that the only place I can get any peace, is a pitch black room (or under the covers) and pray that I can forget about the pain just long enough to fall asleep.

I have on two occasions, had the worst symptom, speech that makes no sense, I know what I am trying to say, but it comes out all jumbled up and total jibberish (More so than normal thanks).

Symptoms that migraine sufferers have, vary, as do the occasions when they hit a person. Some have one once every couple of years, but it is a bad one. Others have them after certain foods or drinks, that act like a trigger. Some, like me, have them three or four times a year.

Luckily, a sympathetic doctor I have, spotted the signs straight away, tried several types of medicine, until we found one that worked for me (apparently, some pain killers will not work for some people?) so that now when the pins and needles or blurred vision starts, if I take tablets and go to bed and sleep for a few hours, it reduces the length of time I have it and I don't get most of the symptoms.
So imagine my complete horror, on Sunday when I was having a nice relaxing day off, when the symptoms started.
My one day off and I start with the dreaded migraine.

Tablets taken, I retreat to my bed. Hours later, very sore head, pain killers having little effect.
So bad is it, that through Monday and Tuesday the back of my head and neck/shoulders feel like they are broken.
After a visit to the doctors on Wednesday, I find that I have not one but two infections. One in the ear and one in my sinus' these have been giving me migraines of varying levels over the past four days!

So if you know someone who suffers with migraines, please do not ridicule them - as I used to do - they effect people in different ways and can be extreme. When a migraine strikes, there is not a thing you can do about it!