Rants

On Sunday, I went to see the NFL International Series game at Wembley.  It's kind of a big deal to take a meaninful American Football game to Europe, even if it was only a meaningful game for one team.

We were subjected to many reminders that this year was the anniversary of the 1972 Miami Dolphins perfect season.  By definition, isn't every year an anniversary?  I had to work out that it's the 35th all by myself - the much celebrated Coral anniversary.  Yesterday's game went to form though, making it eight straight losses for Miami and putting them half way towards the wrong kind of perfect season.

The day in pictures:

	Executive flip-down seating with beverage holders.		Random pre-game entertainment: Cheerleaders, The Feeling and some giant shirts.
	Dolphins warm up.  Watching this from a distance it looks like a party in The Sims.		Fireworks as the teams run out on the pitch for the third time.
	Miami throws up a prayer.		The Great British weather in attendance.

These photos were taken from my £125 "exclusive" Club Wembley seat.  After missing out on three separate ticket ballots, I was well and truly suckered in by a masterpiece of marketing that goes a little something like this:

1. Release tickets in small chunks to create mass hysteria
2. Wait to see how much those tickets sell for on eBay (answer: up to £300 a pair)
3. Magically find another 17,000 tickets and set the price only ever-so-slightly lower than people are paying to the touts.

Wembley's list of prohibited items is not vague about some of the things you're not allowed to take in.  Obviously weapons are not allowed, but I had to wonder what incident had led to the specific inclusion of darts on that list, and whether it involved a comedy head trauma.

Although not on the list, it seems they have also a problem with bottle caps - apparently they can be used as offensive weapons.  Could someone please show me how?  I'm willing to sustain a considerable wound in the interests of getting an answer to this.

I'm not talking about metal beer bottle caps, which could probably inflict quite a nasty scratch, but plastic screw-on caps from bottles of pop.

I found out about this right at the turnstile.  Bored Security Goon #1 patted down my arms but decided he didn't want to go any lower.  Not a problem.  Nobody keeps a dart in their pocket anyway, it's always in the sleeve.  He was more interested in the half-drunk bottle of water in my bag.

- "Sir I see you have a bottle there and we can't allow any bottles with caps inside".
- "Oh.  Why?"
- "Because it could be used as an offensive weapon."

I unscrew the offending sports cap.  This kind actually could be used to create a water-pistol like jet if I squeezed the bottle really hard.  "What, this?" I ask, trying to hold it threateningly.  BSG#1 just ignores me and waves me through.

So I now have a capless bottle of water in one hand and the lethal cap of death in the other.  If only I could work out how to put this darn thing back together.

Well, I nearly got away with it but Bored Security Goon #2 piped up as I walked past him, "Take a sip of your water please".  Ok fine.  This actually makes some sense.  "Now finish it up and throw the bottle in this bag".

Logic has left the building.

Upstairs we're greeted by a couple of fake cheerleaders who sign me up for a prize draw to win, wait for it, some cufflinks.  I'm already too confused to argue so I just do what I'm told.  Claire was signed up for the prize draw too.  Apparently the female prize is also cufflinks.

I went to buy a drink inside the stadium.  Nervous Guy assistant kindly opened my bottle of coke for me.  "Can't I have the caps?", I asked while he struggled to work out my change from a twenty.  I'd actually bought two drinks, and his training hadn't covered that yet.  As he handed the caps back with a shrug, something rumbled in the distance as I realised I probably just got him fired.

I really don't like it when someone talks to me like I'm fucking five years old.  Especially when I'm not acting it.  I'd already tried to get to my seat to be told "you can look through the window if you want but you're not allowed in".  Now, we meet Bottle Bitch.

- "You can't have the cap"
- "Why?"
- "Because... well I think you know why".

For fucks sake, seriously?  Was it such a retarded question?  I really, honestly don't know.

- "You could throw it onto the pitch"

I hadn't seen my seat yet, but I figured I'd need quite an arm to tickle the sideline with a tiny piece of plastic.

Claire and I had a bottled drink each, and while we started pointing out many other things that were much easier to make into a missle - including the handful of change that Nervous Guy had finally worked out - she swooped in and snatched away one of the caps.

Just one.  And as much as I wanted to, I just couldn't work out how to kill someone with the other.

A word of warning to anybody who is looking for a Las Vegas package deal with Virgin Holidays - don't get excited too soon when you drop on a bargain deal online.  In fact, to be safe you should probably wait until you step onto the plane before you start counting down the days.  T minus, err, zero.

I found out just what a gamble they can be by trying to book a holiday for my sister.  She'd already booked the week off work and found a deal on Expedia for about £500 each, then called me to ask if it was a good deal or if could I do better.

Now that's a challenge I can never refuse...

I thought I'd done exceptionally well when I found this deal with Virgin for two return flights and seven nights at the Luxor:

£546 would be a phenomenal price for just the flights, never mind with a week's accomodation into the bargain too.  At this price it was either an insane promotion or it was priced wrong.  Either way, I was going to try to take advantage of it.

Laura found out that it was a mistake the same evening when she got a phone call telling her that the price on the web site was actually for just the accomodation and would she like to add on the flights now for another £500+ each.  The answer was obviously "no".

I don't completely believe their story.  The breakdown above shows line items for air passenger duty (although only £20 each, when it costs £40 just to leave the country), a fuel surcharge and an economy seat discount.  This all suggests that the flight is included in the total.  It even let me log in to the Virgin Atlantic site and select seat reservations, where it also cruelly showed a countdown to a holiday that didn't really exist:

But the chances of them honouring the published price are, as you might expect, zero.  Option one was to cough up for an overpriced flight.  Option two was to forget it ever happened.

Now, more than three weeks after cancelling, I'm still waiting for a refund.  In fact it was only after I called the bank and they set up a three-way phone call to find out what was going on that we got any joy at all.  What a shambles.  Even then, they tried to deduct a £120 per person cancellation fee.  I don't think so...

OK, so I knew all along that something had probably gone wrong and that they might try to get out of this booking, but it did reveal a frightening feature of the Virgin Holidays online booking system.

Once you fill in all the information on their web site, including payment details, you still have to wait up to fourteen days for written confirmation of the booking.  Until it arrives, you just don't know for sure whether or not you have a holiday.  They can still cancel it at any time.

Even if they charge your credit card, even if they book you a seat on the damn plane, they can still change their mind.

While I would expect that in most cases they're probably not interested in simply cancelling your booking just because they can, what's to say they wouldn't pull the plug on your package deal if your plane suddenly became very popular and they could make more money selling it as flight only (which, as far as I can tell, is a confirmed booking the minute you press submit).  A delay of up to two weeks for confirmation of a flight booked online is just not good enough.

In the end Laura rebooked with MyTravel for £294 each and snubbed the rock-bottom rate I found her for Imperial Palace in favour of the Excalibur for just a little more.  Not a bad decision.

Overall, it was still about £200 cheaper than Expedia.  Mission accomplished!

I just downloaded my latest credit card statement, and I knew it was going to be big because it's been a particularly extravagant month.

I've booked two Vegas trips for myself and one for my sister (I'm sure you'll hear more about this), plus enough first class train tickets to requalify for Virgin Traveller.  Apparently I've been to Cheltenham five times this week, who knew?

There's also all my new office furniture.  My desk is up, and it's all the right colour, and it turned out to be a marvel of engineering.  The Hoover Dam of desks.  The lady in Ikea said it would never work, that it's just not meant to go that big.  I've proved her wrong just by using two steel tubes and one extra leg.  The over/under on it collapsing is three weeks.

Then there's all the other random crap that usually goes on there, which this month included car insurance renewal and, obviously, Spice Girls tickets.

New Balance:   £4,983.46
Minimum Payment:   £9.20

Not forgetting the really important bit:

BMI Diamond Club Miles earned: 7,313.04

I really wouldn't mind if they rounded down the point zero four miles, that won't get me very far.

So let me get this straight.  Even if there was no interest on this card I would be paying it off at just over nine quid a month, which would be 542 monthly installments - a mere 45 years to clear the balance.

Given that if you pay your credit card automatically by direct debit you have just two options - full balance or minimum payment - this special rate (the card terms say the minimum payment should be 3% of the balance - nearly £150 in this case) has to be a crafty angle they're shooting to try to rack up a lifetime of interest.  Or at least a couple more months until you realise what they're up to.

Can anyone lend me five grand?

I got Spice Girls tickets! And corkers they are too. Block 106, row D - actualy facing the stage. That almost never happens.

Stopped laughing at me yet? OK. Now for the obligatory rant about Ticketbastard fees.

There are so many great advantages to trading online. Having a global presence without needing premises; staying open around the clock without needing extra staff; never needing to actually speak to customers. Reduced overheads produce savings that can be passed on to make you more competitive. At least that's how it should be.

Absolutely everything you can buy is cheaper on the internet, except for concert tickets. But when the only way you can buy tickets is online and one site has a monopoly, they don't need to be competitive.

My two £75 tickets cost £169.75. You're laughing again, aren't you?

The £2.25 charge for "standard post" I can almost live with. Who doesn't inflate their shipping costs to build in a little extra profit when they're selling junk on eBay? I know I do, so it's a bit hypocritical to take issue with an overpriced stamp.

But the "service charge" on this was the fattest I've ever seen. £8.75 on each ticket! Where the hell does that come from?  There must be a human involved in the process somewhere along the way so we can't deny them a little something towards their expenses. And sure, it's a business so they're going to want to make money by adding a booking fee. Come on though? A surcharge that's the same price as a CD (delivered) for every person who goes to a concert?

Here's the official explanation:

This Service Charge (otherwise known as a Convenience Charge or Booking Fee) is a fee that covers costs that allow Ticketmaster to provide the widest range of available tickets while giving you multiple ways to purchase. Tickets are available in many towns and cities via local ticket outlet locations, our Call Centre and ticketmaster.co.uk.

What a crock of shit.  These tickets were only available online - you needed to be selected to get sent a password to stand a chance of booking - and the first batch sold out in 38 seconds this morning.  Where's the convenience in having to be online at 10am on the dot to have to fight through the booking process in record time and take whatever tickets you're lucky enough to have thrown your way?  If you decide you don't like the look of the seats it's picked for you and want to try again, you're probably going to miss out.

Similarly, if you come up against an impossible Turing test, like these, you're pretty much buggered.

     

Apparently if you relax your eyes, you can see a helicopter in the one on the right.

Tickets from the first show raked in £175,000 in booking fees in under a minute. Then three more dates were announced, and then four more. Overall the juice on just those eight shows heading into the pockets of Ticketmaster shareholders is £1.4 million - I think somebody just got a new yacht.  It's not exactly skilled work stuffing tickets into envelopes. The fees I paid on just two tickets could fund three hours of minimum-wage labour. Plenty of time, even if their equal opportunities policy demands the use of partially-sighted amputees with Parkinson's disease.  It's somewhat generous.

What's most annoying is why is the service charge for this is so much higher than for other tickets? Am I somehow getting a much better service than I would, for instance, with my £12 face value ticket to see The Donnas next month (and I'm really not ashamed about that either), which carried a £1.20 fee? The postage on those was cheaper too, at £1.75. Are the Spice Girls tickets really heavy?

Seriously, if people have been successfully taking their banks to court to claim back unreasonable charges for overdrafts I might start keeping a tally of just how much Ticketmaster has ripped me off and see if I can't do something about it. It would probably pay for my next car.

After nearly a week without Big Brother, our cable box has finally fixed itself.

Well, when I say fixed itself, that's not strictly true.  They told us everything would work itself out in the end, but in fact it took yet another call to Virgin Media to get anywhere.  This time they eventually told me the trick to resetting the box and making it perform an emergency recovery - something that I now learned would actually have been possible on Friday.  Had I bothered to look into the deepest corners of their web site, I'd actually have found this myself.

It's a shame that technical supportings didn't know where to look for this piece of information, rather than just telling me to please be patient sir.  The trick, for future reference, is not to report a fault but to ask to cancel.  Then answers suddenly seem to appear. 

I don't watch a lot of TV these days, but even I'm going to notice a complete blackout that lasts more than a day. 

The screen was like this yesterday tea-time when we sat down to catch up on Big Brother, and it's the same story today.

Of course, I've switched the box on and off a couple of times since then.  Very naughty, but come on - a day to do a software update?  I just didn't believe it.

I dreaded making the phone call, but it couldn't be put off any longer.  However I did learn a couple of things.

Firstly, while on hold for an impressive 28 minutes as my call was transferred from the wrong Indian call centre to the right one, I learned that I am perfectly capable of eating a chicken kiev with one hand.  Using a fork, obviously, but I was very pleased with this newly discovered skill.

I also learned that despite having a set top box that says Virgin Media on the front, all the on-screen menus saying Virgin Media all over them and the fact that I get bills in the post from Virgin Media every month, I am in fact a not a Virgin Media customer.  I'm aparently with NTL - a company I didn't think existed any more.  As Virgin seem to not have any customers of their own, the number on their web site (that's the same web site you get to when you type in www.ntl.com or Google for "NTL"; or go to www.telewest.com, or Google for "Telewest") is probably just another call avoidance tactic.

The verdict, which may as well have been relayed on a recorded message that said "we realised we broke it", was that this problem has been affecting many customers since 4.30pm yesterday, and the engineers have said it should be fixed by 5.30pm today.

This was at 7pm.

So that twenty-five hour timeframe they'd given themselves to restore a fundamental service - in fact the primary reason for their business - just wasn't long enough.  If that's how seriously they've been taking it so far then why on earth should I expect them to do anything about it before Tuesday, now that the bank holiday weekend has started?

I don't think it's overly sensational to call this a major fuck up.  As much as I relished the prospect of leaving Sky and not paying them any more money to spend on outbidding the BBC to take shows like 24 and destroy them with commercials that aren't even in the right places, there were never any problems with actually being able to watch TV.

If the Halifax former building society want to be treated like a bank, they should act like one.  There we are with a hundred quid in silver, saved up over many years in a Cadbury's Roses jar, and she's all like "only five bags a day".  It does say this on the counter too.  But I mean, how much effort is it really?  They don't count the coins.  They don't even have to pour them into a sorting machine.  She took my five bags behind a partition and presumably weighed them, as the whole thing only took about 30 seconds - including the walk.  It might have taken 40 seconds if she'd accepted my full deposit.

Apparently this restriction doesn't apply to kids' accounts.  Clearly high revenue earners for the banks, children.  Especially the ones who have a freaking mortgage with them, like me.

I'm not done though.  Sorry, there's more.

PayPal.  For crying out loud.

Last week I attempted to get a refund on a transaction from a seller that has proved to be less than honest.  Claire found a nice little sideline in used printer cartridges, buying them from eBay and either recycling at a profit, or sending them to Tesco for 100 Green Clubcard points each - that's £4 a pop if you use the points towards a Virgin holiday to you know where, or some other Clubcard Deals.  I paid through PayPal using my MBNA credit card to earn BMI diamond club miles, towards yet another holiday to you know where.

I have no problem with naming and shaming here.  Hopefully search engines will pick this up so that anybody who wants to check out the seller will find our story: Image Warehouse (eBay name imagewarehouse) sold a box of empty Lexmark inkjet cartridges that were just not up to the job.  Listed as virgin (not yet refilled) and official, they were mostly neither - a box full of poor quality "compatible" cartridges that were in no state to be recycled.  Some of them had literally fallen apart.

The seller agreed that we could return the box for a refund, which in itself cost about £60.  Since then he's not responded to a single email, despite still apparently doing a healthy business on eBay.  Right now, he's had 17 negative comments in the last month, but he shifts enough stuff that this only equates to a 99.3% positive feedback rating.  Most buyers wouldn't even look any further than that.

The problem with PayPal - for buyers dealing with another country, at least - lies in the fact that they will only open a dispute within 45 days of purchase.  These cartridges were sent surface mail from the USA so took about five weeks to arrive.  After sending them back, it was clearly way past 45 days before we could be sure that the guy was ripping us off.  PayPal won't help and Mastercard won't start a chargeback over a "quality of goods issue", even though I have emails stating he would refund and proof of shipping.  That just encourages honest citizens to lie to their bank and say that it's a fraudulent transaction, surely?  Telling the truth sure as hell doesn't do any good when the "buyer protection" policies just aren't worth a damn.  We're pretty much screwed on this one.

On the other hand...

I've also been on the seller side of a dispute.  A web site I took over a few years ago included a store that sells downloadable software and web traffic.  It's far from being a retirement plan, but it does get the occasional order.  The software sales work just fine, but since it's way down my priority list, I've not bothered to keep up to date with traffic prices from various suppliers that I'd resell from and I've not accepted an order for some time.  I actually care about this web site so little that, rather than hack about with a mess of a web site, I just decided to put a message at the top of the page saying that these products weren't unavailable.  Unashamedly cheap, but I thought it might do the job.

You can see the message here: http://www.arrayal.com/wholesale_web_traffic.shtml

It's not subtle, is it?

Still, I got an order last month for $129.95 and about an hour later - as it didn't instantly arrive - the buyer put in a complaint with PayPal.  Doing so locked those funds pending a review so I couldn't use them, even to send a refund.  As the buyer clearly couldn't be bothered to read the massive red text warning, as far as I was concerned he could wait a little while for his refund now - I wasn't going to make a deposit in order to pay him back and then wait weeks while PayPal decided if I could have my money back, or if he'd actually get refunded twice.

The only option for any kind of communication open to me was to submit tracking information for the sale.  I did this, selecting delivery method "online" and tracking number "none", and wrote a message in the comments field to explain that this actually wasn't tracking information, but it was all I could do.  The email confirmation they sent after submitting the information did not contain the comments I'd entered, nor were they visible anywhere in the PayPal screens.  I'm not sure if anyone ever read these - it doesn't look like it - and obviously I don't have an exact copy, but from memory it went a little something like this:

"This product ordered is not available at present, as is stated clearly on the order page.  Buyer needs to pay more attention before entering payment details online.  Please refund the buyer in full - I cannot do this as the funds in my account are frozen."

Weeks pass, and I hear nothing.  Then this:

"According to the User Agreement, PayPal's Buyer Complaint Policy applies only to the postage of goods and not to services and other intangible goods.  For that reason, we are unable to take any action regarding this complaint."

Result?  Err... no.

Now it's his turn to be screwed by a brain dead PayPal policy that, really, is an open door to online fraudsters.  If someone is prepared to send you money with PayPal for anything that you don't have to ship (software, a web site subscription, an e-book, etc) then you simply do not have to deliver and the buyer has no comeback at all.  Why not try it?  There's a lot of money to be made if you're that way inclined.

This result in my favour is no consolation to me really.  I could keep the $129.95 to offset what I've lost on the other deal, but then I'd be as bad as Ron from Image Warehouse.  I'm still going to refund this poor sucker eventualy.  First I just want to make sure he knows how fucked up PayPal really is. (*)

(*) I considered censoring my language here, in case it jeopardised search engine indexing, but a quick search for "paypal fucked up" reveals that I'm not the first to say it, and that it's just fine and dandy with Google.  Good job.

It's my last work trip to London, for a while at least.  Pros: no more 6.30 alarms.  Cons: no more compilmentary at-seat breakfasts on a free first class ticket.

Thanks to the Virgin Traveller programme, which I "qualified" for by booking eight return tickets to Cheltenham, I've been able to sit in a slightly bigger seat for free on any Monday morning or Friday evening journey.  It's already more than paid for itself - entry to the programme cost about £500, and every morning journey I've made to London would have cost £54, in a cheap seat, without breakfast.  I didn't even need to go to Cheltenham.

Membership has its benefits: two first class weekend return tickets to anywhere on the network.  I always book both seats, even if I'm travelling alone.  That way the seat reservations are always for a proper four-seat table, not a one-on-one table.

That's the theory at least, but seat reservations appear to mean very little, particularly to people who pay £150 to get to work.  At least in standard class you see people looking a bit shifty when they know they're sitting in someone else's seat, ready to get up and avoid embarassment as soon anyone looks like they're going to confront them.

The real problem is that I'm absolutely hopeless this early in the morning.  So when I see two ladies sliding into opposite corners of my table just ahead of me, one saying "you go that side so you can spread out a bit", I'm in no fit state to politely and, more important, coherently point out that one would actually be spreading into my seat, would you mind letting me sit there, and it has to be the window seat so I can use my laptop, and by the way can't you read the fucking sign?

What's that... is it a monster?  No, it's just me before I've had my third cup of coffee and luke warm hash brown.  I decide it's best not to engage them.

What do you say?  "Hey, you're in my seat".  So she lets me sit next to her and opposite her friend and I get caught in some crossfire talk about shopping or periods or whatever while I'm eating a particularly chewy sausage.

Do I really whip out the second ticket and say "I pwn your seat too"?  The best that can happen then is she moves over to the other side of the table and I have to face her for the next hour and a half.  Hell hath no fury like a woman asked to move seats by a fat dude?

All I want to do is curl up and zone out until my rubber bacon arrives.

So here I am squatting in some other bastard's single seat - I know this because it says "reserved" above it, it's not hard - and winding myself up because I only got one seat for free, not two. 

I'll try to calm down a little when I get off the train and to Costa Coffee.  Even though I know they'll assume I want milk in my Americano.  No.  Thank you.

What an amazingly spoilt start to the week.

I haven't followed football for a while now, but I know it's cup final day because Sporting Index sent me a fifty quid free bet offer as long as I tried out their mobile phone software.

I'll review it in one word.  Infuriating.

It needed to access the internet more often than I blink, and each time it did it popped up a security warning and I had to say that it's OK to go online.  This is probably a phone feature rather than anything specifically in their software, but it's still annoying as hell.  If it was OK last time, it's fine this time if you wantr go and get the same stuff from the same site.  It isn't just when you go to a new screen, if you stay watching the same screen for 10 seconds or more it tries to refresh.  So anything you have to type, you have to do quickly or it's too late.  Scroll down the list of bets but do it fast, otherwise it'll get hidden by the popup message before you have time to digest what's on offer.  I would say that perhaps being able to digest the bets that are on offer is more useful than making sure the prices displayed are bang up to date.  They'll always be sure to let you know if a market has moved before you get your money out, so this is a bit too clever for its own good.

My main gripe though is that apparently my phone's keypad isn't good enough.  You can't enter numbers or letters using the phone, instead you have to use a crappy small and unresponsive touchscreen soft keyboard.  Once you're logged in (and after the first time, you only need a numeric PIN), the only things you should need to type in are numbers for the bet amount.  What phone doesn't have a numeric keypad?  Mine not only also has a full keyboard, it also has its own built in soft keyboard which works a hell of a lot better than the one in the Sporting Index software.  No input method works right except their own keyboard, and even that doesn't work very well.

In fact, on the Sporting Index online games (I had another refund promo yesterday, lost as usual - I'm not saying it's rigged or owt, but I'm 0 for 7 on those now) they only let you select bet amounts using the mouse by clicking up and down arrow keys.  Most computers have a keyboard, so I don't know what their aversion to using them is.

I ended up buying Man Utd in the Win Index at £4/point at 13 points.  It's 25 for a win, 10 for a draw and 0 if they lose, so I lose £2 of non-refundable real money if they lose.  No big deal considering I stand to win up to £48 on the free bet, but the reason I made it a nice round £4 and not £3.85 for a completely risk-free bet was only because I couldn't get anything at all to enter into the pence part of the stake input.  Two separate boxes for pounds and pence isn't a bad idea if most users will enter numbers on a phone keypad but (a) they're not and (b) it doesn't work anyway.

It's not like I'm going to watch the match - It's still double player points at PokerStars today and the ten billionth hand bonus is fast approaching.  But come on you reds, I guess.

EDIT: 0-0 after 90 minutes, so I lost £12 and had £38 still to play risk-free.  So I had to go through it all over again with an extra time bet.  That one lost.

Motorway service stations are the perpetrators of one of my biggest pet peeves.  Their business is to sell stuff to motorists, a group that is largely comprised - particularly during the day - of solo travellers.  Yet virtually everything in their shops is priced in such a way that you cannot just buy one of them.  They're clearly doing you a huge favour with their multibuys - on bottles of Coke, for instance, £2 for two is not nearly so overpriced as £1.30 each.  It's gotten to be rare that you can find anything to drink that isn't priced this way.

The reason this winds me up so much - and the reason I so often go without purely out of spite - is not the excessive pricing, it's that you're put in a situation where whatever decision you make is bad.  Either you can pay the solo traveler tax (that's 30% on every bottle of Coke you buy on its own) or you can pay the difference and take that second bottle that you don't really want for a price you wouldn't ordinarily pay.  70p seems cheap compared to £1.30 for the first bottle, but it's not really, and it'll be warm by the time you want it so you'll probably just take it home and put it in the fridge where it can sit next to the case of drinks you bought from the cash and carry and smirk at you every time you open the door.

So here's a top tip I discovered tonight at Donnington Park services on the M1.  Their Travelodge has a vending machine in reception which sells bottles of soft drinks, one at a time, for a quid a pop.  As most service stations have some kind of hotel, I'll definitely be trying this trick in future.  It's most satisfying to have beaten the system.

However it's even more satisfying to hit a once-in-a-lifetime chocolate jackpot.  I decided to splurge on a pack of Jaffa Cakes so I fed the other vending machine accordingly.  As the packet started to move forward, it got caught on the shelf above and would not drop.  I prepared myself for giving the machine a bit of a kick and a shake - whatever it takes to get my confectionery - but there was no need.  These clever modern machines can detect that nothing dropped out, so it kept on pushing.  The second pack also got jammed on the shelf above and it kept pushing still further.  I reached for my camera phone, of course, because that's a natural reaction for anyone to have to this kind of situation, but unfortunately I was just too late to get a picture .  Three packs of Jaffa cakes plopped into the tray for the price of one.

Seriously, how could I refuse Neteller's kind offer of some complimentary NETPoints?  Well, probably because they're the most worthless loyalty points ever, and I'd much rather just have them pay me the amount I got stiffed on my last withdrawal.

The sky appeared to be falling in yet again for online gamblers in America when Neteller announced last month that they were pulling out of that market.  Last week, they revealed that they had $55m seized by the US Government and wouldn't be paying out to any US players.  In light of that, my beef does seem a little bit petty.

I decided that, even though in the UK we have the luxury Neteller being regulated by the FSA, that I'd be happier to see my money sitting in a proper bank than in Neteller right now.  I cashed out $3000, paid Neteller's $1 bank wire fee and then today got a text alert that a large deposit had been made to my bank.  The amount: $2887.39.  My last withdrawal was also for three grand and landed about $6 short (neither Neteller nor Citibank could explain where it had gone) and I decided it wasn't really worth taking any further.  But this time, $113 had gone walkabout.

It turns out Neteller don't operate in US Dollars any more.  Instead, they cashed me out an equivalent amount in Euro, leaving Citibank free to use whatever the hell exchange rate they felt like.  Turns out it wasn't a great rate - in fact, xe.net says the amount Netellersent works out at $3015, so it's actually about $130 that Citibank are making on the deal - a handsome price, and the very reason I have a US Dollar bank account.

Some kind of warning that this is how they had to process a dollars withdrawal might have been nice.  I'd definitely have found another way to withdraw if Euro was the only option, knowing that it was going to cost me to receive it into any account.  My best option probably would have been to deposit into PokerStars and then ask for a cheque by mail.  But if Neteller had offered to send the money in US Dollars using a reasonable exchange rate, that would work for me too.

As it stands, I'm $113 out of pocket and Neteller - so far - have basically told me tough cheese.  I don't think I should have to pay for this - after all, I asked for $3000, not EUR 2505.  They recommended I lodge an official complaint, which I've done but don't hold much hope for.  You send that by email to complaints@neteller.com, for anybody who doesn't want to have to wait forever on the phone to be told this.  In my 45 minute phone call there was nearly five minutes of real actual talking, and almost none of that was useful.

New Year sucks. Christmas is over (well, actually that's not such a a bad thing). You've run out of turkey recipes, and still have half a bird left. It's starting to smell a bit, too. You can, if you wish, queue for hours in the freezing cold to stand a small chance of picking up a genuine bargain in the sales. Although I'm sure it won't be as bad as the insanity and violence of the PlayStation 3 queues in America last month. This year, I'm spending midnight at New Year's Eve on a plane. I know I won't care.

Oh, and all new for 2007 - the price of poker is going up again. All around the country this time, too.

Grosvenor Casinos have announced a new schedule of "session charges". Whilst they've had the sense to tier the fees so you pay less for a cheaper tournament, the attempt to justify it as the "true reflection of running costs of cardrooms" is unconvincing. I'm quite pleased that I managed to delete the word "bullshit" just then, very disciplined of me.

It's a £2 charge on a £5 tournament, but £5 on £20. Does one game really cost two and a half times as much to run as the other?

It's actually great for the game that the major casinos are finally starting to treat it as a game in its own right, and not simply something in the same league as £5 in free slot play or a complimentary drink. If they have to charge a little extra to do justice to their tournaments and keep the guys upstairs happy, then so be it. But c'mon, call a spade a spade. Call a service charge a rake (unless you're not allowed to). And acknowledge this session fee what it is - a way for casinos to begin making money from poker directly, rather just using it to try to bring in pit game suckers.

Remember when the Internet was flaunted as the marketplace of the future, offering lower overheads to traders and allowing them to pass these savings onto consumers.  Stuff costing less online is one of the main reasons, besides porn, that the Internet has become so great.

It's not just Ticketmaster that seem to have forgotten this vision though, with their convenience charge (charged per ticket - clearly its more convenient when you buy several), building facility charge (think I might use the spa after the support act...) and of course the "if we can't charge you over the odds to mail your ticket, you still have to pay to pick it up" charge.  First class stamp - two quid.  Collect from box office - two quid.  You now even have the option to print your own ticket for some events.  Two quid.

The auctioneers selling off the remains of the Stardust also charge a premium for buying online.  The auction fees are 10% if you buy on site, or 13% if you buy online.  Who am I to question the logic behind this?  I'm actually more concerned with the logistics of actually buying, storing and bringing home something as wonderous as this:

The auction starts a week on Friday at 11am PST.  That's 7pm over here - and can you think of a more perfect Friday night in than phoning for a curry and watching the sale of thousands of pieces of memorabilia from a classic Vegas casino?

Well yeah, you're right.  I do need to get out more.

I always expected the reception I'd get at Stoke Grosvenor would be frosty. This is a regular haunt for many of my former so-caled friends and other ex-poker buddies and I knew that whenever I went odds would be that I would bump into at least one of them.  Tonight for the £20 freezeout it actually took until level five and my second table move until I came face to face with any of them across a card table. As expected, they were ignoring me just as hard as I was ignoring them.

Allow me to introduce some characters: James Welsh, my estranged business partner on a poker-related venture and the mastermind behind UK Poker Info - a forum from which he has subsequently banned me for posting a strategy article with only the slightest hint of superiority - busted out a couple of hands later, moving all in without looking and tabling garbage that thankfully didn't improve. Jim Fryer, the former owner of an illegal poker club that is somehow no longer running, and who still owes me ninety quid for a table, was riding high with about 40k in chips allowing him the freedom of only playing every other hand whilst running backwards and forwards to have a smoke. Negative expection on two counts.

I never got to play a pot with Jim, and only contributed to only two hands at that table before I went home. I'd raised once with AQo and folded to a reraise all in, then made a squeeze play with AJ against an early position raiser and a caller. I still quite like the move, even though I ran into a squeezee (I need to know if I'm the first person to use that word) with AQ. I had a chance to nearly double my stack uncontested, which was fairly likely given the extreme tightness I had shown, and the prospect of taking a race with 4.5k in dead money wasn't too shabby. It's only real bad when you are dominated - and he calls. Which it turned out I was, and he did, thinking he was behind.

Earlier though, I had a confrontation with "Deadly" Darren Sutton. Daz is not someone I know well at all. I can really only remember one time I've spoken more than a passing sentence to him, which was actually at Nottingham Gala on the same day I discovered that my so-called friends from the saturday night game I have such fond memories of were a bunch of ignorant back-stabbers. Let's move on.

Darren comes over to tell me how nobody likes me, and then how I owe various people an apology and how I owe James some money. He tells me "you and him need to sort it out, or I will sort it out". Whether or not he has a point doesn't much matter - none of this is any of his fucking business, but he obviously loves the action. I am brought up to speed as he walks away. "You don't know me. I used to be a minder. I look after people".

Another person he is looking after tonight is Rob Ho, although I doubt this is with his knowledge or consent given that Rob is a martial arts expert and could cripple me as soon as look at me if he wanted. On the very rare occasions we had a saturday game without him, we would gossip around the table about how he is likely connected, a Triad probably. I owe him an apology, I'm informed, because of how I insulted him on the forum - by which he can only mean the "strategy article" I mentioned above. As I walk to the bathroom at the first break, Rob actually yells up from his cash game at me "Hey Chris, are you winning?". I'm so startled, I don't really know how to respond and mumble back god knows what before running away to take a piss. Unless it's part of an overly elaborate and highly doubtful good cop/bad cop routine, then Rob isn't holding a grudge. And I would have gone back to talk to him too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.

Deadly Daz followed me into the bathroom. He followed me into the fucking bathroom! He stood next to me, and carried on with a routine which I pretty much ignored, trying instead to concentrate on whether he specifically was the reason I couldnt go, or just that there was another gent right there who was more interested in me than his own bodily functions. That would usually do the trick.  As I left (he was done before me, and didn't wash) he was waiting near the door to keep yelling across to me and point out exactly where Rob was sitting. I don't know why he was yelling. I didn't stop to see who he was with, whether it was even anyone I'd ever met before. Or whether they were impressed. I just kept walking. I don't know - nor did I care to find out - whether he was all talk. But I was glad to be back on the casino floor. As far as I know, there's no cameras over the urinals...

So there we have it. I was threatened and intimidated - twice - by a guy I hardly know in my friendly neighbourhood casino. Just one contribution to a general air of violence in the Grosvenor Stoke where threats, fights and beatings appear to be an everyday occurrance. When the cash game was announced, some cheerful soul piped up "will there be a punch up tonight?". Apparently there was yesterday, and it sounds like the crowd loved it. And I heard two guys at my table very openly discussing how they might teach someone a lesson. "Careful though, he's the kind who'll run down the cop shop first chance he gets", says one. "Yeah, but what's he gonna do with a fucking broken neck?", came the reply.

At Leicester Gala the £20+£2 tournament on Wednesday is now a £20+£7.

That's a 26% rake!

Well, no it's not. That would be illegal. Instead, there's a £5 "session fee" that you have to pay before you can register for the tournament. And apparently they not only have the backing of the Gaming Board to do this, Gala is piloting the scheme for them to see if works well enough to use at casinos across the country.

The fee does cover you for as much as you want to play that night, however. Whoopy doo. If you're very unlucky you could perhaps fit in two sit-and-goes (I have no idea if that's the correct way to pluralise it) but if you do well, or have no intention of playing anything else after you bust it's another five quid on top of a twenty quid tournament.  You effectively get taxed more when you win, than when you keep on losing.

The terrible thing is that people are already paying this. Even worse is that last night those people included me. Well, I'd driven an hour to get there and if I'm prepared to drive a 140 mile round trip to play in that game it does seem a little on the stubborn side to go straight home once I'm there. Won't be going again though.  Numbers were down, with 40 runners compared to the usual sell-out 56, but the night before they'd still managed to fill the room for the, effectively, £10+£6 tournament.  If they owned up to what the charge really was, that would be a 38% rake.

Las Vegas Advisor maintains a list of the poker tournaments in town with their respective percentage paybacks.  Only Sunset Station and Sams Town are this greedy, which actually surprised me a little.  Even the quick and nasty tourist tournaments on the strip are 80-85% payback.

Geoff and I spoke to cardroom manager Steve, who was obviously disappointed that he had to do this, knowing that it would drive away many of the regular players.  However this seems to be exactly what those higher up are trying to achieve.  You see, the Play and Party Poker Zone is not really a cardroom.  The casino is not interested in developing poker players or creating loyalty, because they do not generate any profits until they are either paying their 10% on three-figure buy-in tournaments or generating hourly seat charges in cash games.  And whilst a £100 tournament would attract a handful of gamblers who fancy a shot at a big prize, it's something that takes more effort to promote than a regular game, and not something you can do every night in a provincial casino.  So it's quantity over quality, and they just want to get as many players through the door as possible hoping that if you throw enough suckers in the direction of a roulette table then some will stick.

So why am I so upset about this?  I guess mostly because of the stealthy and semi-legal way in which it's been done.  The Gambling Commission's Guidelines for the Casino Industry document states that a registration fee may be no more than 10% or £50, whichever is greater.  Simply calling the charge a "session fee" doesn't cut it, and I just can't see how this is legal.

The casinos who have put pressure on the Gambling Commission to take action against borderline-illegal clubs - who take a "service charge" out of every pot, don't anyone dare say the word "rake" - are hypocrites.  Now is a time when poker desparately needs a new way of being regulated to protect the player from an inevitable undesirable element.  If indeed the GC are behind this scheme, as Steve suggested, all they have managed to come up with is a way to allow the regulated venues to charge an unlimited rake and legally fleece their players.  Well, I guess that's what casinos have been doing for years, just not quite so blatently.  Meantime the clubs that do cater for those that just want to play some cards (there's no blackjack, no roulette, just a 10% rake - let's call a spade a spade here) are still waiting to hear whether they will get shut down.