Mike's Flying

F22 Raptor

Originally uploaded by Mikebert4

So, in it’s first European Air Display, we lucky enough to be at the Royal International Air Tatoo (RIAT) 2010 got to witness this shiny new addition to the USAF in all it’s glory.

Coupled with possibly the most awesome commentry I’ve ever heard, the F22 flung itself around the sky in truely brutal style. Showing off vectored thrust and insane flight control computers.

Highlights included ‘flicking’ the aircraft round a loop using the vectored thrust and allowing the plane to fall backwards whilst maintaining control (sorry, “Suh-liiide backWurds”, the commentry was to die for).

Certainly for me, the highlight of RIAT 2010, though the Vulcan and Red Arrows are serious contenders for that title as ever.

Fwoomph!

 Another application.

Into the furnace that is the world of HR.

 With luck it’ll be borne aloft on the updrafts of burning applications, else it’ll fall into the fire and in burning, will aid in bearing another lonely application up to the heights of employment. Such is the cycle and the way of things.

May your CV always soar, but be comforted that in the conflagration of the many some few may taste success.

Yup, slow day at work.

So, no word back from natwest as of yet.

But unfortunately I’ve cause to write them -another- letter.

All will be explained within.

Unhappy Mike.

Ahh, NatWest Complaints department.

We meet again.

I’m not sure if you remember by letter dated XX-XXX-2010, but it’s ok because I’ll summarise it for you here.

You vanished my account. After I’d taken action and agreed a repayment plan to cover the arrears you cited as the reason for locking my account. It took two days, several phone calls, even a branch visit to get my account back again. I was unhappy and I stated this in a phone-call to your collections department when I was trying to regain access to my funds. I even wrote the aforementioned letter of complaint.

So, with assurances from your collections department – after they admitted that it was a fault in their operation/system that caused my repayment agreement to not be recorded properly – I continued to use my NatWest account.

I cleared the arrears on Friday 11^th June – paying a sum £88.45 as per my repayment agreement. Everything went through just dandy. Tell me then why, after filling my car with petrol, I have my card declined at the cashiers? Actually, don’t go explaining that just yet – I’ve got more joy and juice for you.

I’m not an unintelligent guy, I learn my lesson quickly. Rather than calling your phone banking team, getting sent into my branch and from there being told to call collections – I simply called collections. I understand this is unorthodox, and usually you make customers traipse around all the other systems that can do little for them until you give the coveted number of the one department that seems to be able to fix anything. For this I apologise.

Normally I like a good game, I really am sorry to deprive you of your howlers, but this day I wasn’t in the mood. I owed £30 in petrol to a garage and I knew I had that money in my account, and that I was clear of any arrears. I’d be told the very same just two days previously.

So, feeling like a big spoil-sport, I called your collections department. I spoke to Ian (time was 6:10pm, 11^th June 2010). I liked Ian, he was very helpful – thank him on my behalf would you? I would, but I fear I’d have to make at least one branch visit in order to speak to him and I simply haven’t the time. I digress. Ian informed me, in his and my bemusement, that not one lump of £88.45 had been paid, but simultaneously to my card payment the same sum had been transferred into my loan from my current account (that’s £176.90 in case you’re wondering). Now, I don’t know about you, but taking money like that without any instruction or permission is, oh now, what is that term again?

Anyway, to add to your losing my account for two days, let us add taking monies without instruction. Oh would that that were all the items on my list.

 Because, alas, there’s more (amazing how these things can stack up, isn’t it?). Ian, bless his cotton socks, also informed me that my account was locked. Luckily it wasn’t disappeared, which seemingly is your standard action on my account. Why was my account locked? I hear you ask – go on, ask! No-one here will judge you.

Well my account was locked because I was, and this really cracks me up, in arrears on my loan.

Lo, the almighty system has told Ian, and Ian has told me that I wasn’t merely in arrears for the one month’s payment (which I’d now settled), but that somewhere I’d actually missed two! Oh the mortification! I felt terrible, it was such a shock. But wait, both payments were missing a good two weeks even before my account was disappeared/locked for the first time.

How can it be that it took your system almost two months to vanish/lock my account for the first missed month (I remind you, no phone-calls, no texts, no emails, no letters), yet less than two weeks for the second? How, then, can the nice lady who arranged my repayment plan the first time a good week after I’d missed the second payment not know about it? Just how broken is your system?

Currently NatWest have caused me two days without access to my money, in turn causing grossly unfair and unwarranted stress and anxiety about my ability to access funds vital to my day to day existence and you’ve failed to alert me to a major misdemeanour on my part. In the course of these failings, I’ve expended unreasonable effort, time and expense in chasing NatWest to resolve problems that I’ve not caused. Further to this, you then validated my anxieties about the security of my funds by taking monies from my account without permission or instruction, and once again locking my account despite my, to the best of our combined knowledge at the time, having paid off all arrears on the account.

My confidence in NatWest has all but evaporated, and I’m currently looking at alternative companies to move my current account, loan and overdraft facilities into the care of.

Is there anything NatWest is willing to do to attempt compensation for the anxiety, stress, inconvenience, expense and time I’ve spent dealing with your failings as a banking provider? All are very real damages to a once loyal and long standing customer.

I look forward to receiving and replying to your stock apology

It won’t be enough, not by a long way.

Yours Faithfully,

Mike

Ok, so we all know the lovely bank and provider of finantial services. Member of the RBS Group. My bank for over 7 years now.

On monday, they lost my bank account. It just pure plain dissapeared. Sure, I’d been sketchy with a loan payment, but I’d agreed methods by which to pay it back – and recieved assurances that I was in good standing.

It took me to call their online help team (suspecting an online banking glitch), and for them to tell me to go into a branch, for the branch to tell me that they couldn’t deal with it and I needed to call the collections department to discover that the arrangments I’d made hadn’t been entered into the system properly and that’s why my account had run off.

Well great. All fixed.

But wait, I’ve just spent two days without access to my money. Nothing, My card was declined everywhere. Lucky I had food and a generous flatmate really. Lucky I wasn’t stuck somewhere needing petrol or a place to stay.

Luck. Luck isn’t a good money word. Words like Sure, Safe, Guaranteed, They’re good words. Luck isn’t a good word when you’re relying on this money to live.

What follows is my letter to NatWest in complaint.

Enjoy.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I’ve been banking with NatWest for 7 years.

I’ve a loan and two accounts with you, and I even pay £12 a month for an Advantage Gold account.

I hope, that by some definition this might qualify me, if even only in part, as a ‘customer’.

I’d like to clarify how I see our relationship. Firstly, a bank account is a life – pay goes in and (usually fairly promptly) comes back out again in bills, payments, debits and heaven forbid, even food. The bank gets access to the cash deposited and usually provides other financial services for its customers. The customer gets somewhere convenient to store their earnings and point their bills towards. If they’re like me, they also take advantage of the overdraft and loan facilities on offer.

Now, how much does a person rely on a bank account?

Well, I can tell you how much, pretty accurately, because on Monday 07^th June 2010 mine vanished.

I’ll tell you the story in full momentarily, but considering I actually pay monthly for this account I’d like to draw a parallel or two.

Imagine waking up one day. Where do you wake up? Well on the floor, because the bed you paid for has disappeared. You brush your teeth at the sink but you have to use garlic butter and sugar because your toothpaste you paid for had disappeared. Why garlic butter? Well, your normal butter, that you paid for, has (guess what) disappeared! Now you want to get to work, but your car won’t start, I can’t say for certain but I’d hazard a guess that the petrol you paid for has disappeared. So you walk to work. You arrive sweaty, with bad garlic breath and late. Your day is ruined. That cute temp down the corridor you’ve been flirting with nearly throws up when you wave hello. You’re only wearing one shoe.

I mean, that’s a pretty bad day. By all accounts, I’d imagine you’d be pretty stressed if your day went like that. So, imagine how I felt when the bank account I’d paid for had disappeared. I wanted pizza at the time. No pizza. I wanted to put fuel in my car. No Fuel. I wanted to see how much available cash I had, oh wait! No account.

I was dumbstruck. Sure, if I’d done something wrong I would expect my account to have a black mark against it, maybe I’d even have received a letter or phone-call. Outright deletion seemed a little much as a first-response. I’d have felt like a gnat being squashed under the metaphorical sledgehammer of your accounts system. Well, I would have, if I’d done anything wrong.

So, the story in full:

Having missed a loan payment, your lovely collections department called me – this must have been 2 weeks previously – and we had a very useful and thorough examination of my current (appalling) financial situation. We arranged a payment plan to cover the arrears and I even paid £60 (all I could afford at the time) as a good-will payment. It was very helpful and constructive and I was extremely grateful for the progressive attitude.

Though apparently this plan, despite being recorded and agreed, wasn’t entered into the ‘system’ properly and hence, seemingly at random, the ‘system’ decides to lock and hide my account. No letter, no email, no text, no phone-call and no note on the online system. I’d have been happy to have received some word about what was happening, be it even by trained carrier-ferret or interpretative dance – some small effort to tell me about the impending cataclysm stalking my account.

It fell to me – having had my card declined – to log onto my online banking, discover my account had disappeared, call the website support team, get told to go into my branch, go into my branch, speak to a cashier, get told to speak to customer services, speak to customer services, get told I need to speak to an advisor, get told the advisors can’t deal with my case (at this point I’ve still no idea why this is happening), get given a number to call, call said number and lo! I’m talking to your collections department again.

Two days. Two days with no access to money. Two days with no word from NatWest.

I now have access to my account, but being without access to my account was a huge inconvenience – and having no warning, having taken specific steps to avoid the above predicament. I’m questioning whether I want to even continue banking with NatWest at all.

Thus, all joking aside, I want to know what you intend to do to keep my custom with NatWest, how you intend to reassure me that NatWest are capable of being such a central part of my day-to-day life and how you intend to stop this from occurring again.

Yours Faithfully

Mike

I’ll keep you all updated on my little saga as it unfolds.

Collision

Originally uploaded by Mikebert4

So I spent an evening (stayed up farr to late really) attempting to get a shot of a droplet falling through a bubble.

Why?

Well, to be sure, I don’t really know. It seemed like an interesting idea and so I got the kit out and sat diligently dripping water onto bubbles. Good times.

For those interested the setup is also on Flickr -

- 500W lamp+brolly for ambient light
- Sigma EF-530DG Super slaved to camera flash
- Canon 30D
- Sigma 70-300 f4-5.6 in Macro mode

Post process in Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom. Neat eh?