BT drop to new low in candour and honesty

I've just wasted five minutes having been suckered by BT - and nearly cost myself a lot more, too.


BT tried to entice me to pay for a year's line rental in advance, and offered a juicy discount for doing so. I carefully scanned the list of features, looking to see whether this involved my routing calls via BT (rather than much-cheaper ICUK who I currently use).

Things you need to know about Line Rental Saver

• Only available with paper-free billing (view your bill online and receive no paper bill)
• You must set up Direct Debit to cover any call changes made throughout the year
• You need to make at least two BT calls per month to avoid monthly charge of £1.50 being added to your bill
• Line Rental Saver payment is non-refundable
• At the end of the 12 months you'll revert to monthly line rental unless you tell us otherwise
• If you currently get a discount for paper-free billing, this will stop
• Some calling plans aren't available with Line Rental Saver. If this is the case we'll let you know and you can then choose to change your Calling Plan or remain on monthly line rental

Nothing there about shifting my calls - two calls a month via BT is something I can live with.


So I waded through the screens declining all the extras BT wanted me to buy, and there at the final screen was a minor detail that they had forgotten to mention at the outset:

By completing this order you are agreeing to switch your calls back to BT.


Oh, didn't they mention that at the outset? They didn't explicitly ask me whether I was OK about this. How careless of them only to slip it in at the last minute along with a lot of other verbiage. 


When a company is gifted a monopoly, I reckon they need to try extra hard not to come across as taking advantage of that to bully their customers. 


BT seem not to agree. This reinforces my dislike of the company and makes it a long time before I will invest the effort in exploring any temptations they may try on me.

Welcome to Nottingham?

Is Nottingham serious about attracting visitors?


Visit the City Council's What's On listings to see the my nomination for Most Pathetic Information Website Of The Year award (and if there is no such award, there should be one).


Start looking through their list of an impressive 3556 events, and it won't be long before you are questioning your sanity. Surely 6th May is a Friday, but here is "Community Retail Market - Tuesdays Only". A slip perhaps? No - there it is again on Saturday, along with Javier Perianes - Sunday Morning Series . 


What's happening? It seems that any event that happens more than once is listed on every single day between its first instance and its last - with the days of operation appended to the title to try and atone for the irrelevance. So the user is expected to wade through dozens of nonsense entries to try and find out what is on offer. Forget it, we'll try Sheffield instead.


Have Nottingham bought/signed up to a rubbish events system that can't cope with events happening on a number of occasions that aren't consecutive? If so, that's quite an achievement.


Or do they have a system that could show the information properly, but the staff don't know how to use it properly?


Either way, Nottingham are doing nothing for the notion that the public sector can be trusted to spend money competently. Shame on them.