Ignoring the obvious problem (it’s BT), the issue seems to be that they have various brands and packages (and we have no idea at this moment in time if business broadband accounts are affected). Most people don’t seem to know what they have signed up for (and don’t waste your life asking BT – they still phone us to offer us business broadband and we’ve had it for three years). According to Phil Gyford there are currently BT Yahoo, BT Connect, BT Openworld and BT Total Broadband. Phil provides an excellent account of his frustrations trying to sort out his mum’s email based on the instructions given to him by BT.

Shortly afterwards we spotted this posted on ecademy

Still nothing listed on the BT press releases or on our favourite source of IT updates – The Register

We’ve since found information on yahoo answers which might help you make sense of the instructions BT are sending out – as Phil points out in his blog the screen you see is not the screen they think you see…

Update: More information here on the BT users forum This article has some useful external links and also a few choice words about BT’s customer service.

The important point to get across here is this: Don’t shout at your web developers/hosting providers. We received no clue that BT were going to do this (in fact I’d be amazed if anyone in BT knew they were going to either as one of our friends called and was told that the problem was down to a system outage, the operative on the end of the phone denied all knowledge of the new email validation policy). Whilst we will be happy to give advice, the problem lies completely in the hands of BT – prepare to lose at least three or four chargeable hours tomorrow – and if their level of compensation is anything to go by from our recent day long outage you might be lucky to get a fiver. One way to get them to dig deeper is to phone head office and ask to be put through to the MD’s PA – that does tend to get their attention.

We’ll be evaluating alternative service providers and preparing to provide advice for our clients if required. It’s not the fact that BT have finally woken up to the issue of spammers, it’s the fact that they think they can implement a change which affects hundreds of consumers and causes no end of grief for their web service providers without any prior notification.

A short term (though not very practical) solution is to use webmail if available. We will update this blog as more information becomes available.

Anyway – one trip to the audiologist later and it turns out he was right. Which would make me not right, or ‘differently right’ or just plain darn wrong. I was given a pair of 10 channel digital hearing aids to try, and I never thought I’d say the words but I want them. I really really want them.

My first hearing aid was a lovely pink NHS analogue. The word lovely there is used in the ironic sense BTW. It whistled if I turned it up loud enough to hear anything and it gave me a hell of a headache, so after about three weeks it was stuffed back in the box, left in a drawer and I learned to lip read instead. Which is a lot of fun unless you happen to see someone say something you didn’t want to hear…

Since then I’ve muddled along. I even tried out the hearing thingy at the theatre. The bloke at the side of me had been stealing furtive glances at the odd bit of plastic hanging just under my chin and sticking in my ears. Sadly his decision to bellow ‘are you deaf then?’ coincided with the orchestra starting up, causing me to almost fall off my chair. When I took them back they were popped back in a bag and I had this horrible feeling I’d been wearing something that not only made me look a little bit odd, but had been making the previous wearer look a little odd without being wiped afterwards.

I don’t suppose it’s really that interesting to anyone who isn’t deaf but I’m hoping to get them in a few weeks and I’m planning on adding a couple of entries about how I get on with them.

These days we do things very differently. Because when you take time to get to know your clients and understand their requirements, and they in turn get to know you, I reckon that it’s then that you deliver your best work.

For example when Celia and Dean started working on the beautiful old building that is becoming their top Aveda concept salon we agreed with them that a good approach would be to leverage people’s natural curiosity. Bill the builder was already telling us that rumours were flying around about what was happening at the building – that it was going to become a nightclub or a tanning salon – so we simply addressed people’s desire to know with a banner on the building and a website explaining what was happening.

Our lovely ladies at K2 Horizons never fail to leave us with a good idea after we’ve spoken to them, the same with our friends at Zynia – in fact every client we currently have, we seem to have developed a working relationship with that allows us to do fun things that really work.

So we’re getting over the cringes, and laughing at some of the pitches, but it’s made us realise just how much we enjoy our jobs now we’ve grown into working the way we like to.

Well our local Post office (the one just round the corner) is earmarked for closure which is a shame because it’s used by lots of people, and lots of businesses (including us) for paying in money, paying bills, paying the VAT etc etc.

Our alternative is to walk to the new local branch for local people in the middle of town – which is around half an hour there and back, and means I have to leave Skateboard tied up outside instead of leaving her guarding the office and popping out for a second. I know this sounds terribly selfish of me – as I have the ability (although not necessarily the time or inclination) to walk into town, unlike some of their current customers, however the thing that really got my goat was that in the ‘full report’ done by the Post Office and published by the local paper the one element that they didn’t seem to have taken into consideration was businesses.

I mean it’s not like we contribute anything to the local economy is it?

They mention in passing the ‘retail environment’ including a chemist, florists and fireplace shop, but what they have failed to mention are the other businesses: the Garage, the Chippy, the Cheltenham Cheese Factory, the Curry Corner, the Funeral Directors, the Barbers, the Hairdressers, the Butchers, the three companies in our building, the Accountants and other businesses round the corner, the Lib Dems office, the Pub (s), Naturewatch, Phil who works with us sometimes from down the road – I could go on – you’d get bored – but you see my point…

It also means that now we have two choices when it comes to paying in money. We can either post it (oh you have to laugh don’t you?) or we can drive to Gloucester.

The good news is that it is open to public consultation for 6 weeks. The bad news is that I’ve not seen much publicity about how you can get involved so here it is: If you want to make any comments as part of the consultation process then you have until the 17th of March. There’s a useful leaflet in the branch with the address to which you have to post your comments (now now, stop sniggering at the back there) or you can do it online

You never know – this could be the first time the Gloucestershire Echo run a headline about an MP, a Funeral Director and a Butcher doing a Dibley

A definite improvement on ‘I sold Robbie Williams a motor home’ from last year’s front pages.

We got our mits on a copy of her e-book 299 steps to website heaven for review and in our humble opinion it’s worth every penny. Of course if you’re a tight wad that doesn’t like paying for anything then she is blogging about the 299 steps on her website 299steps.com but you’ll be waiting until sometime in October to get the full set. Or you can buy the hard copy in late February

Go on – treat yourself.

Since we blogged about the little laundrette in Nailsworth we’re finding we get lots of traffic to our site as we seem to be number 2 in google for that search term at the moment. So hopefully as we included their phone number they’ll be seeing more customers after they so kindly helped us out whilst we were without water.

Keep checking back.

The successful candidate will be working on broad range of projects, large and small and often involving client meetings. There are some long days and so flexibility is important. Don’t worry, we’re pretty good about the tea rota though!

Please apply in writing giving as much information about yourself as possible. Include links to work that you’ve done or been involved with and provide some details about whether you were a freelancer or an employee and any appropriate point of contact we can follow up with.

Pay is to be determined based upon experience and skill level. Drop us a line with your details or if you have any questions. Unless the questions are ‘Do you want a freelancer?’ or ‘Can I work remotely from India?’. In which case don’t waste your time.

Check out Free Stuff to find out more and get the download.