girl geek adjacent

This is a Grumpy Alikat

Last Tuesday evening on my drive home, I saw a large plume of black smoke on the horizon and lots of fire trucks heading in the general direction of Mt. Wellington. As it happens, Corporate Consumables was engulfed in fire.  Being a geek and having a loose association with the emergency services, I snapped a pic of this smoke plume and twitpic’d it hoping that my firemen friends could give me the skinny on what was happening. I was hoping like hell it wasn’t a friends business premises which was in the same vicinity.

In the next 20 minutes it took me to drive home, it got retweeted a couple of times here and here among others. But you could imagine my horror on getting home, I checked out the NZ Herald website, and my photo was already on there with someone elses name taking credit for the photograph.

I saw red. I saw more than red. I had that red mist that racing drivers talk about. I immediately emailed the NZ Herald telling them that it was my photo and they should be crediting me, not the person who emailed it in. To their credit, they quickly fixed it up and apologized. Nice considering it wasn’t their fault. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you may or may not remember my original post which basically was an email I sent to Telecom about a recent broadband outage I suffered. I sent it to a couple of other people as well. And eventually word trickled down to me that my email was being used as an example as how poor customer service can bite you in the bum, or something like that. But anyway, I eventually calmed down and resigned myself to being shafted and the whole experience faded into a distant (jaded) memory.

Today when I got home from work, I had a letter from Telecom in the box. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting it to be a confirmation of a direct debit I had set up, but on opening it didn’t look like a direct debit letter, it looked like another kind of letter. I thought, oh how fantastic, more nonsense about being upgraded to ADSL2+, but alas no, IT WAS AN APOLOGY AND CONTAINED THE WORD SORRY IN THE TITLE. Sorry for yelling, but I am that surprised. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, I attended the Vodafone Get Smart event at their HQ in Auckland. Traffic was a nightmare, but I got there on time. I have a thing about being late. I commence anxiety attacks if running just slightly late. I was offered a free car park by Hamish Sansom via Twitter. According to his twitter profile he’s the head honcho for mobile data at Vodafone. Nice. I found my way through the carpark, to the elevator and then to reception. They had name tags, but I didn’t. But of note, they had a name tag there for someone who I knew was attending the event in Christchurch. I could have stolen it and pretended to be Andy Ghozali for the evening. But I’m the wrong gender for that. Never to mind. They made me a label. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an email I sent last night to Telecom about their (lack of) service due to a recent fault caused by them at the exchange:

Yesterday when I got home from work, I found my Internet not working. The last time I had seen my PC online from logmein.com was earlier that morning. I rang your 0800GETXTRA number at 5.30pm and selected the appropriate selections to get your help desk. After eliminating my modem & computers as the cause of the outage, it was determined that there was a technical fault at your end. I was informed that they would call me back, which may have happened. But I had to call back at 7pm to find out if it was indeed a technical fault. I was patched through to Peter (not his real name) in Auckland, who was excellent and very helpful. He explained that I was most likely mis-jumpered at the exchange. This had happened to me before back in February. But he would get a technician to look into it. But this could take until Thursday afternoon but they would be in touch. Read the rest of this entry »

I make no secret of the fact that I am an iPhone fan. The hubby frequently calls it my boyfriend. But today it was the most valuable tool in my arsenal (with the exception of the plastic).

My day started innocently enough. I went and had my monthly facial at Beauty on the Hills in Drury. It was bliss. After this, getting on the motorway, I realised time wasn’t on my side. I had to get over to Constellation Drive to collect my new computer monitor, but needed to stop at an ASB branch to withdraw $100 towards the cost of it. My original plan was to go to Botany Town Centre first and get the money there. But with time ticking, Sylvia Park seemed awesome. I got to the counter at the ASB and they told me that I can’t physically withdraw money from my Accelerator savings account, after some begging, they agreed to put my empty cheque account into OD to let me get the money, on the pro-visor that I transferred the money electronically from my savings account to the cheque account before leaving the store. Yay for iPhone’s Safari browser and boo for the Vodafone 3G reception inside Sylvia Park. But by the time I got back to my car, I had made the transfer required to keep my bank happy for another day. Read the rest of this entry »