The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Raid]

What the actual fuck is Sky doing as a business?

They're getting paid £70 a month for TV by millions of people and still absolutely filling their air time, which is more valuable because of the number of people signed up, with adverts. Losing the odd person that can actually be bothered to go through all the rigmarole you've put up with to quit, probably isn't worrying them all that much.

[Wrathbone]

I should point out that the £66 a month is just for the broadband. I don't have Sky TV.

[Raid]

Oh I know, and that's ridiculous in itself (I pay half that for a connection I very rarely max out from BT), I was just meaning they have colossal amounts of income.

[Stormbringer]

I should point out that the £66 a month is just for the broadband. I don't have Sky TV.

My goodness. I'm on TalkTalk; I get a 1Gb full-fibre connection for £28 per month.

[Mantis]

I'm on 320mb (or around that, might be slightly different) with PlusNet and I pay about 31 quid a month ish and it's a full fibre connection.

Always found them to be reliable and the couple of occasions where I had a problem they resolved it quickly.

The big names in the business just have too many customers giving them easy money to ever bother actually offering a good standard of customer service. Sack the lot of them off.

[Sly Boots]

Yeah, I recently moved (back) to Plusnet after BT jacked up their prices, were with Plusnet for ages prior to that and never had issues with them.

The slightly amusing thing is apparently BT owns Plusnet, so everyone involved in that transaction ended up pretty happy with things.

[Wrathbone]

I was with Plusnet for a couple of years and had several issues. The router was bloody awful and needed restarting regularly and their customer service - the thing which they parade about as their best feature - was horrific. The worst instance was when they had a UK-wide outage that lasted about 8 hours and there were zero updates on it anywhere. They didn't even acknowledge it and they certainly never apologised for it.

[Raid]

I work on a university campus, overlooking the main square. This comes with a certain amount of noise; protests, the occasional charity fundraiser with people cheering, that sort of thing. I don't really hold it against anyone as universities are supposed to be lively places. Today though there's a DJ playing the worst 90s and early 2000s dance music I've heard since, well, the 90s and early 2000s. It's the type of music that we seemed to immediately forget as soon as tastes moved on, and is presumably older than all of our current undergrads. It's so loud that my phone, sitting on the desk next to me, is doing it's automatic Shazam thing and telling me the title of the track. We don't have the windows open or anything, although we'd certainly like to as the central heating clunks and bangs constantly if the radiators aren't on and it's baking in here. And it's to advertise the opening of a sodding Co-op store on campus.

I've had to put my noise-cancelling earbuds in to at least drown it out with something more to my tastes, meaning I now can't hear any of my colleagues making working from the office entirely pointless. Just shut up and let me get my sodding work done! >_<

[Wrathbone]

And it's to advertise the opening of a sodding Co-op store on campus.

"Fear not, fellow marketing colleagues, for I have the only solution we'll ever need to entice the youth of today into our extremely dull supermarkets."

<Removes velvet cloth to reveal NOW 1998 double-CD boxset>

[Animalmother]

So utterly forgettable that I can't think of a single artist or song that might have been played.

[Stormbringer]

I work on a university campus, overlooking the main square. This comes with a certain amount of noise; protests, the occasional charity fundraiser with people cheering, that sort of thing. I don't really hold it against anyone as universities are supposed to be lively places. Today though there's a DJ playing the worst 90s and early 2000s dance music I've heard since, well, the 90s and early 2000s. It's the type of music that we seemed to immediately forget as soon as tastes moved on, and is presumably older than all of our current undergrads. It's so loud that my phone, sitting on the desk next to me, is doing it's automatic Shazam thing and telling me the title of the track. We don't have the windows open or anything, although we'd certainly like to as the central heating clunks and bangs constantly if the radiators aren't on and it's baking in here. And it's to advertise the opening of a sodding Co-op store on campus.

I've had to put my noise-cancelling earbuds in to at least drown it out with something more to my tastes, meaning I now can't hear any of my colleagues making working from the office entirely pointless. Just shut up and let me get my sodding work done! >_<

While I'm very sorry to hear this, and I totally sympathise (sounds awful, literally), I am grateful that you've reminded me what I wanted to write a week or so ago in here and forgot about.

THE NINETIES.

I have a lot to gripe about concerning the 90s. It was a time of total disaster for me, personally, but that's too much to talk about right now, so I'll concentrate on one thing: the pop music of the 90s.

I'd say it started out okay, perhaps in the first couple of years of the decade, when it was really still the 80s just bleeding over, but by the end of the decade things were in a dire state. The absolute pinnacle of it, though, probably the worst song I've EVER HEARD and still makes me grind my teeth to this day, is this piece of rot:



This, to me, signified the beginning of the end of civilisation.

I stopped listening to any pop music after 2000, so the last 25 years have been almost completely silent for me, save for the CDs I bought, and whatever I listen to on YouTube.

[Wrathbone]

Windows search, as in searching for files in Explorer. It's always been bad and extremely slow, but these days it's completely broken. I had a folder where I searched for a common word across multiple files and it inexplicably returned some but not others. The results pane changes view type rather than maintaining the view of the folder you're searching. And I've already said it's slow, but it can't be emphasised enough just how bloody slow it is.

I know there are altenatives that do actually work, but this is a seriously basic function of an operating system and it's inexcusably bad.

[Raid]

I find myself having absolutely zero respect for any and all Microsoft products and services these days.

Case in point; over Halloween, one of my co-workers and I chatted about his movie marathon, and it cropped up that I'd never seen the classic Hammer Horror Dracula starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. He brought the DVD in for me the following day. I only have one machine with a DVD drive that's actually still plumbed into my TV setup these days, it's my XBox One X that hasn't been turned on in three or four years. I switch it on, it asks me to sign in to download an update. I'm not doing anything online, so I just tell it to stay offline and go to launch the DVD app. This doesn't work, because the XBox One X does not have the DVD app installed. Ok, fine, it's probably a DVD licensing thing, and installing the DVD player app by default would mean millions of extra DVD software royalties, or something, however you'll recall that this was the console generation that began with Microsoft showing off hardly any games, but a shitload of TV features, so this is still a bit irksome.

To sign into the Microsoft store, I need to update the console. This isn't terribly surprising and I grin and bear it. It's a 4gb download, and takes about 15 minutes (mostly to install). I then hit sign in. It asks me for my PIN. I don't know why my games console needs a PIN, but I enter it. It's wrong. No XBox, it isn't wrong, I still have the muscle memory for entering it (each number is assigned to a different control on the pad). I try again. It's still wrong. I get it "wrong" a third time and it asks me to enter my login details. This involves my 20-something character email address and 10-something character password, all of which is a pain to enter using a d-pad. It takes me a minute to do, and two characters from the end it cancels the whole dialogue and takes me back to the home screen, forcing me to go through the rigmarole of getting my PIN wrong three times and re-entering the whole bloody thing again.

About ready to throw my XBox out of a window, I download the 22mb DVD player app, and open it. At this point my TV cuts to black and displays the "no signal" message. The console is still on, I can hear the DVD spinning. I know holding the guide button, hitting up on the d-pad twice and hitting A will turn the thing off. I do this, restart it, it asks me to log back in. I enter my PIN incorrectly three times, enter my email and password for a third time, and at this point it asks me to enter a new PIN. Fucking finally. I create a new PIN. It asks me to enter my password to confirm it. I try the DVD app again and the same thing happens. This, I can only assume, is that bloody hopeless HDMI security thing kicking in as it thinks there's something amiss with my TV setup (it does go through a Denon amplifier, so it's a little more complicated than typical I guess).

At this point I eject the DVD, carefully place it back in the case, yank the power cable out of the back of the sodding XBox, download the film via a torrent, and have it within 4 minutes. My laptop, unsurprisingly, does not have an issue playing this via the same amplifier and TV setup. It has taken an hour to get to this point. The film is only 80 minutes long, and I suspect contains fewer horrors than trying to get one DVD to play via a Microsoft product in 2025.

[Wrathbone]

At some point in the near future I want to put Steam OS on my gaming PC and see how it goes for a month. I've been nothing but impressed with Linux Mint on my media PC and would happily replace Windows with that, except that Steam OS is better for gaming. Not sure there's much that I currently use that I couldn't do in Linux. The Xbox app, I guess, but I rarely use it.

It's impressive how in the space of a few years Microsoft have all but convinced me to ditch the OS I've been using daily for 30 years. They seem to have either a total disregard of or utter contempt for their customers.

[Animalmother]

My issue with the Xbox was trying to claim the points that I'd earned over time. It used to be a case of once you had accumulated enough it just gave you the equivalent voucher, very straightforward. Now it asks you to scan a QR code which sends you to an MS site. You have to create a MS account if you don't already have one and add your phone number. If you already have the account setup it tells you that the phone number given is already attached to an account (my fucking account). Delete the number and add it again, same message. This goes over and back until it just gives up and says Try Again Later. Apparently a very common issue that may or may not be a deliberate attempt to frustrate people into not claiming the points. Worked for me and I've just given up on the €50. I switched the Xbox off anyway after cancelling my Game Pass and it hasn't been on since.