Can I just say a big hello to the folks over at the Daily who, despite being one of only two group blogs nominated for Best Blog in B4L’s Blog Awards (which, if you look at the voting system in use doesn’t half confer an advantage over us solo bloggers) is, so far as I know, the only nominee to openly shill for votes.

Hey, if it means that much to you - take it. I just do this for fun!

To make matters rather more ironic, Iain Dale currently leads the field in the ‘Wooden Spoon’ award having been nominated for failing to apologise to Phil Dilks for not printing a libellous statement about him that appeared in the Mail on Sunday, earlier this year, only to find today that Iain has withdrawn certain comments made by Paul Offer, regarding his resignation as PPC for the City of Chester, from his own blog…

UPDATE: I have just had a call from a senior member of Chester Conservatives, who was not willing to go on the record, but disputes many of the allegations made in Paul Offer’s statement. He asked me to remove one passage which is considered defamatory. On reflection I have agreed to do so.

…that currently feature prominantly in Phil’s coverage of the same story.

Far be it from me to interfere, but having read the comment in question I have to say that I think Phil would be well advised to take the view that discretion is the better part of valour on this occasion, his recent success in his own libel action against the Mail making him just that little bit too tempting are target for his own comfort, if not for the money then for the spectacle of seeing him hoisted on his own petard.

Glass houses, Phil.

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Seriously, can I just add that although this (the Blog Awards) is all a bit of fun as far as I’m concerned and definitely not to be taken seriously, this is not an invitation to go over there and vote for me (hey, I got nominated which is nice, but no big deal), especially if you’re not a Labour member or supporter (or regular visitor to B4L) as I know many of my regular visitors aren’t.

Call me a bit old fashioned but when I found out I’d been put forward I kind of had in my own mind the idea that this should kept an ‘in-house’ thing for us lefties, and a fair-ish reflection of our own online community, which is why I’ve not mentioned it before now.

So please, let things run their natually course, even if it does mean that Iain gets the ‘Wooden Spoon’. I’m sure he’s big enough to take it, although how he’ll react to beating Mad Mel, Nick Griffin and ‘Britney British‘ (surely the Bastard offspring of Mad Mel, Nick and a shellsuit) is anyone’s guess.

What would say the collective noun for morons is?

If the last couple of weeks is anything to go by, the answer is ‘Call Centre’.

Like a lot of people, my partner had a store card with a very well known retailer of children’s clothing - at least up until January this years, when she paid off the balance and instructed the company to close the account.

Of course, children’s clothing retailers don’t run their own financial services departments, they outsource this kind of thing to a specialist company - in this case Creation Financial Services Limited, which is based in Solihull.

So all very simple then - my partner makes the payment, the company takes the payment and then closes the account.

But no, it’s not quite that simple… because they didn’t manage to do the last bit and close the fucking account - not that my partner was ever made aware of that small omission.

At the end of September, my partner suddenly receives an invoice showing a balance of £29.99 on this account for a single transaction which reads only as “cpp payment default’ - this being the first missive of any sort from this company since the account was ‘closed’.

So, naturally, she queries this using the only contact number she has to hand, which is the customer services department of the retailer - only to find that they haven’t got the foggiest idea what any of this is about. Nothing to do with us, contact Creation.

Oh, and by the time, the payment that she doesn’t owe the company is late, so that’s a £10 late fee (plus VAT) already added to a bill she doesn’t owe.

So, next we contact Creation - in writing. The reason we put this writing is twofold, first to ensure that we have a proper record of correspondence and second because we don’t have a phone number for them, or at least not one that doesn’t necessitate being stuck in a queue for ages on a national rate line, running up our phone bill - we did try but got pissed off after 15 minutes.

And we got a letter back - the mysterious cpp Merchant Default is for a year’s cover under their card protection plan (that’s for a card that was destroyed in January relating to an account that was closed at the same time) but sorry, nothing to do with us, you need to talk to the insurance company.

Oh, and by the way, have another late payment fee on us.

My partner phoned me at work a short while age - she’s not received a default notice for insurance she doesn’t want on an account she closed 10 months ago for a card she no longer has - and can I try an sort the idiots out.

Get on the phone using the number we now have from this last letter and, lo and behold, I’m through to the trained call centre chimp in a matter of a minute - but then this is the credit collection department.

Run through the account number, give my partners name and out address, explain the problem and in return I get ‘can’t discuss the account with you, you’re not the account holder, and in any case its the insurance companies problem’.

No, you complete fucking shithead, it is not the insurance company’s problem - its your fucking peoblem.

It works like this - if you’d done what you were told in January, and closed the fucking account, then there would be no fucking account to be insured and therefore no insurance premium to be paid, no invoices, no late payment charges, no default notice and I would not be wasting my precious time on the fucking phone trying to explain all this to a complete dickhead who, so far as one can reasonably ascertain, seems congenitally incapable of taking a shit unless given explicit instructions on a company-issued and approved fucking script.

Look, you complete and utter twat.

I don’t need you to give me any information at all about this account or the person to whom it relates, it’s my partner, we’ve lived together for a long time and we have two kids, which is why she had the fucking store card in the first place.

Having rapidily ascertained that you are too fucking stupid to understand the problem, let alone sort it out, all I need you to do is put a note on your system to say that I’ve called, that I’m just a little bit pissed off with all this and that I’ll be back in touch in due course once I’ve settled down sufficiently to write you a letter with using the word ‘cunt’ several times.

Yep, a call centre of morons it most certainly is…