This is obvious, really

With most mobile phone networks in Britain, when you call regular customer service the call is forwarded to someone in India. If the person on the other end of the call solves my problem efficiently, I am fine with this. When things don't work, the problem is ultimately caused by poor systems and poor management at the network, usually. For instance, I had a customer service issue with Vodafone (caused by a screw up at their end) in which it was impossible to be helped by the same person twice, and different people kept failing to understand things that I had already explained to one of their colleagues. Bad service. On the other hand, for a recent issue I had with Three (caused by a screw up by the Royal Mail) the first person who helped me took my number, and said he would escalate the problem and call me back when it was resolved, which he did. Good service.

However, there is one option in the phone menu that will always get you to someone in the UK, and that is selecting "I wish to cancel my phone". When you select this from just about any network, you get someone with a friendly Northern English or Scottish accent from the "customer retention" department, whose job it is to talk you out of leaving. These people will ask you why you are leaving, and have the power to offer you much better deals that people in, say, the network's retail shops. Such people walk a relatively delicate line, because if someone genuinely does wish to cancel they have a legal right to do so and the network must not refuse them, but it is their job to keep you on the line if there is some chance you will renew your contract.

If you genuinely do want to cancel your phone, there is a game to be played to get it over with quickly. Basically, you tell lies that are unanswerable by the person on the other end of the phone. "I am leaving the country" is a good one, but only works if you are doing a straight cancellation. If you are instead asking for a PAC code to port your number to another network, that doesn't hold up. Things like "This phone is in my name, but my ex-girlfriend used it. We have now broken up and she wants to keep her number" will usually work. Or one can just get confrontational and insist, but I don't like to do that.

Sometimes though, you say you want to cancel when you have absolutely no desire to cancel. This comes down to what I said earlier: the customer retentions department has the power to offer you a better deal than any other part of the organisation. Usually, though, they will not make their very best offer unless you seem sincere about leaving, and it turns into an experience akin to haggling in a market. It is very hard to know how low they are able to go, as the level of desperation to keep customers varies depending on how close to their monthly quotas they are, how badly they think the stockmarket will react to news that they have lost fifty thousand customers, and that kind of thing. Therefore, haggling exists here for the same reason it exists in markets - the seller does not want to reveal to the buyer how low he can go unless he absolutely has to, and he does so in the hope that the buyer will agree to pay more. I am reasonably good at this, but I suppose I should note that the cheapest deal I have ever obtained was received when I rang up genuinely intending to leave and they genuinely talked me out of it. (As a consequence of this, I generally carry two mobiles. That said, having a second number that is only known to my close friends has something to be said for it to).

In any event, the cheapest mobile deals to be had in the UK generally come from taking out a contract, letting it come to its end, and then calling the customer retentions department and threatening to leave.

Yesterday, however, I did something different. I have had a mobile broadband contract with Three for the last 12 months, for which I pay £10 a month for 1Gb of data. This isn't a huge allowance, but is generally plenty for those occasions I am away from home and where there is no free WiFi. However, I bought that original contract at a bad time. Three have at various times had 25% off or 50% off deals on this contract. In fact, I obtained a £5 a month deal for one of my friends during one of these offers. (Hi Brian). Therefore, I yesterday simply rang up the customer retentions department, and asked if they could give me the same deal. The response from the nice Scottish woman was "Let me check. Yes, sure, I can offer you that. It's nice to get someone who knows exactly what he wants".

Somehow, this seems deeply wrong, as the game of elaborate lies was missing. I suppose, though, that it was akin to knowing a fair price for something in a market, offering it, saying "take it or leave it", turning around to walk out, and seeing if the stallholder stops you. The woman at the other end of the phone seemed pleased. I suppose there is a fair chance she is paid on commission, and gets commission for a contract renewal, and someone who does a deal immediately without 15 minutes of lying and/or threatening to hang up is quite an efficient use of her time.

What does this mean?

This morning, I woke up at about 5am. I had a flight to Santiago de Compostella booked that departed at 8am. This had cost me some money (a few tens of pounds) a few months back. As it happened, I imagined climbing out of bed, the struggle through various means of transport to Stansted airport, security lines, flying through the need for more sleep, a bus into town at the Spanish end, and then finding and checking into a hotel.

At that point I decided to roll over and fall back to sleep. I now quite considerably regret this, as if I had done everything correctly, I would now be sitting in a tapas bar with some jamon iberico and a glass of red wine, or perhaps admiring a cathedral.

On the other hand, what does this mean? Possibilities.

I am finally growing up.
I am depressed.
I am ill.

On the other hand, I do genuinely regret this. I will get up and make the plane next time.

On the other hand, if I meet the love of my life at the party on Saturday night that I wouldn't have been able to go to if I were in Galicia, I guess it will make a good story.

(Sorry RSSers).

Sofia, Bulgaria. January 31, 2009.

On that nodescript Buenos Aires photograph

There is a certain art to putting together a post like this. You don't necessarily post your "best" photos, and you certainly don't post images of the sorts of things commenter "Raul" mentions (all of which I did take photographs of) because a post could equally well be compiled by buying 20 picture postcards and scanning them will not be a very interesting post. If I do post a classic "picture postcard" image, then that probably indicates that (for whatever reason) I had relatively few pictures to choose from for that destination. Of course, I did post one of Argentina's classic "picture postcard" images two photos below, but I allocated it to Brazil (which is fair, as I was in Brazil when I took it and the foreground is in Brazil). As it happens, I spent most of three weeks in Argentina, took around 2000 photographs, and I had considerably more photographs to choose from than any other country on the list, and it took me a long time to decide what to post. I toyed with re-using this photograph that I took near Tunayan in Mendoza province (in which amongst other things I like the fact that what initially appears to be clouds in the background is actually the Andes and this becomes clear when you take a second look). Then I thought of posting this photograph of Santiago Calatrava's footbridge in Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, but it would have been the second structure designed by the same architect in the post, plus I don't think it really captures as much of the spirit of the city as I would have liked. Then I thought of showing the great arched trainshed at Estacion Retiro (with its interesting contradiction that one of the greatest railway stations in the world hosts very few trains) but didn't quite have the right photo, and I had already posted another railway station. Then I thought of perhaps showing some of the beautiful riverside buildings and bridges at Tigre, but that was slightly too close to picture postcard territory, although the very Englishness of some of the buildings would have given it an interesting twist. Then I thought of showing a picture of the memorial to the dead of the 1981 war, but I conluded it was too sombre (and whatever it is, Buenos Aires is not a sombre city). Then I thought about my first morning in Buenos Aires. After a very tiring flight from Madrid the previous evening and a night's sleep, I stumbled from my hotel the next morning, and just about the first thing I saw was an ice cream shop named after the Malvinas. A thought of "okay...." went through my mind, and I took my first photograph of the trip. Definitely, though, the rules I have set myself as to how many photographs I post to posts like this do serve countries like Argentina (and the US, which got very short shrift last year) badly. The rule is essentially "One photograph for each country I visit on each absence from England". Thus a country I visit for three weeks gets one photograph, as does a visit to a border town for an afternoon. In South America I spent two days in Chile, less than one day in each of Brazil and Uruguay, and three weeks in Argentina (where I of course had a wonderful time) and the four countries get one photograph each.

I'm proud. Also slightly scared

96% Geek

Created by OnePlusYou

Warsaw, Poland. 28 June 2008.

Life milestones

My application for British citizenship has just been approved. I am not a British national yet, as I have to attend a ceremony and swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen first. I already owe allegiance to the same Queen wearing a different hat (or should it be crown), but this does not count. As I have just moved, the ceremony will be one held by Wandsworth council and not Tower Hamlets council. This is kind of a shame, as I suspect the Tower Hamlets ceremony might have been slightly more colourful.

This does not affect my Australian citizenship, although Australian law was only changed to allow Australians who took out foreign citizenship to keep their Australian citizenship in 2002 (*). It does not affect my right to live in the UK, which I had already, and it does not give me any additional voting rights, as I have had full voting rights since the moment I moved here. (Britain gives full voting rights to citizens of all Commonwealth countries resident in the UK. When I was student here, I rather weirdly had the right to vote or indeed to become Prime Minister, without having any right to work or to live here for more than a short finite period).

Where it does help me is that it means that if I want to leave the UK in the future and come back, I will have voting rights while I am away and the unconditional right to return, whereas the type of permanent residency I had ("Indefinite leave to remain") can be lost after two years absence. Also, as an EU citizen I will have treaty rights that I do not have now, including the right to live and work anywhere in the EU (and in Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein under other treaties). If I ever want to (say) retire to Portugal, I now can.

And of course I can get in the short queue at British airports.

The one thing I shall lose is my right to stand for federal Parliament and/or become Prime Minister of Australia, as the Australian constitution forbids anyone who holds foreign citizenship from taking a seat in parliament. I could still theoretically stand for one of the Australian state parliaments, although heaven forbid that I would want to do such a thing ("You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...").

(*) Curiously, dual Australian/other citizenship was allowed prior to that in all other cases, including allowing foreigners who were naturalised as Australians to keep their foreign citizenship, and in cases where people got combinations of Australian citizenship and some other through birth. Everyone recognised that the situation was anomalous, both political parties were in favour of changing the law, and yet somehow governments failed to get around to changing it. It was to be voted on soon when Labor was voted out in 1996, but the new government (despite theoretically supporting the change) decided to set up a new commission to investigate the matter etc etc which ultimately reached exactly the same conclusions as the previous one, and then finally managed to change the law in 2002. In the mean time, enforcement of the previous law had been changed somewhat. The previous law had allowed anyone who had lost Australian citizenship upon taking out foreign citizenship to apply to resume their citizenship, if they would have suffered "significant hardship or disadvantage" if they had not taken out foreign citizenship. By the time the law was changed, having to spend time in the long non-EU nationals queue at a British airport was considered a "significant hardship".

Actually, having spent a lot of time in such queues (particularly at Stansted on Sunday nights) I do rather see the point.

Stockholm, Sweden. May 24

This photograph was taken at 2.30am. I am far enough north that there is natural light in the sky, even at that time. The fast lens and big sensor makes it look a little brighter than with the naked eye, but it is still something that the more equatorial of us are not used to.

Doing it by country is a bit misleading

This is starting to be a good effort

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Iguaza Falls, Argentina. May 14.

The fuzziness at the top right of my head is the haze from the waterfall, which is a long distance behind me. It causes an interesting optical effect, doesn't it.

Tunuyán, Argentina. May 8

This is Argentina

Imagine you go on a tour of a winery in Argentina. Imagine that they split the group, and there is one tour guide speaking Spanish and one speaking English. Imagine that you are the only Anglophone on the tour, and therefore the English speaking guide gives you a one on one tour. Imagine also that the English speaking guide looks like this.

Imagine also that you have a longstanding weakness for Latin women with black hair and brown eyes. I assure you, the whole experience is like having a bullet fired through the forehead.

Perceptions can stick

It is certainly true that I have a history of being a cricket obsessive, although I have become disillusioned with the sport a little bit in recent months. This is perhaps why, despite what Alan Little posts, and despite requests from Brian Micklethwait for analysis, I don't think I have even mentioned the Indian Premier League on the web, and I have barely mentioned it in person to anyone. My disillusion is perhaps partly responsible for this lack of excitement. Perhaps also I have just been distracted by my own life.

Simple summary of the state of affairs. Does the rise of the IPL indicate the end of the cricket world as we know it? Very probably yes. Is this a good thing? Very probably yes also, although I would prefer they were playing a longer form of the game rather than the 20 over silliness. Do I have the inclination to research and write about this in detail at the moment? In truth, no.

Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 27.

Munich, Germany. April 14

Update: In case Brian has caused anybody to wonder, the building is the Haus der Kunst, which was built for propaganda purposes by the Nazis between 1934 and 1937 as a museum for what they saw as wholesome, non-decadent (ie bad) German art. It is still used as an art museum, but these days it has a nightclub in the basement.