Friday 30 January 2009

2009 and all that

So let's see if I do any better with regular posts to my blog this year than I did last year. (The road to hell is paved .... etc)

So to start 2009, a post which rambles across a few topics but ultimately is about the power of the Web for sharing of Knowledge.

I have been affected by the cold winds blowing in the retail sector. Empire Direct has gone into administration taking some of my money with it. I paid by credit card, so I can reclaim from the credit card company. In fairness to them, they've been very good in handling it so far. Provided you get to talk to a person. And there's the rub. You know how it goes... "For another menu option, press 1; to listen to dreadful music, press 2; to talk to a person, you're SOL (an acronym I picked up from some American colleagues the polite form of which is 'Sadly Outta Luck'). Well I did eventually get through to a human, and they were very helpful.
Then yesterday, while browsing some blog posts (like you do) that came up in my RSS aggregator I came across one which mentioned a website called get2human.com. The beauty of this site is that it tells you the number to call and the appropriate key presses to reach a human for a range of organisations. And, of course, anyone can submit entries to the database. Very useful knowledge shared, I think. I'll add it to my list of useful websites right next to saynoto0870.com and fixmystreet.com