Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Finally found some time to try to get through to Orange again. This time they answered their phone significantly faster although it was a lady with quite a strong accent who was difficult to understand at times. When I asked her about all the charges for Orange World Access she had the cheek to try and pass the buck to e2save and when I broke through the flaw in her logic she went quiet for more than a minute despite me repeatedly asking if there was anybody there!

Apparently e2save turned on these extra internet services and gave them to me for free for the first three months. After that they made Orange charge me for it. The rather large flaw I saw in this argument was that Orange gave them the facility to do that to my account, and then proceeded to bill me for it, and not e2save. I would say about 30% e2save's fault for quite dishonest business practices, and 70% Orange's fault but you tell me what your opinion is on that one.

Apparently she was being very generous offering to stop these charges immediately and rebate one month. Apparently the fact that I never asked for these services, never used them but still paid for them is quite beside the point. I let her know that they had obviously lost a customer with this terrible service but I really must find the time to get some addresses for the industry watchdog as this is very poor behaviour even if they are somehow staying within the law.

It really makes me despair to see service dropping to levels this low. With attitudes like, "Well you didn't notice very quickly so it is OK for us to charge you for things you didn't ask for"! May be all the providers are behaving this way now but I certainly never had any of this with T-Mobile, I just fancied a change and always thought Orange was supposed to be quite good. Now I am stuck with them until the end of my contract but my bills have been ?15 a month or so higher with Orange than T-Mobile and my useage remains pretty much unchanged...

Over the last week I have spent a couple of days making sure I had done all the paperwork, completed the last few exams and went through knowledge reviews. Then I got roped into doing the open water course with Lucy and Craig, with Gordon divemastering too. Unfortunately he got caught in traffic and it was just me until Sunday when Mick ended up divemastering too.

Mark and Lynda did our supervising certified divers in open water dive and it was a tough dive with lots of interesting issues. We got through it in the end though! Once I get some photos of myself that I can live with on my certification cards (as Mark warned me they keep this picture instead of using a new one each time) I will send off my application. I am really pleased I have finished the course, I have learnt a lot and it has been really tough at points but it was definitely worth it.

I probably won't do much more diving in the UK until next year now as I don't have a dry suit (or the money to get one). That is probably a good thing so I can devote more time to writing up my thesis as that has slipped behind schedule a little. I will probably manage one or two pleasure dives before the end of November, and then I will have to wait until Egypt at the end of January. Hopefully all of our open water students had a good weekend and enjoyed the diving too.

I am afraid it is time for another rant! This time it is Orange UK. I switched to them from T-Mobile as I thought the grass might be greener on the other side. How wrong I really was on that one. Whenever I need to phone I get the standard recorded message "We are currently receiving a very high number of calls...please hold..." and I have been on hold for more than 60 minutes now! I find that absolutely disgraceful and the reason I am hold is to talk to them about services they are charging me for that I never asked for.

I really am beside myself in disbelief. Once my contract period is up I will be moving as soon as I possibly can. My bills have been higher with them, my phone occasionally tells me I have an inactive SIM and won't make or receive calls (they are apparently working on that issue) and their phone lines take forever to get through to people. I am giving up now as I really don't have the time to wait on hold for an hour or more to speak to someone. I will have to give them a try tomorrow or something.

I know I will be moving my mobile account somewhere else once my contract is over with them. Is this typical of Orange? I always got the impression they were a little pricier but were really good otherwise - I am guessing this impression may have been wrong now. Looks like the time they take to answer my call is going to exceed the capacity of the battery in my mobile phone! Rant over for now.

On Friday the 13th of October I set out with Mark (buddy) and Vonnie (surface cover) to do my mapping project at Stoney Cove. As we were driving down it looked very foggy, but we were certain it would clear, probably... As we got closer the car engine started to act strange and I started to worry a little about the mechanical viability of our car! It got us there but the fog still hadn't cleared. We were nearly an hour late in getting started and I was beginning to worry we wouldn't even be able to see the buoys once we had them in position.

Nethertheless we perservered and got ready. We went over my plan and took the buoys down to the waters edge. After doing our buddy checks we dropped in off the slipway and dropped down towing a buoy each. As we dropped down I spotted the road and we followed it to the edge of the 22m shelf, then followed that round until we found the cairn. Eventually we found the cairn (I was beginning to worry) and then took a sharp left. Once we hit the coach I was feeling much happier and we tied Mark's buoy off onto the coach making sure the line didn't have too much slack in it.

I took a few pictures and then we headed off for the Stanegarth. I was surprised by how quickly we found the Stanegarth - I always think it is much further away from the coach. As we were securing this buoy to the bow I began to wonder just how much slack I had left for the buoy on the bus - was it still above water? Once the buoy was tied off we had ten minutes to explore the Stanegarth a little before heading off for the 4m blockhouse.

Neither of us had ever seen the blockhouse, and I didn't have a bearing for it. So we headed off on a north-easterly bearing until we hit the wall and ascended to 6m. After that we just followed the wall round and in theory we would see the blockhouse. Theory proved correct and we did find the blockhouse although it seemed devoid of nice places to secure a buoy. We settled on a medium sized rock as the best thing we could find. We even found a pike willing to pose for us before heading for the surface.

Then it was time to take our bearings. Thankfully the coach buoy was above the surface (half submerged though - phew) and the fog had cleared. So we could get bearings on all our objects. I checked Vonnie had seen us on the surfacebefore we started taking bearings. Then we swam to the Stanegarth buoy we had placed on the bow (I was surprised to see just how long the Stanegarth is with the permanent buoy on the stern). We took bearings from this buoy and the pub arch before leaving the water and having some lunch.

We got some air fills over lunch and dropped back in to retrieve our buoys. Before doing that we had to take some more bearings off the bus stop and the coach buoy. We collected up our buoys very quickly and looked around the Stanegarth a little more before heading back with our buoys. We did a very slow midwater ascent whilst collecting in the rope from our buoys on the way up. We had all our bearings and our buoys back and so it looked like the mapping project was done with.

We did a third dive in the shallows under the pub arches, around the Nautilus and back around the blockhouse to finish off the day before heading back home to fill in log books. Looking at the bearings I obtained for the day they seem to make sense and look reasonably accurate. Despite it being Friday the 13th - I have never been a superstitious person and so this day was chosen as Mark could get the day off and we didn't want to be playing with buoys on a crowded weekend.

This was the last practical exercise for my PADI divemaster qualification and so I should hopefully be ready to qualify at the end of the month. My PhD does seem a little further off though...

Just to balance out my blog a little I thought I would add a note about what a nice weekend I had doing my trainee divemaster internship with Tigerdive last weekend at Capernwray dive centre. I was helping Lynda with the Advanced Open Water course. We had four students who were all really nice. They had a few small problems but overall the whole weekend seemed to go really well.

I got to feed the fish, I got the last of the open water dive sign offs I need for my PADI divemaster course and we had a great weekend. The trainee divemasters also qualified on the Saturday evening - hopefully I will do the same at the end of the month. I stayed at Capernwray house just down the road instead of camping this weekend and it was a great place to stay. Should hopefully be staying there on my last trainee weekend too.

I got a great tired diver tow time and completed my rescue assessment too. The course has been pretty tough but I feel like the end is in sight now. I just need to get a few more exams done and complete my mapping exercise. I have really enjoyed diving over the summer and am glad I took up the divemaster course. It has been tough finding the time necessary as I am also very busy writing up my thesis which is a little delayed right now. I should really get some sleep now...

Had a bit of a slow start to the day. Louise left for work at 9ish and I stayed in bed for a while. Got a few things done this morning before getting showered and ready for a late start in the office... Got out to the car to find some little vandals had just broken through the small window in the front of the drivers side door right outside our house in broad daylight

Most unhappy about this I phoned the police on their non-emergency number - the crime had happened already so I couldn't see how it was still an emergency. Woman answered the phone, I told her I wanted to report a car crime, she asked me what area and put me through. I then spent more than ten minutes on hold! Once I finally get through to someone he just took all my details and gave me my crime number.

I was quite shocked he even bothered to send someone round to our house, but a few hours later a police officer came to dust for prints (far better than a few years ago when something similar happened). He quickly came to the conclusion there weren't any useable prints and left. My day was pretty much wasted by this point and then I got to figure out how to get it fixed.

It cost us nearly a hundred pounds to get the window fixed. The thieves took got my favourite sunglasses, although I think they cost less than £10 and some parking change (both in the glove box which was closed). I really don't know why this is allowed to go on in this day and age. The police just advise you not to have anything in your car, we already spend about £80 on a big steering lock and other bits of security equipment.

We are sick and tired of this area. I think this has made me decide it is about time we looked at moving to a nicer area. All the garbage about regeneration is a waste of time, the council/police/authorities have no clue how to make this area any better. This has also prompted me to add a new category to my blog for rants, I had thought about adding it before. I think too often I and others are silent about things like this. I doubt it will do much good but I think these issues should be discussed.

I am going to veg out in front of the TV and try to cheer up about living in an area ruled by yobs...