Premium Bonds

I’ve owned Premium Bonds for many years and always thought of them as a way to have a little flutter without loosing my shirt. Over the years I’ve invested quite a sum of money, always thinking that the more I own the greater chance I have of winning the jackpot, or one of the smaller prizes. I mean £10,000 would do me just fine, tax-free, I’m not greedy. A couple of years ago I set-up a standing order so that I bought £50 worth each month. Obviously this was just money that wouldn’t end up in my savings account. Recently I had started to think about stopping the standing order and cashing some of them in. Only because I ended up with more money in Premium Bonds than I had in accessible cash. Also I did wonder whether they were worth it.

On Wednesday I received the weekly ‘Martin’s Money Tips’ e-mail and the top headline was ‘Premium Bonds: are they worth it?‘. What Martin says is that for someone like me, a basic rate taxpayer, I would be much better off investing in a good savings account than investing in premium bonds. It’s just that people would much rather have a chance of winning big than earning interest on savings each month.

So, last night I filled in the form, you have to ask for this at the Post Office, to cash in the majority of my bonds. Of course I checked the box which says that you want to sell them after the next draw… it would just be my luck to miss out on a big win.

Freeview

Yesterday I thought that I would check out the new ‘five Life’ digital channel. Ellen DeGeneres has a talk show in the US that I had seen clips of and ‘five Life’ were showing two shows back to back from 4:00pm. The Sony TV that I have has an integrated tuner which needed updating to receive the new channels. I’ve done this before, it just takes awhile for the set to find all the channels that are available to it. This all ran through fine and the picture returned. I selected channel 36 with the remote but the station wasn’t tuned in. Bugger. So I thought that I’d leave it and do some investigating later. I then tried to select BBC News 24, the only ‘extra’ digital channel that I watch, and it wasn’t on channel 80. Double bugger, because I hadn’t made a note of the channel and service numbers so that I could tune it back manually.

The rest of the evening was spent trawling the internet trying to find these elusive numbers for my region. I couldn’t find them. I had already tried switching the set off on the wall for 10 minutes, switching it on with the aerial unplugged, doing the auto-tune to clear out the stations, switching the set off again for 10 minutes without power, plugging the aerial in and doing another auto-tune… all to no avail.

Channel 80 was listing some channel called ’smileTV’ which is only broadcast between 1am and 5am. Brilliant just what I need. I wouldn’t mind but BBC News 24 worked perfectly at lunchtime. I even dug the User Guide out (RTFM right?) to see if I was missing something. No luck.

This morning I phoned the Sony support line. The only thing that they could suggest was that the signal may have been quite weak last night when I was running the auto-tune and that I should keep trying it. They also gave me the phone number for Freeview, which I didn’t use.

This evening I had a walk around to the shop that I bought the set from. I told the guy in the store what had happened and he looked as if this wasn’t the first time a customer had asked about this today. He’s probably gone through this hundreds of times recently.

It seems that the Freeview channels have jumped from being just a plain 2 digit number to being a 3 digit number. This of course screws up the older sets, like mine, that only have room for 99 channels. He said luckily I could manually tune a blank channel and he dug out a print of a web-page. 56 is the ‘channel’ number for BBC News 24 and he said that I would have to try different ’service’ numbers before I found the correct one.

When I arrived home I tried it out and it all worked fine. BBC News 24 was back up and running.

The chap who helped gave me the URL for the Digital TV Group. He said that the page he was looking at was maybe for retail trade only. There is a retail section to the site but I can’t find a page that lists the ‘channel’ and ’service’ numbers for my area. So I think that it’s going to be trial and error to find ‘five Life’.

Today I finally received a letter from Pipex Homecall regarding my problems with the bill. Their Customer Relations Executive, no less, has said that he will arrange for the £25.00 to be added to my account and he has asked that I be switched back to the ‘Everytime’ package.

I await the next bill with interest.

Another quarter, another red electricity bill from British Gas in the post, another e-mail to complain, which they will ignore.

Amanda,

Customer Reference :- xxxxxxxxxxxx

For the second time in a row I have received a red payment reminder in the post even though I am signed up for paperless billing. I actually haven’t received an e-mail reminder since 21st March 2006. We will overlook the fact that you sent a red bill reminder on 7th August 2006 when I had in fact recently paid my bill.

What is going on?

The fact that you didn’t reply to my e-mail last time means that chances of a reply this time are remote at best.

Hope this finds you well,

Carl

Another month, another bill from Pipex Homecall but the same cock-up. The current tally, if you are playing along at home, is 2 correct bills against 2 incorrect bills. It doesn’t take a maths whiz to calculate just a 50% success rate. And all because I rang to complain that I hadn’t received my free internet speed boost.

At least I have figured out what this Anytime service is that is costing me £12.50 extra a month. It apparently allows you to make free calls. I haven’t looked into it too deeply because I don’t need it. It is a mistake. I in fact only made 3 landline calls last month and, drum-roll please, one of those was to Pipex Homecall to complain about the bill for the previous month. I was going to call the customer service(?) department again but I would only have started to use some of my industrial strength expletives, which I save for such occasions. Instead I have sent a registered letter to their Customer Relations Review Service asking that the Anytime service be removed and that £25 is credited back to my account. If that doesn’t work then it’s onward and upward to the The Office of Telecommunications Ombudsman to ask them to review the complaint.