Dom Davis (The Blog)

I’ve been with Lloyds TSB for 20 years. Over that time I’ve acquired 2 current accounts, 2 savings accounts, a private banking account, a credit card, an ISA and 2 mortgages via C&G (who are practically Lloyds TSB). Being a private banking member, in the top 5% of earners and having run something like half to three quarters of a millions pounds through their systems means they tend to bend over backwards to please me – not, you understand, due to caring about me personally, although they will claim this. No, I’ve worked in banking, I know what the banks are like and I know they make a lot of money off me, so they want to keep me. I personally have no problems with this; I get a range of benefits out of it and it’s not like any other bank is going to be different.

To give you an idea of the personal treatment I get a few months ago I tried to add The Zozo to my private banking account. We were married so it was time to get a joint account, and it had the added benefit of giving her access to all the perks of the account without increasing the fee. To do this we visited our local branch and spoke to the bank manager. Sadly she didn’t seem to know what to do with a private banking account and, by the end of it, she’d had to create a new account and had only managed to get it as far as a Premier account. The next day my private banking manager phoned me to find out what was going on. I explained the situation and he told me to leave it with him to sort it out. Sadly, since my old account had been cancelled it was going to be quicker and easier to just fix the new account, so that’s the route we took. A few days later and things were mostly sorted. The Zozo still has the wrong card, but she needs to call herself to sort that. We also don’t have the right cheque book, but I can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque.

Sadly my private banking manager is going to have to work for his money again tomorrow. I’ve got an insurance claim thats been open since march this year. The claim has just been denied. You see, I was claiming against the travel insurance that comes with my account… except the account I had when I made the claim isn’t there any more. And the account I have now wasn’t open when I made the claim. The insurance people are claiming that due to this I’m not covered. I can see their point, except it’s not my fault that my accounts moved during this time and I don’t see why a cock up that the bank made should cost me several hundred pounds. Given the amount this is going to cost me its quite understandable that I am absolutely livid.

So here’s the deal: either my private banking manager fixes the problem so the claim goes through and I get my money; or he otherwise sorts it that I am reimbursed for the amount I’m claiming for; or me, my private banking account, my current accounts, my savings accounts, my ISA, my credit card and my mortgages will all be moving to a new bank, a bank that will also get my daughters new account and the mortgage I take out when we move next.

My guess is that something will be sorted, but just in case they drop the ball here does anyone have any suggestions as to a new home for my money?

Before I settle down for a snooze (and get away from this god awful film The Zozo is watching) I wish to make a complain about the Playstation Store. My wife, you see, had a hankering for gorn films with fluffy bunnies in them and, since I wanted to snooze, my dislike of… er… rabbits in general wouldn’t be an issue. Movie rental can come via a number of vectors in this house, however, todays chosen method was via the PS3 and the Playstation Store.

For those unfamiliar with the Playstation Store it has white text on light blue transparent boxes for windows that live on a dark blue background. Snazzy looking, but not hugely easy to read on the smaller HD screens such as the ones we have. Not content with this, however, Sony have decided to go one step further this Christmas and put a special ‘Happy Holidays’ backdrop up. One that is of a snow filled scene and, therefore, predominantly white and light blue. Something that really helps the white and light blue test disappear into the page. Now I know they’ve stopped teach useful things like actually being able to program on computer science degrees (it’s true, it’s actually possible to pass some courses with very little programming ability, if any) but I would have thought that they’d have kept the fluffly modules like HCI, or Human Computer Interfaces, which specifically details how to design user interfaces so that people can do basic things, like read them.

I the meantime The Zozo has selected and downloaded some gorn fest The My Little Ponies Christmas Special and I’m going to drink my Beechams cold and man-flu and then die snooze.

Soap. It’s pretty boring, fairly ubiquitous, hard to differentiate and low margin. We’ve gone from plain old bars (Imperial Leather, remember that?) and tried every trick in the book to make the product stick out and increase market share and margins. Bars with metal plates that stick onto magnetic holders, soap on a rope, liquid soap, soap with moisturiser, smelly soap, hypoallergenic soap, soap in dispensers, it’s all been tried. Recently one company has taken this to extremes allowing you to buy an automatic, hands free dispenser for their soap. The marketing pitch? With this product you don’t have to touch the nasty, icky dispenser that’s been touched by your families dirty hands.

Let’s step back and think about this. Let’s take our hypothetical hands and cover them in hypothetical dirt. Now we need to clean them, so let’s go to our hypothetical sink and wash them. We turn on our hypothetical taps, pump our hypothetical lemon and lime liquid soap (enjoying the thoughts of sherbet lemons it conjures) and… oh no, the soap dispenser may have put dirt and germs on our hands! Whatever will we do? Now at this point we could bemoan the lack of automated soap dispenser as we risk near certain Ebola, however, I’m going to suggest an alternative. Let’s carry on with our thought experiment. Let’s take our wet, dirty, soap laden, germ coated hands and let’s wash them. Look! Clean! Magic. Kind of renders the automatic dispenser moot. Sure, there’s the gadget appeal but it’s also not the cheapest thing in the the world.

They’ve missed a trick though. Let’s continue our thought experiment, where we take our lovely clean hypothetical hands and turn off the taps. But wait, our lovely clean hands are touching the now filthy taps, necrotising fasciitis ensues followed by death. Automatic taps, that’s what we need.