Hooptedoodle #170b - Scammers - Thoughts at 3am

Well, I’m now getting daily phone calls from the scammers, so I guess we must be on some priority list or other. Unless something remarkable happens, this should be my last mention of phone scamming – these guys are already a huge drain on everyone’s funds, time and patience, and I’m probably one or two posts past the point of having said quite enough.

However, I do think that anything we can do to maintain awareness is worthwhile. I had a couple of emails in response to the Donkey Scammers posts which described some very tragic instances of people being victimised, and they served to remind me that, while ridiculing the perpetrators may help me to cope at a personal level with the affront offered by their mere existence, it stops some way short of actually making them amusing. I confess I have found this episode quite upsetting, and I am fortunate enough to be pre-equipped with an understanding of how the scam works, how to recognise the calls, and sufficient technical savvy and specific case history to fill in some gaps.

For the moderate sum of £75 I have now ordered a new, replacement, 3-handset phone which will enable us to solve this problem once and for all – it has a sophisticated range of options allowing the user to block selected individual numbers (including the one that just phoned), all international calls and a whole raft of other helpful alternatives, including a facility to accept or reject individual calls, identified by the user’s settings. I will not have to change my phone number (which would have been a catastrophic thing to do, and – since we are ex-directory anyway – would only give us a short relief before we were back on the scammers’ lists; I understand that they buy their lists from staff working for real phone companies; money will always win over security - of which more later).

This new kit will arrive Wednesday; a little set-up effort and we should be well protected. I still feel very uneasy – there is a brooding malevolence out there, somehow. A few days ago, when we put down the phone on a scam call without answering, the caller rang back and left a voice message. He said, “I know you are there, sir – I am going to call you all day until you speak to me”. We played it back a few times – there he is – the enemy – he even thinks this is funny. Creepy. He is, in fact, a creep.

Not a huge deal – we know he’s there, we aren’t going to answer (and he did try another 5 times in quick succession); it is reasonable to assume he can’t spare enough of his premium, dollar-earning time to waste in chasing us, and it would cost a lot of international call-time for him to deprive us of our phone service by staying on the line. We can, in any case, manage without our landline phone for a little while. So what the blazes is he playing at? He knows that we are not going to do business with him, that, apart from accidentally, we are not even going to pick up his call – we can see who and where he is from the caller display. No chance. Is he now prepared to commit some time to just causing a nuisance, trying to intimidate us?

God knows. I sincerely hope that his god knows. It does not help a great deal to know that he and his pals will move on and attempt to cause loss and damage to other innocent souls, but at least by Wednesday night we will be off the hook until someone thinks up a new scam.

That’s what is bothering me most – that is the Theme at Three in the Morning. There is a comedic side – years ago, when we were students, my cousin and I used to tell each other stories (usually in the pub) about the Land of Bong, where things were usually ridiculous extrapolations of what we saw around us in the Land of England.

At one point (mugging must have been a growth industry at the time – or at least was getting a lot of publicity) we explored a situation where mugging became such a successful way of earning a living that everyone abandoned any other form of employment, and became a mugger. That’s right – for a while (at least until 10:30pm one evening in the Rose of Mossley) the entire population of the Land of Bong became muggers – they roamed the city streets, trying in vain to find other muggers who still had watches or cash, breaking each others’ heads and having a generally unrewarding time. [Parallels with a modern economy in which everyone is in a service industry, or is a scammer, and nobody makes, mines or grows anything are interesting, but a digression at this point.]

Imagine, then, if the phone scamming industry is so successful, and is such a colossal currency earner, that eventually no-one in Mumbai or Kolkata does anything else – in particular, the police and security forces have disappeared. They can only prey on outsiders – and they are restricted to outsiders who speak a language they can more or less cope with [if you answer your phone and speak French they will hang up, at present]. Preying on outsiders has some other advantages – it is easier to be contemptuous of people from another culture, easier to be untroubled about the morality of one’s actions. [The term “mug” was a boon to muggers, since it implied that there was something wrong or comically incompetent about the victim, and thus that in some way his fate was partly his own responsibility]. But this is a growth industry – what happens when everyone they can possibly phone is already working in the same industry? When Rajasthan – or the whole world – turns into the Land of Bong?

My cousin and I realised, all those years ago, that a criminal industry only works if there is still a residual non-criminal world to feed off. This isn’t philosophy, just economics. The anarchy implicit in criminal action must not completely wipe out the ordinary, structured world which contains people with watches and cash, or it will starve itself to death. So there is a balance (by some bizarre, unhinged definition) which would seem to limit, for example, scamming activities. The calls have to be rare enough to still find people who haven’t had one before, and who don’t know what you are up to. They must also stop short of the point at which no-one answers the phone any more, or at which the counter-activity of building scam-proof phones becomes so general that it is too labour-intensive to get through to anyone. The bad news is that there is plenty more money to be made and damage to be caused in the short term, but the faint good news is that eventually the scam must become impotent – must become something that isn’t worth carrying on with. The evil in the world will have moved on to something else.

What really troubles me at 3am is a growing suspicion that our growing reliance on technology – especially the internet (of which I am an enormous fan, by the way) – provides such a rich field for the corrupt and the greedy that it may be doomed. One of the odd jobs I was given toward the end of my working career was as head of Technology Security at an insurance company, so I have thought a great deal about this stuff before. The technology itself has moved on since my day, of course, as has our complete reliance on secure internet banking and so on, but human frailty is constant.

Security is very largely an illusion. If you haven’t thought of that before then write it down, and hang it on the freezer. If the rewards for dishonesty are sufficient, you can buy anybody’s integrity. There is a basic principle of auditing which involves division of responsibility – a risky or high-value procedure must be carried out by a number of individuals or departments, independent of each other and with separate reporting and audit lines. Bunkum. It only works up to a point. If the pay-off is high enough, you can place as many of your own (corrupt) people as you want in all the separate positions – it is just a matter of cash. Anyone, whatever you might think, can be bought or overruled if there is enough of a reward.

At 3 o’clock this morning, my estimate was that there is about a 30% chance of a secure, trusted internet still being in use by 2025. I haven’t made any estimates yet for expected use of telephones. That sneering bastard on the answering machine is still out there.

Hooptedoodle #170 - Donkey Award - Even the Scammers Are Crap

Phone rang at 9 o’clock this morning. It was almost like a long-lost friend had called. I had spoken briefly to this presence when I answered the phone at my mother’s house a year or two ago, but they’ve taken a long time to get round to me. Now they were calling – I felt almost honoured.

A gentleman from the Indian subcontinent asked for me by name – he was polite, though his English wasn’t very good. The number showed in the caller display

008045550164

He said that there was “a problem with the Windows” and if I was near my computer I must help him to fix it. It would just take a few minutes, and I had to do this.

I told him I knew who he was, and where he was, and what he was doing. I told him that the call was being recorded (untrue), and could he please give me his name, so that I could pass it to the police?

“Oh no,” he said, “no need to go to all that trouble – this is the Windows Support, this is what I told you already.”

I know what happens next – the caller gets the victim to fire up Windows, to run eventvwr, displaying a supposed pile of (spurious) error codes. Then he gets him to sign up to some fake extended guarantee, which will require a credit card payment, and then he persuades him to allow remote access to his computer, where they can implant any malware they wish, and through which they can (and will) delete key system files if the card details turn out to be invalid, often demanding immediate payment to undo the damage.

Monday mornings are a bit low on excitement here, but I was (frankly) disappointed that the young man was untroubled by being told that I knew he was a villain, and was quite prepared to carry on where we had left off. I got bored with him and hung up. I am surprised they keep this going – the scam is famous – it has been widely known as the Microsoft (sic) Scam since about 2007. Obviously it must still be making money for them, though I would have thought that a credit card transfer was traceable – mostly I am surprised that the scammers have not been arrested or dismembered.

So – action point for today – if it isn’t there already, put the number I noted above in your phone’s directory, with the name LOW LIFE SCUM against it, so you know not to speak to them if they ring you. I am vaguely interested in where they got my phone number and name, and how they know my BT account details, since my phones are ex-directory and BT’s records are supposed to be confidential. Not to worry, but bad people are not usually as limp as these guys – my brush with them wasn’t even entertaining.

Poor show all round.

Hooptedoodle #134 – The Information Age and the Common Turnip

Occasionally I have a little go at Royal Mail here, and usually I get my knuckles rapped – there is great belief and customer loyalty out there. Since my last cheap poke at our worthy national carrier we have had a mighty hike in postage prices, a controversial privatisation and a bewildering – I hesitate to say nonsensical – new set of regulations concerning shapes and sizes of parcel. My appreciation of them has new lighting, some changes of script.

And yet they almost always deliver – if slower and more expensively than previously – so we have to be grateful. Mustn’t gwumble.

One of the services offered – at a cost, of course, is trackability. The idea that you can see exactly where your precious package has got to is very attractive, especially in the somewhat tense world of eBay, where a painstakingly-built reputation can be destroyed by a single accident in the post. I am saddened to observe that this service is neither so useful nor so reassuring as it once was. The last three or four attempts I have made to check progress on parcels (including a guaranteed-delivery item which was 2 days overdue) have discovered only that my item was “in progress”. Since I already had a paper receipt which confirmed that it was in progress, this was not a big help.

I doubt if the internal rules or guidelines have changed. I suspect that the RM staff have discovered it saves effort and generates some useful fog if they do not bother with a full log of the adventures of our tracked parcels. You can take a horse to water, you can provide the posties with a state of the art online information system, but you can’t force them to use the thing properly – especially if not using it makes accountability (and potential blame) easier to avoid. Students of Brehm's (or was it Marr's?) Boomerang Effect will be nodding sagely at this point.

The logging system does, of course, record successful delivery, but then we have normally been contacted already by the recipient if the package was in any way precious, and this is also Brownie Points time, so you would expect flawless record keeping at this stage.

International tracked packages have always been a joke, since they simply tell you that the package has left the UK, and is no longer visible to the RM system. It seems that inland tracked mail may be heading the same way – the only reason to make anything signed-for or to pay for a trackable service is to ensure the maximum amount of evidence in event of loss, and the insurance cover is normally better.

It’s not a real defence, but the competition are about the same – one nation-wide courier I used recently provided a tracking reference which for 4 days told me that my package was “in the system”. Thank you for that – that’s a relief. This represents a genuine downgrade; the previous time I used this same courier I got to follow my parcel from Harwich, to their West Bromwich depot, to Livingston, and eventually was told it was on the van and would be delivered between 4pm and 5pm. Now that’s more like it. Not only was that useful, but also quite exciting for a poor old soul who doesn’t get out much.

Somehow, “in the system” is not quite the same. I kept checking again later, naturally, to see if the message had changed to “what bloody parcel?”.

Hooptedoodle #130 – Technology Advances at Chateau Foy

I live in a very rural spot of South East Scotland, as I have mentioned here previously. We are not isolated in the sense that Canadians or Australians would recognise the term, but we are some miles from the nearest village (pubs, shops, post office) and we have so few neighbours that our immediate area is always well down any priority lists for infrastructure improvement. The nearest piped gas supply stops about 4 miles away, our broadband speed is so slow that it even surprises the local engineers, our electricity arrives via overhead cables, which run some miles across the farm fields and through gaps cut in the woods, and there is no mobile phone service here. By the standards of mainland Britain, this is a backwater.

The location suits us, and there are obviously a number of considerable advantages in living out here, but it is the last two of these small technical matters that this morning’s Blethering Sunday hooptedoodle will focus upon.

Rural charm

Subject 1 – Up the Pole

The oldest part of our house was originally a dairyman’s cottage, and was built around 1960. The area which is now our side garden (which, confusingly, is where the front door is) was originally the “drying green” for the little hamlet of farm cottages. We have a hefty wooden pole in the middle of the side lawn, which brings the electric power to the house. The garden has had new boundaries and been landscaped over the years, but I see no reason to suppose that the pole has ever been replaced since 1960.

It is part of the character of the place, and in Provence or somewhere it would seem quite charming to have overhead power cables, but our pole is not a source of pleasure in that way. Since a large neighbouring tree was removed a few years ago, the pole now dominates the garden, and it is not without some dangers. Kites are a very bad idea, water sprayers and hosepipes have to be kept out of the hands of children (in case they fry themselves), and there are numerous local stories of tree surgeons and roofers being killed by discharges arcing from these old cables. We cannot use a pressure spray to take moss off the roof, for example, for fear that the spray makes the God of the Pole angry, and he literally strikes us down. Thus all roof cleaning and repair has to be done with a lot of hand scraping and rather hushed conversation – to be on the safe side.

The ancient pole itself is rotting – on a summer afternoon, if there is no wind, you can hear the wasps munching away at it, deep in the cracks. Our chums at Scottish Power have occasionally come and looked at it, and promised that it will be replaced, but mostly their visits have been notable for fresh applications of very unsightly barbed wire – on the pole and on its anchor-stay – to frustrate our obvious enthusiasm to shin up the 20 feet or so and place a wet finger on the wires, to see what happens. Each time they go away, I take the law into my own hands and remove the barbed wire – if I wish to electrocute myself, I have no desire to hurt myself on the wire on the way up, and I certainly don't want to look at the stuff on a regular basis.

When the pole was last inspected in 2012, the young fellow from Scottish Power said it would be replaced very soon. I asked him was there any chance of the new pole being re-sited in the lane outside our garden, which would give a straighter run for the cabling, would move the wires to a new location, away from our front steps (so the pigeons could no longer sit in a row and defecate on visitors), and would improve the safety of the place quite a bit and the appearance very considerably. The SP man peered at me from beneath his yellow hardhat with the sort of nervous look which is correctly used when dealing with dangerous lunatics (I believe it is part of their training), and mumbled something about regulations and cable spans and planning permission – then he left.

They have returned. A much older man arrived last month, announced that the replacement of the pole was imminent, and – with hardly any prompting from us – suggested that it would be much better to place the new pole outside in the lane (exactly where we wanted it) and, provided the farmer didn’t object, they would be back to carry out the work in April.

Well, the days are accomplished. The pole has been installed. The cables have not been attached yet, but we are booked for a day without electricity on Wednesday, when the cables will be replaced with modern ones. This is such an unexpected stroke of good fortune that we are still expecting something to go wrong, but the pole is here, and it’s standing up, and I can’t see SP wasting their time and money to change it again. All being well, our hated pole will be gone by next weekend. The only people who will not be pleased are the family of sparrows who are living in an illegal nesting box (above the barbed wire line) on the pole itself, but there must always be a little collateral damage.

Good – we’ll give this a very large tick. The sparrows will have more babies in future years.

All right - no laughter, please...

Subject 2 – The Dreaded Smart-Phone

I have a very ancient mobile phone – it is so old, in fact, that the sales assistant in Phones4U burst out laughing when he saw it yesterday. I was not embarrassed – I was quite proud of it. I should have done something about my mobile years ago, but I hardly use it, and I am currently paying my network supplier some £18 a month for something which gives me hardly any benefit at all. How stupid is that?

As mentioned earlier, my home is a dead spot on the mobile networks – no service at all. When I was running my little publishing business, and travelling around a bit, I used my mobile a lot, and could not have managed without it. Without that context, my phone is now an expensive nuisance for most of the time. It is useful when I go away, or out in the car, but I only really need to make the occasional call and send the odd text – I have been known to take photos, but rarely.

The rest of the world, of course, cannot understand this. Despite my requests that they should not use my mobile number, friends and businesses constantly make calls which I do not receive. Courier deliveries and internet banking security procedures now do not work properly if you do not have a working mobile. Service engineers for utilities and domestic hardware will request a mobile number, so they can text and tell us when they are likely to arrive. If you do not have a working mobile, pal, you are not a citizen.

There is a whiff of comedy when I drive away from home, up the lane and off the farm. There is a sound like a genteel fire alarm, which is the accumulated urgent text messages from the last couple of days chiming through as I head towards the real world. By the time I get to the public road – maybe a mile away – the display shows a handsome network service, ready to meet all my demands. The thing which really niggles is that I am paying £18 per month for this joke, and it is all my own fault, since I have not done anything about it before now.

The network provider keeps urging me to upgrade my phone, which hardly seems worthwhile if I don’t use it. Thus my wife and all the sensible people have moved on, and bought modern phones, while I still live in a bygone age. A friend of mine visited recently, and – of course – his mobile didn’t work, but he has an app installed on his iPhone which enables him to register with my house wi-fi, and he could then receive and make calls through the internet quite satisfactorily.

Aha.

The rest of the world almost certainly is aware of all this and uses it every day, but it had eluded me until now. Yesterday I travelled to Edinburgh (on the train, with a loaf of bread and my old phone in a knotted handkerchief, on a stick over my shoulder) and went to talk to the nice people in the phone shops. Goodness, what a lot of them there are…

I had to get someone to talk me out of this loop – don’t want a smartphone since no service at home and not worth the expense, but only way to get a decent service at home is with a smartphone. I think I now have a way ahead. I can change my contract so that the monthly allowances are so much better I can hardly believe it, and they will provide me with a posh new phone so that I can use them, and the monthly payment will go down to three-quarters of what it is now. If I provide my own phone it will be even cheaper – about half. It all hinges on whether the mobile actually works at my house under this new arrangement. The sales guy at EE (I am an Orange customer) reckons it will, but then he has the faith, which I do not.

They have offered to lend me a SIM card for a fortnight so I can try it out. Seems sensible.

So I am approaching a big decision point – if it works, I will join the ranks of the detestable smartphone users, and my life will change forever (aaargh!); if it doesn’t, I shall probably hang on to my existing museum-exhibit and switch to a cheap, pay-as-you-go arrangement which suits my minimal usage.

I had a trial play with my wife’s iPhone yesterday – it seems very good – I quite fancy that. The only hang-ups I have are

(1) the cost of the phone

(2) the fact that it offers a vast array of features, games, music, ridiculous apps and so on that I am not the slightest bit interested in

(3) I have to rise above my virulent dislike of smartphones, and the very serious damage they have done to education, literacy, the workings of society and a number of other trifling areas

Yesterday I sat on the train into Edinburgh and it was almost silent. Nobody speaks, so as you would notice. Everyone is texting, so presumably they must have some friends somewhere else – unless, of course they were texting the person in the next seat. The other day, I sat in a coffee bar in a bookshop in Haddington, reading, when three ladies arrived at the next table – greeted each other warmly, ordered coffee and cakes, and then got out their iPhones and ignored each other for the next 20 minutes. Terrific – I don’t want to get like that – even a bit. The fact that I have no mates might help out a lot here.

How can we have such an overkill of communications technology, when hardly anyone has anything worthwhile to say? How can we have such an overprovision of phone apps which we do not really need and which waste more time than anyone can sensibly afford? How can anyone ever get any peace, or have a worthwhile idea, if they spend their lives with their heads jammed up their backsides?

Don’t tell me how busy you are if you spend a quarter of your day gawping at crap online, or sending non-messages to your pals. If you choose to do it, then no problem, but it is a choice – you are not really busy. Get a life. And do not answer your phone or check your texts while you are speaking to me, or I shall throw the thing into the nearest pond.

LOL

Hooptedoodle #95 - The Wrong Tariff

I spent some time this weekend sorting out my mother’s account with BT – that’s British Telecom, who provide her with (predictably) broadband and telephone services. She is a customer of BT largely because I am one, and I am one because part of the bewildering network of BT companies – Openreach – provides and maintains the cabling and the communications infrastructure in this corner of the world; I chose to avoid getting stuck in the middle of the finger-pointing exercise which invariably follows any problem with a slow, precarious country broadband service if you have separate suppliers who can pass the blame on to each other.

Apart from my lack of enthusiasm for their customer helplines, I find BT OK. It takes a bit of constant monitoring to make sure we get value for money, but they probably compare favourably at present with our alternative suppliers.

Someone else's mum

My mum’s problem was that she had got stuck in The Wrong Tariff. I myself am in what I consider to be The Correct Tariff with BT, but only because I have the time, the knowledge and the resources to put regular effort into monitoring my bills online, and keep tabs on the constantly changing product names and complicated pricing arrangements which telecoms firms – and much of the rest of the commercial world – use to con us out of our money, not to mention our time. My mum would not know where to start. I know how to do it, but increasingly I begrudge the effort required, and – increasingly – I am not sure why we have to keep up this struggle.

Some specifics – I just know you want some details of my mother’s account.

When my mum got broadband set up – primarily so that she could do her shopping online – we agreed to what was called BT Total Broadband 2, which allowed her rather more data-shifting capacity than she was ever likely to require, and also got her a complementary licence for anti-virus and firewalling from McAfee. For actual land-line phone calls, she was offered a deal called Unlimited Weekends and Evenings, which requires a standing charge of £2 a month, and allows you – that’s right – free calls to UK land-line numbers in defined off-peak hours plus some other discounts on calls to mobiles in those periods.

And, since about March 2008, that contract has been running happily. Every month, BT send a direct debit request to her bank, and convenience reigns withal. This month she got a letter from BT telling her that, since her current monthly debit is not meeting costs, she has run up a bit of a debt, and thus they will be increasing her payments to an amount which surprised me. My mum is 88 and pretty deaf, and uses the Internet about twice a month to get her groceries ordered. So I set up online billing for her with BT, and we had a good look at what’s what.

Wrong Tariff.

Because of her circumstances, she makes all her phone calls during the day. She is (sadly) running out of people she might wish to phone in the evenings, and the concept of a weekend is meaningless when you are 88. My mother is paying full price for all her phone calls. Also, her broadband usage is trivial, and the free McAfee package is so awful that we replaced it ages ago with a free Microsoft product which works better and is less of a nuisance.

Wrong Tariff – and, because we should have spotted it and done something about it before now, I have the additional burden that it is our – well, my – fault. If at any time I had called up BT and complained about value for money, they would have said – quite correctly – that we were getting what we asked for and signed up for.

Quite so

By reducing the service level to basic, no-frills broadband, and changing the phone contract details to Unlimited Anytime (£7 a month), as from 9^th September, her monthly costs will now drop from £59 to £35, which is important if you are a pensioner. The infuriating things about this are:

(1) Her use of BT services will be exactly the same, whatever the contract is called.

(2) BT claim that they keep a paternal eye on your account, to make sure that you are in the best-value, most suitable contract and that your payments are adequate. Bollocks.

(3) BT’s focus – in common with everyone else’s nowadays – is the new customer. By definition, anyone who is an old customer is a mug and should be stiffed mercilessly until they notice and complain about it. I call this “The Negative Loyalty Bonus”. It is everywhere – don’t get me started. In the last few years, we have had major fights about pricing with our insurance company, our supplier of domestic LPG, our mobile phone companies, our BANKS (aargh!), etc etc. In most cases, we ended up changing suppliers, and saved a lot of money, but many people don’t, and many people just keep on handing over cash they can’t afford.

I’ll spare you the rant about Aviva, BP, Royal Bank of Scotland and all the others – maybe for another day. This is now business as usual. I hate it. Let me end with two short stories about lightbulb moments in my economic education – I apologise if I come across as unreasonably trusting or naïve in these, but I tell it as it is.

My background includes a lot of study, including some heavy, classical economics, but I come from a druidic, actuarial world in which the prices of things are worked out scientifically with great precision, and the dirty spirit of competition sneaks into pricing only at the last minute, to ensure that one might actually sell something occasionally. The concept of someone getting ripped off is not incomprehensible, but certainly alien to my upbringing.

Story 1 – the Man from Swissair

In the days when I was in salaried employment, and before I made the strategic error of becoming unfashionably old, I used to get sent on what were laughingly described as management training courses. I can only assume they offered my employer a source of tax-deductible expense. The main, maybe the only, attraction of these was that I got to meet some interesting people.

On one course, there was a fellow from Swissair, and he described for my benefit that strange phenomenon which occurs on aeroplanes, where no two people may have paid the same price for their tickets, though they will consume the same food and fuel and arrive in the same place at the same time. Neanderthal that I was, I had never really thought about this before. The most interesting bit came at the end. There is a point, he said, where the tickets sold cover the cost of the flight, and anything at all you can make on any further empty seats is a bonus.

Thus the fact that business class passengers from Geneva to NYC in those days were paying £1400 a pop was irrelevant. Once the flight was paid for, any remaining seats could be sold for almost nothing. If the extra passenger would require say £50 worth of extra fuel and food, then he might fly for £50.50 and you would have made a profit of 50 pence.

Yes, I know that everyone understands this, but for me it was a lightbulb.

Story 2 – Price Guarantees

A kid who was a friend of one of my older sons got a job for six months before he went to college. He worked as assistant manager in a computer game store, on a shopping mall on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He was seventeen and a half, and he knew nothing about anything, but he explained to me how price guarantees work.

In his store there were notices up on the walls, which said something like

“If you can purchase any product from a physical shop within 12 miles of here for less than we sold it to you, we will gladly refund the difference”

And then, of course, they deliberately cranked up their prices by about 5%, right across the board, so they knew they were more expensive than the competition.

If anyone spotted a cheaper product elsewhere, remembered the guarantee, still had the receipt and could be bothered paying to travel all the way out to the outskirts of the city, the shop would happily, smilingly make the promised refund. Have a nice day. However, in reality, hardly anyone ever came back. The deliberately inflated prices made them a lot of extra profit – in some cases doubled the mark-up on specific products.

This applies in big, respectable department stores as much as nerd shops. If your local John Lewis publicizes such a price guarantee, it’s a pretty safe bet (said my young tutor) that they know their prices are high to start with, and they are chancing it.

Lightbulb.

Hooptedoodle #93 - Trending with Bernard

I am quite a fan of Spotify, the online music service – so much so that I actually pay for it, and I don’t know many people who do that. Thus I find it a little disappointing that Spotify is trying to condition me. I almost feel a bit betrayed.

See what your friends have been listening to, it urges.

Why on earth would I want to do that? Not so much because I don’t actually have friends, I hasten to add, but because, though I really hope my friends are enjoying their choice of music, I am not likely to be influenced one way or the other. And just a minute – what friends are these? Does it know who my friends are? I get a faint whiff of decaying spam – is it possible that Facebook is involved somewhere here?

Ah yes – social networking. How nice.

Maria Seadyke is trending near you, says Spotify.

Who? – who is doing what?

You recently listened to Mantovani, says Spotify, why don’t you have a listen to Beethoven?

Well now, I don’t believe I have heard or even thought about Mantovani in forty years, and any connection with Beethoven seems a bit – how do you say? – oblique. This is an area where Spotify really goes to town on being helpful. The links for the suggestions are certainly lateral – tenuous to the point of blatant stupidity, though it may be ungracious of me to put it like that.

You listened to Loudon Wainwright III, it says – you might like Leadbelly.

Well in fact I do like Leadbelly – in fairly short bursts  - but any possible similarity to LW3 eludes me, apart from the fact that they are/were both men who play guitar and sing. Just as mystifyingly, I find that Spotify seems to associate Otis Redding with Louis Armstrong, James Taylor with Richie Havens, Fleetwood Mac with Mud (that’s a very strange one – does anyone remember Mud?) and Thomas Newman with Samuel Barber.

My first reaction to this was that it must be some kind of expert system, something which interprets real marketing data and makes predictions based on what it has learned, but I have come to doubt it. I can’t believe that any expert system of this type would be quite so spectacularly dumb. I have decided (privately, like – for my own amusement) that these helpful suggestions for improving my quality of life are produced by a real intelligence – someone who has my best interests at heart. I find that I have attached a sort of personality to this being – I call him Bernard. No matter if he is a robot. I have come to spot signs of evidence of the presence of Bernard with something approaching affection. That he is rather a stupid robot makes him even more likeable – he even gets a sympathy vote.

Ah – there you are, Bernard, I say as I am informed that some punter named Jessie has uploaded a personal playlist which might interest me. How are you this morning? How’s the moonlighting going?

Because, you see, I have become aware that Bernard works for other online firms as well.

eBay, for a start, informs me that people who, like me, recently bought a bag of 27 broken lead soldiers from the 1960s also bought a vintage map of Leeds and a replacement exhaust pipe for a Vauxhall Astra. That has to be Bernard – you can recognize his style. Nice one, Bernard – that was good even by your high standards.

On Amazon, he has blossomed into a full email service.

Since you recently bought a book from us, says Amazon [come on, Bernard, that’s a bit broad – you can do better than that], you may be interested in the new best-selling paperback that Jeffrey Archer is about to dump on us [no – I told you it was too broad].

Or one of my favourites: We hope you enjoyed your recent purchase of “Campaigning for Napoleon” by Maurice de Tascher, and thought you might be interested in “Campaigning for Napoleon” by Maurice de Tascher.

Excellent – that’s really good, Bernard. I know you’re there – it comforts me, warms my heart, to know that you are still watching over us in this harsh, cruel world.

Mind you, there are some things that Bernard does which I haven’t quite got the hang of yet. No doubt I’ll come to appreciate these as well, but I’m still thinking about them. I just have to trust in him, I suppose. Recently I was looking in Amazon for books by Alan Bennett and by Charles J Esdaile (which makes me wonder what Bernard would make of that for a combo). As it happens, I didn’t buy anything, but within a day or two my spam filter caught emails from both of these gentlemen, asking me to be their friend on Facebook. As far as I know, Prof Esdaile is alive and well and probably writing another six books on the same topic as I sit here, but Alan Bennett is certainly as dead as the proverbial flightless bird from Mauritius, east of Madagascar (as opposed to Mauritius, Lancs).

Bernard, was that you? I’m not at all sure about that one. That maybe wasn’t in the best of taste. And while I’m thinking about it, was that you that spotted my search for the Conde de Penne Villemur on Google yesterday, and put adverts for pasta products on the screen when I visited Amazon later in the day? That was pretty clever, but please don’t do it again. And what are all these ads on my email browser for mature women in Thailand? – how am I going to explain those?

It’ll all be fine – I know it will. Bernard will sort it all out.