Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Archive for the ‘life’ Category

Money From HMRC

I got a letter from HMRC this morning – to my company, not to me personally. It basically said “we’ve been looking at the PAYE you paid in 2010/11 and it looks like you’ve overpaid by [a surprisingly large number of pounds]“.

Now 2010/11 was the year that I was having some difficulties with my accountants. The difficulties eventually got so bad that I switched to my new accountants (who I’m still very happy with). So it doesn’t really surprise me that something went wrong that year, although the amount (it’s about 25% of the PAYE/NI I paid that year) is impressive.

What really surprises me is the tone of this letter. Having told me that I’ve overpaid (and, helpfully, pointed out the exact extra payment that I made) the letter goes on to say:

Before I can agree to either a refund or a credit, please let me the reason the overpayment has arisen

And:

Please complete the enclosed P35D giving a full explanation as to how the overpayment occurred.

Below are some example of reasons I cannot accept to justify an overpayment

  • Duplicate payments with no evidence to explain why
  • Statements such as ‘Payment(s) made in error’ with no further explanation
  • The overpayment is due to monthly payments which do not match our records
  • Any other explanation without evidence to support it

I’m finding it hard to read that in any way other than “we know we’ve got some of your money but you can’t have it back until you’ve explained in detail just how crap your record-keeping is”.

You’ve got my money. You know it’s my money. Either my accountants or I screwed up in some way. There’s no more detailed explanation than that. Just give it back to me, you bastards.

Ticket Refund Update

[There are two earlier posts that you might want to read before this one]

I mentioned yesterday that See Tickets customer support were trying to get hold of me. I spoke to them in the early afternoon. It was their customer services manager and she wanted to apologise for the way I had been treated over my ticket refund. She said that she would be having a word with the support rep who had threatened to ban me from the site if I tried to make a chargeback against them.

Most importantly, she said that she would be happy to give me a full refund for the cost of the ticket and all the extra fees.

So that’s nice. My immediate problem is solved I’m no longer going to be out of pocket for not going to a gig.

But the wider problem still remains. See Tickets haven’t changed their T&Cs. They still believe that it’s fair to retain booking fees in cases like mine. As far as I can see, they made an exception in my case because I caused a bit of a storm on Twitter on Wednesday. And that’s not a solution that scales well.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m no longer convinced that See Tickets are the main problem here. I think that they’re probably just a symptom. They are doing what they are doing because they can get away with it. And they get away with it because the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers has such a weak code of conduct. On the front page of their web site (and in an image, so I’ve had to retype this!) it says:

STAR members comply with a Code of Practice designed to help protect customers. You can be sure that a STAR member will always:

  • Clearly identify the face value of any tickets purchased and any additional booking fees
  • Refund at least the face value of the ticket if an event is cancelled and the promoter agrees to refunds
  • Handle bookings politely and courteously, giving the highest standards of professional service
  • Highlight any terms and conditions, including transferability, cancellation and viewing restrictions.

It’s the second of those items that is causing the problems here. A STAR member is only expected to refund the face value of a ticket. And even then, only when the promoter agrees. How is that designed to “protect customers”? Looks to me like it’s designed to protect the profits of STAR members.

So I think I’ll try to have a conversation with STAR. To see if I can get them to admit that their code of practice is, to say the least, disappointing. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get them to change their code of practice so that it does actually protect customers.

Of course, not all STAR members are determined to get away with as much as they can. Some of them go above and beyond STAR’s code of practice. TicketWeb, for example, say this in their T&Cs (point 18):

Occasionally, events are cancelled or postponed by the team, performer or Event Partner for a variety of reasons. Contact us for exact instructions. Unless indicated otherwise in relation to a particular event, if an event is cancelled, ticket holders will be offered seats at any rescheduled event (subject to availability) up to the face value of the tickets or, if the ticket holder is unable to attend the rescheduled event or the event is not rescheduled, a refund. Refunds for tickets purchased prior to the date of the original event will be given up to their face value plus the relevant per ticket booking fee. [Emphasis mine]

So what advice can I give for buying tickets? Well, read the T&Cs carefully. Try to avoid any company that wants to just refund the face value of the ticket. And if you get caught in the same situation that I was in, then my best advice is to write a blog post and kick up a stink on Twitter.

 

Five Pounds and Twenty Pence

[New readers should probably read the background before proceeding]

The figure of £5.20 has come up in some of the discussion of this issue. It’s the difference between what I paid for the tickets and what See Tickets want to refund me. It’s come up in two ways.

Firstly a couple of people have said to me “It’s £5.20, why bother?” Actually it’s not £5.20, remember they want me to pay to send the ticket back to them by recorded delivery too. That’s going to cost another £1.50. But, yes, there’s a point here. The amount of time I’ve spend on this is completely disproportionate to the amount of money involved. I can afford to lose a fiver. Why do I bother?

I bother for two reasons. Firstly, it might only be a fiver, but it’s about 25% of the money I paid out. That’s a large chunk. If that happened whenever I got refunded for stuff, I’d soon start to notice the impact. And secondly, I bother because (as far as I can see) no-one else has. These people get away with it because people say “oh well, it’s only a fiver” and don’t do anything about it. I don’t think that’s right. It’s become a matter of principle.

Then people have said “I hope See Tickets think that £5.20 was worth all this bad publicity”. Of course, the numbers aren’t right there either. The Union Chapel seats about 500 people. If 10% of them can’t get to the postponed show and need a refund then See Tickets pocket £250. And how many gigs get postponed every week? Some in far larger venues. This is quite a nice little earner for See Tickets. When they resell the ticket they’ve made the booking fees twice over.

Let’s be clear here. I’m not saying for a second that ticket agencies shouldn’t make money. I like the convenience of being able to buy tickets online and I’m happy to pay for that service. I just think that when shows are rearranged, the fans shouldn’t end up out of pocket. The ticket agencies would say that they have printed and posted the tickets therefore they are entitled to be paid for that service. But when fans end up paying because they aren’t able to go to a show then something is wrong with the system.

Someone took the choice to rearrange the dates and they should be the people who pay the ticket agents costs. The ticket agencies should be chasing the promoters for this money, not taking it from the fans. I suspect they’re just taking the path of least resistance here – they’ve already got the money from the fans, it’s easier to just keep that rather than trying to get it from the promoters.

Unfortunately it seems that See Tickets business practices are endemic in the industry and even supported by the industry’s major organisation. See Tickets are a member of STAR (the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers) so I contacted them this morning to see if they would like to censure See Tickets in any way. I was told that as See Tickets were acting in accordance with both their own terms and conditions and the society’s code of conduct then they would be taking no action. I pointed out the unfairness in this system and the reply told me in no uncertain terms that they considered the matter closed.

I’m still considering applying for a chargeback from Visa for the amount. In fact that looks like my best chance of actually getting my money back. But I’m starting to see this as a wider issue. The whole ticketing industry needs a shake-up. It can’t be right that fans can potentially be left out of pocket as I have been. Perhaps we need a change in the law to force ticket agencies to treat fans fairly. Perhaps we need an organised campaign.

p.s. See Tickets customer support have been trying to get in touch with me today. I picked up a voice mail where a customer service manager wanted to apologise for the way I was treated yesterday. Which is a start.

[The story continues in the next post]

See Tickets

Anyone who buys tickets for gigs, plays or sporting events will have horror stories about how a reasonably priced ticket suddenly became a lot less reasonably priced once booking fees, transaction fees and postage fees had been added on. I’ve often wondered why the face value of tickets doesn’t just include a fixed amount that goes to the ticket agency as their cut rather than them being left to make up figures themselves.

Today I found out why the booking agencies like things how they are.

A month ago I bought a ticket for a Kathryn Williams gig at the Union Chapel. I bought it from See Tickets. It cost me £24.70. That figure was apparently made up of the following:

  • £19.50 – Ticket price
  • £1.95 – Booking fee
  • £2.25 – Transaction fee
  • £1.00 – Insurance (I think I forgot to uncheck a check box there)

The show was supposed to take place next Tuesday. But today I got an email from See telling me that the show had been postponed until 8th October. That’s a slight problem as I already have a ticket to see Radiohead that night. So, reluctantly I am going to have to return the Kathryn Williams ticket for a refund.

The email contained details of how to claim my refund. I had to post the ticket back to them (“by secure mail”) and they would refund the face value of the ticket.

Yes, just the face value. That’s £19.50. The rest of it – their fees – they want to hold on to. And they want me to post it using recorded delivery. That’s going to cost about £1.50.

I emailed their customer service to confirm this. It seemed really unlikely that I would lose about 25% of the money I’d paid just because I couldn’t get to the rearranged date. But their customer support confirmed that as they had done their part (by sending me the ticket) they had earned their money and weren’t going to give it back to me.

I discussed this a bit on Twitter and someone pointed out that I could probably get the money back from the Visa card that I used to buy the tickets (as I understand it, Visa can then claw the money back from the vendor). I’ve sent a message to First Direct to see how that might work. I also asked See Tickets to confirm exactly how much they planned to refund me and mentioned that I planned to see if I could get the rest back from Visa.

I got an email back from the confirming that they plan to refund me £19.50 and that they wouldn’t refund the postage. The email then finished with this:

If you proceed to claim the money back from your card provider you’ll be banned from using See or any of our affiliates in the future.

Up to that point I was happy to debate the finer points of the transaction and try to persuade them that their T&Cs were unfair. But I can’t really see the point now. They obviously aren’t reasonable people. I tell them that I’m planning to use legal methods to recover as much of the money as possible and they respond with threats.

It’s not much of a threat to be honest. After what has happened today, I’m not planning to use the company again. I’m sure my gig-going won’t be hampered too much if I stop buying tickets from See.

Perhaps you’d consider doing the same.

Update: Here’s are the details of the insurance that I inadvertently bought. Notice that there’s a list headed “we will not provide a refund where” which includes the item “the booked event is cancelled, abandoned, postponed, curtailed or relocated”.

Update: One nice thing to come out of this. Kathryn Williams heard about it on Twitter and was as appalled as any reasonable person would be. She has offered to send me a copy of her new CD to make amends (even though none of this is even slightly her fault). What a lovely person. You should all buy The Pond when it comes out next week.

[There are two follow-ups to this post. You might find those interesting too]

Chuggers

Earlier this week, I was stopped by a chugger in Richmond. We see a lot of chuggers in Richmond. I suppose that the charities see it as an area that still has a lot of disposable income. Usually I have my earphones in so they ignore me, but this was at lunch when I’d just popped out for a sandwich so I was easy prey.

She bounced up to me in that overenthusiastic way that many of them have and started talking to me as thought we were old friends. I asked her which charity she represented, told her that I never support charities that stop me in the street and walked off. Even as I made my exit she was saying “but we can still have a chat…”

From talking to friends I know that I’m not the only person who hates being stopped by chuggers. I don’t know anyone who claims to enjoy it. So I started to wonder about the economics of it. Surely so few people sign up on the street that’s it can only just be worthwhile for the charites. And if that’s the case, then perhaps it would only take a small change in public attitudes to make it completely uneconomical.

Denny pointed me at this report from Newnight last August which goes into some of the details. I was astonished at how much it costs the charities. The first thing to realise is that the chuggers don’t work directly for the charities. They work for fundraising companies who will work for many different charities. So there are a lot of people who need to be paid out of the donations you sign up for,

It turns out that many charities pay around £100 for each person who signs up on the street. If we assume that most people pay a tenner a month, then it’s nearly a year before the charity makes any money at all out of the deal. And, of course, if you stop the direct debit before you’ve donated £100, the poor charity will be out of pocket.

I accept, of course, that times are hard and charities are as short of money as the rest of us. So, of course, they will try any means at their disposal to make money. But to use this method, which has a pretty good chance of them losing money shows just ho desperate they are. But perhaps we can use this to our advantage and send the charities a message telling them how unwelcome chugging is.

Depending on my mood, I tell chuggers one of three things when they stop me. If I’m in a hurry I’ll just say what I said this week – that I never give money to people who stop me on the street. If I have more time or am feeling a little more evil I’ll explain that because I have been stopped I will never support that charity financially in the future. If I’m feeling really bad and want to ruin the chuggers day then I’ll say that I currently support that charity with a monthly payment of £20 a month. but that because they’re using this rude tactics I now intend to cancel the direct debit. Feel free to use those if you think they’re useful.

But, of course, there will be charities who you see chugging that you want to support. One common excuse for chugging that I hear is that they remind people that a charity still exists. And, of course, if you want to support a charity then you should support them. However, if you’re going to sign a direct debit to make regular payments to support a charity, then it is really important that you don’t sign the chugger’s form. If you sign that form then most of your first year’s payments will go to pay for the chugger and their company. No, if you really want to support a charity, then go to their web site and fill in a form their. That way the charity gets all of your money.

Actually, that might just trump all of the other things that I tell chuggers. Next time I’m stopped I’ll tell them that I intend to visit the charity’s web site as soon as I get back to my desk. Surely they can’t object to me taking action which gives the charity more money. I wonder what they would say?

Now I want to be stopped next week so I can try it out.

P.S. One important point that I missed. If you ever decide that you aren’t going to support a charity because of their use of chuggers or if you just get annoyed by chuggers and want to complain to someone, then please use the ‘contact us’ form on the charity’s web site to let them know. If enough people tell the charities what we think of chuggers then perhaps they’ll realise how many people they are alienating.

Binary Dates

There’s a strange meme going round that today is the last “binary date” for a hundred years. I’m not sure where it came from but a couple of people have repeated it on Twitter over the last couple of days.

A binary date is one which is made up completely of ones and zeroes. So in order to find any we’ll need to ignore the “2″ in “2010″ and assume that we’re writing dates in the shorthand dd/mm/yy format – or your local variation thereof.

In that form we can easily agree that, yes, 11/01/10 is a binary date. And so was yesterday (10/01/10) and the 1st of January (01/01/10). But to suggest that there are no more for a hundred years is clearly nonsense. Anyone suggesting that is guilty of not giving the matter the smallest amount of thought.

There are still six more binary dates to come this year (01/10/10, 10/10/10, 11/10/10, 01/11/10, 10/11/10 and 11/11/10) and another nine to come next year (01/01/11, 10/01/11, 11/01/11, 01/10/11, 10/10/11, 11/10/11, 01/11/11, 10/11/11 and 11/11/11).

After 11th November next year, there will be no more binary dates until the year 2100.

If you’re going to pass on memes, at least check them for accuracy first.

Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise

Round these parts the period between christmas and new year is a time for turning the house upside down and trying to get rid of most of the rubbish that we’ve accumulated over the previous twelve months. My part in that is often going through the piles of paperwork in the study, filing the stuff that needs to be filed and getting rid of the stuff that is no longer (if, indeed, it ever was) needed. If I have time I’ll also engage in a spot of paperwork archaeology (do I really need all those credit card statements from 1998?)

This year I got deeper into cupboards and drawers that I have for several years. And I found some old stuff that brought back some memories. I particular, I found a green notebook that I was using in 1983.

In 1983 I was unemployed and living in Hackney. I had dropped out of my first attempt at a degree and I wouldn’t start my second (ultimately successful) attempt until the following year. I had a lot of time on my hands.

So I started to draw a cartoon. About a tortoise. We actually had a pet tortoise at the time so I wrote cartoon strips based on his antics. Or, at least, the antics I thought he’d be getting up to given half a chance. These cartoons are all in the green notebook that I have just found.

I wanted an break from sorting and shredding paperwork, so I’ve started to scan in the cartoons in order to preserve them (notebooks don’t last forever). And because the internet gives me a global audience, I’ve started to put them online.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise. I’ll be publishing the strips over the next few weeks. There’s also a page with more background on the real Humphrey.

Randall Munroe has nothing to be worried about.

Not Dead

I know it’s been very quiet round here, but I’m still here. I’ve just been off on holiday for a couple of weeks. I was cruising around the Baltic. There will be stories and photos arriving soon. I just need a couple of days to get a bit more organised.

A Life Well Documented

Recently I realised that two seemingly completely different projects were, in fact, both facets of the same project. They both led me to putting more detail about my history into web sites and (once they are complete) this will mean that my life will become far better documented.

The first project started when I dug out an old box of photographs. I was relatively late into digital photography so I have huge numbers of photos which just linger in boxes and albums instead of being enjoyed on Flickr. Also in the box I found the negatives for most of the films so I decided to start getting the negatives scanned in and put on CDs (if anyone is interested, it looks like Boots are the cheapest place to get this done).

This scanning is still in progress, but when I got the first few CDs back I realised that there were lots of photos of holidays and that I only had the vaguest of ideas when some of these holidays took place. So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve done pretty much all I can to tie down the dates of all of the holidays I’ve taken in the last fifteen years. I’ve gone through old passports looking for stamps. I’ve searched for email confirmations of flight bookings. I’ve even gone through my invoicing records to see which days I didn’t invoice clients for (an unexpected advantage of being a freelancer). As I’ve been going through this process, I’ve been adding the trips to my Dopplr account.

The project has expanded from just covering holidays. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in that time and I’ve also added those details to Dopplr. I don’t think I’m very far from having a complete record of every conference and meeting that I’ve ever spoken at.

The other project which eventually led in the same direction was my discovery of Songkick. Songkick aims to produce a complete directory of gigs. Users can add details of gigs they attended and mark themselves as having been at gigs added by other people. Trying to track down the dates of obscure gigs you attended in the late 1980s turns out to be a surprisingly addictive pastime. I’m sure I’ll never get everything into my account, but it’s certainly fun trying. I don’t even mind that the first gig I ever attended was supremely embarrassing.

Songkick currently has one obvious omission. It would be great if they would publish a users list of gigs (or “gigography” as they call it) as an iCal feed so that I could subscribe to it in Google Calendar. I’m sure that something like that will be added to the site soon.

There’s an obvious crossover between these two projects of course. Some gigs (more usually, festivals) can also count as holidays. Every time I went to Glastonbury or the Cambridge Folk Festival, that’s going to need to be listed in both Dopplr and Songkick.

Two interesting projects. Neither of them will ever be 100% complete, but it’s fun trying to get as close as you can. Of course, they both appeal to the “High Fidelity” style list geek in me. If these tools had been available thirty years ago I would certainly have been using them. And that would have given me an incredibly rich set of data about how I spent my time. One that I’m now painfully trying to piece together a bit at a time.

I’m fast coming to the conclusion that you can’t ever have enough data about your life. I’m now looking for new data sets that I could add to my life history.

More on uSwitch

The people at uSwitch saw yesterday’s blog post and were rather pleased that I was so happy with their service. To show their thanks, they’ve written to me with an offer for my readers.

If you use this link to visit their site and change energy supplier before the end of June 2009, they will send you an Amazon voucher for £10. You’ll also (obviously) need to give them a valid email address so they have somewhere to send the voucher.

I don’t yet have a policy for promoting products on this site. Perhaps I should think about that if offers like this become more common. I should, however, point out firstly that I have no connection to uSwitch (I’m just a satisified customer) and secondly that I’m getting no payment for mentioning them again – the offer is just for my readers.

So, once again, here’s the link to use. The offer is valid until the end of this month. Which gives you about two weeks to make use of it.