Saturday we spent kinda phased out and sleep thanks to the Pulse Party Classics we suffered.  Once we’d woken up a bit we went out for drinks to celebrate my good friend Ad’s 30th birthday.  It was a good time, and plenty nice to see the folks I used to work with at Morrisons. We left early though, because I had to be up very, very early on Sunday morning for a bit of a male bonding session with my dad, my brother, Ed and his dad.  In the spirit of putting everyone withing a 500m radius in danger, we went clay pigeon shooting!

What could possibly go wrong, giving me and Ed guns and handfuls of shells?  Surprisingly nothing.  Dad had suggested we had a wager on who’d hit the most shells… for whatever reason, we didn’t and frankly I’m glad.  I think he is too.

I’d never used an actual gun before, I’d fired BB guns and Air Pistols, but nothing that used gunpowder.  I started pretty well, hitting 3 out of the first 8 shots but started deteriorating as we moved around the stands.  By the third one I was struggling a bit with my shoulder, it’s not great at the best of times and the bruising wasn’t helping. The third stand was *really* hard and I hit nothing out of 8… a little demoralizing but I was still having fun. By the fifth stand I’d got my eye back in and hit 3 out of 8 again.  The last stand we were ‘shooting on report’ which means the second clay pigeon launches immediately after the first shot.  I actually found this one to be easiest of them all, probably because it was more instinctive than trying to aim.  Clearly I’m better when I’m filling the air with shot instead of actually aiming at things.

When we’d all finished we got our scores and I’d finished as badly as expected, hitting a pitiful 16 out of 50! My brother ‘won’ with an impressive 26 out of 50, so I’m glad we didn’t have that wager, but I suspect my brother is a little disappointment.  But we all won in the end, because the last part of the day was to return to Hichliffe’s Farm for a steak dinner.  Without question, the best lump of steak I’ve *ever* eaten!

Overall, I had a great time and it was a fantastic birthday present from my folks.  Thanks Mom and Dad

This is a continuation of the ongoing battle between myself and rewardsnow.co.uk.  They have stolen money from me, I am going to get it back! You can read Part One by clicking here.

I decided that as they were all limbs of the same company I’d stick with the contacts I’d developed and begin my attack. I started with rewardsnow.co.uk. I explained that I had given no such permission for my details to be passed on to any third party, and that I did not, catagorically, sign up to their subscription service.

As a side note, rewardsnow.co.uk claim to offer a range of highstreet brands at discount prices.  What they don’t mention is that in order to shop with them they’ll charge you £15 a month.  This is itself is outrageous… this little clause is tucked away in their Terms and Conditions and wrapped up tightly in legalese.  A quick shufty around their site suggests that most of their stock would be quite at home in a bargin bin near a supermarket checkout, and the few items that aren’t shonky knock offs are at least full price, sometimes more.  Plus the £15 a month to use their site.

Back to the saga, rewardsnow got back to me pretty sharpish and told me that, yes, I did sign up to their service and that I signed up when I checked my creditscore with quickcreditscore.co.uk – according to them, I accepted a £10 voucher for my shopping at Asda which entitled them to my bank details (harvested from the quickcreditscore.co.uk sign up). I know damn well that I didn’t accept a voucher for Asda.  I don’t shop there, it’s almost ten miles from my house, I don’t drive and I don’t fancy trying to cart a month’s worth of shopping home on the bus.  Simply put, as far as incentives go, it’s deep into chocolate fireguard territory.

I told rewardsnow.co.uk this and asked them to provide me with evidence of the sign up and evidence of the voucher I am supposed to have accepted, something which I think I’m entitled to under the data protection act. I knew full well that they wouldn’t provide it because it’d be too easy to fake up and wouldn’t hold water. They were adamant that we had a contract and that under no circumstances would they be returning my money.

I very politely told them that they had refused my request for evidence, and demanded to see both the record of my sign up and the voucher in question. I also told them that I was not satisfied with their response and that unless the money was back in my account within seven days I’d begin legal proceedings to get my money back and hopefully have the bastards shut down.

Contracts are a funny thing.  There’s often little details, easily overlooked, which can make the whole thing fall down.  In this event, the flaw in their argument was the voucher.

I never recieved this mysterious voucher, a fact that I pointed out to them.  I also mentioned that promotional items are covered by The Sale of Good Act and even if offered as an incentive they must match the criteria required of the item for sale.  They must be fit for purpose, they must be as advertised etc.  The most important fact is that they must actually materialise to complete the contract of sale.  As the voucher never turned up the contract was never sealed and this means that the money they have taken has been taken unlawfully. I told them this and they once again refused my refund.  Interestingly enough, they also changed the offer from being a £10 voucher at Asda to being a £10 cashback offer at Asda.

Personally, I don’t see Asda forking over a tenner to every schmoe who walks in brandishing one of these.

My next logical step was to get in touch with Asda, the process is ongoing, but they have been exceptionally helpful so far. They too were sympathetic to my problem and have passed on my message to their marketing guys who are going to investigate any ties they have with rewardsnow.co.uk or Adaptive Affinity LTD and let me know what they find.  Although my argument stands up well enough on the Sale of Goods Act, if they have been offering fraudulent promotions with another company’s brand I’m pretty certain the shit will hit the fan.  Asda are much, much bigger than me, with lots more legal clout.  I’ll take any back up I can because right now, I’m out for blood.

…to be continued.

Here’s a tale of warning for you.  A few month ago I signed up to a free trial with quickcrediscore.co.uk to check my credit rating.  I’d already used my free trial at credit expert and didn’t fancy paying for something I could get for free else where.  Boy, was I wrong!

I filled in the sign up details, declined their partner offers and got my credit score, and cancelled my account the very next day.  That should have been the end of it.  It wasn’t.  A little while later I was checking my bank statements and discovered that I had some transactions I didn’t recognise, debits for the sum of £14.95 had been taken from my account under the identifier ‘REWARDSNOW.CO.UK’. I had spotted one of these earlier, but assumed it was just something I’d bought online, but when I saw it was there again this month I started to get a bit suspicious as I hadn’t bought anything online for a while and so I rang my bank for details.

They were kind enough to tell me that there’d been four such debits, all for the same amount, all around the 22nd of each month and all for the same company and they suggested that the debits had come from my CreditExpert sign up. Naturally I asked them to refuse all further attempts to collect the money as I had not given my consent to rewardsnow.co.uk to take it.  My next stop was Google to see what I could dig up.

It turns out I was not alone.

Lots of people have been affected by this fraudulent activity and it all pointed to a handful of companies, Vistaprint, CreditExpert and a smattering of other less well known credit check companies. I was furious.  Normally I’m quite a placid guy who rarely gets annoyed, but this time I was livid.

A lot of the discussion about Vistaprint pointed at a smaller operation, vprewards, an external promotional service that Vistaprint ran once upon a time.

I sent emails to Vistaprint and CreditExpert demanding that if they were responsible for selling on my bank details to rewardsnow.co.uk that they can cancel my account with them and refund the £60 that had been taken from my account.  Both companies were very sympathetic and told me that they were not responsible and that my details had not been sold.

I also sent an email to vprewards asking them to check their records and tell me if I was on their books and where they had got my bank details from.  This was to be my first contact with the shadowy bastards behind this malpractice.

They asked me for the usual ID verification information, name, address, postcode and the email I signed up with so they could find my informtation.  Strangely, they also asked me for my bank card number.  This struck me a really odd as that data should be encrypted when ever it’s stored.  Understandably I didn’t give them that, but I did give them the other information so they could look me up.  They said there was no record of me in the vprewards files.

A little more research was to provide the missing link.  My searching had turned up a pattern, vprewards and rewardsnow.co.uk turned up in the results very close together, most times in the same sentences. They also have the same parent company and the same address. Adaptive Affinity LTD is the dark umbrella shadowing these smaller companies. It appears they offer promotion schemes to other companies for a premium, and use their smaller companies to collect data.

Because I didn’t feel I had a strong enough connection I sent an email to rewardsnow.co.uk in a bid of desperation. I explained that they were taking my money without consent, I had not given them my bank details and they had no right to the money they’d taken. I demanded the money be returned and hoping they’d balk in the face of legal action, I advised them that I wanted to know where they’d got my details or I’d be holding them responsible and take them to court.

They squealed. Refused my refund, but told me where they’d got my information.  Quickcreditscore.co.uk. That was all I needed to make the links fit together. All of these companies I’d been emailing, vprewards, rewardsnow.co.uk and quickcreditscore were part of the same company, Adaptive Affinity LTD.

…To be continued.

Do I want to buy new windows and doors? No, but thanks for showing me a picture of your shiny windows and magic opening door.

Do I want to donate a handful of change to some starving kid in africa who can’t find enough to eat or clean water to drink? No, partly because I don’t have any money to donate to anything, and partly because as a species we originated from africa, hunting and gathering and finding plenty of water to drink… and if it wasn’t clean, we’d boil it.  There, a quick solution to the africa issue, give them spears and a flint and steel each, food to eat, water to drink.  Problem solved.  Please donate £2 a month to me for coming up with that awesome idea.

Back to the envelope in question, and more importantly, the bland legend on it.  What’s wrong with this envelope? Simple, as a marketing strategy it didn’t bloody work!! I didn’t give it more than a second glance, I didn’t care what was in it and I wasn’t compelled to sacrifice vital seconds of my life to open it and find out just what disappointment lay within.
In short, whoever you are, the thing wrong with your envelope is it’s currently in the bin, unopened, waiting patiently for bin Wednesday.  Your envelope was shit!

If I was God, I’d be pissed… really pissed that mankind had gotten into my Meccano box and started building shit.  I’d probably be quite sadistic about it too.  Probably I’d make the new lifeform replicate out of control until those pesky humans were knee deep in little venomous critters all trying to burrow into their flesh and take over their brains… or I’d make the new life form automatically clump together and evolve very quickly in to dinosaurs that breed quickly and turn the entire planet into my very own Jurassic Park.  I’d probably save a few people too, mostly so I could have a planet sized Land That Time Forgot (1975) playset.

On the whole, it’s a good job I’m not God.  It’s probably a good job I’m not some kind of evil genius lurking in a subterranean laboratory tinkering with artificial life.  Then again, if I *was* some kind of evil genius lurking in a subterranean laboratory tinkering with artificial life, this would be my first invention…

My reasoning is alcohol, without all the bad brain squashing, liver munching bad bits would probably be awesome.  Imagine having a squid sucking on your head (that’s pretty awesome on it’s own!) that starts removing the toxins from the booze before they have time to affect you.  Better still, I’d program it so that after about six or seven pints it just started sucking all the booze out so you couldn’t get irresponsibly drunk.  Of course, the downside it that every now and then it’d need emptying… you’d probably need a wipe clean jacket or something for that, and preferably you’d be outside.

Still with the drinking theme (again), I went for a brew or two (seven, probably eight!) with my good buddy and partner in crime Ad last week.  I popped in to see my Mom and Dad before I set off to the pub and they fed me pizza and trifle and coffee (thanks Mom!). When I did eventually trundle to pub the last thing Mom said to me was “Don’t get too drunk”. When the news filtered through to her that I’d gotten home safely, got into the house and into bed without waking Helen and subsequently woken up with a blinder she said, in the usual motherly fashion, “I told you not to get too drunk.”  This got me thinking.  How much is ‘too drunk’? It’s not like on my way home I argued with a taxi driver over the fair, got out of the taxi to walk home – falling in every set of road works on the way – and decide to have a bit of a sleep down a little track, next to a gate, in some nettles when I was only fifteen minutes from home.  It’s not like I carefully collected each traffic cone and road sign on the way home to ‘decorate’ the garden with, only to have to sheepishly return them the following morning.  I didn’t even want a kebab.  I did try sending Ad a text on my way home but it came out as complete nonsense and I’ve still not managed to decode anything but the last word which was supposed to read ‘pissed’.  With these ponderings in mind, I made a simple chart which can be summed up in a simple formula…

if (case){too drunk}else{not too drunk}

See… it’s dead simple.  If you match one of the situations on the chart below, you’re too drunk, otherwise, you’re fine.

That’s mobile phones out of the way, now on to the less pleasant part of this post, the vomit.

On Wednesday night Helen and I decided to go to the lovely Thai place over the road for dinner and a cheeky bottle of wine.  Seriously, if you’re ever in Huddersfield make sure you pop up to Marsh and visit Pun Ja Thai, their food is excellent.  They can do things with king prawns and ducks that makes them line up to be cooked and eaten!!

Anyway, we enjoyed our meal and wine and toddled off home full to bursting and slightly tipsy from the tasty grape juice goodness. All is good. It is decided by a majority vote of 2 out of 2 that we would like a little more wine and that I should open the Chilean cabernet. Somewhere along the line however, that ‘little more wine’ became ‘lots more wine’ and we ended up killing the remaining three bottles.  After an evening of smoking too much, drinking too much and silly dancing we apparently stumbled off to bed. I even managed to carry up 2 glasses of cordial so that when we woke up dehydrated and dead we’d have something to fix the problem.

As expected, we were both hideous fucking messes in the morning. I got up at 7, gods know how, and bumbled off to make a brew have a smoke. Making coffee has never been so complicated, mostly asleep, hungover to fuck and most likely still drunk. Helen got the last of the coffee (I’m nice like that) and I made myself a cup of sweet tea. I took her brew up for when she woke up and I sat downstairs to drink my tea. About nine o clock I woke up to find Helen had gone to work and that I still hadn’t died. I did feel a lot like Leon Trotsky after he’d drank a gallon of seawater so I went back to bed to try and sleep my hangover off in time for my errand running at eleven.

Helen rang me at ten to make sure I was awake and not going to sleep through my appointment. Having got up I decided a shower might help me feel less like a corpse so had one. Not that I could remember how to have a shower so I pretty much stood under the water for 20 minutes trying not to die.  Shower done I went downstairs to try and drink my now cold tea, watch a bit of Jeremy Kyle for a laugh.  What actually happened was I found my tea was horrible and fell asleep to some Brummie git saying how he hadn’t slept with a ton of women. When I woke up again I felt a little better, and it was almost time for me to go out.  I decided the best course of action was to have a quick smoke and get myself sorted to face the world.

Unfortunately the smoking sent my poor stomach into throes of rebellion and without warning it decided to eject everything I’d eaten and drank the night before. I hadn’t even set foot on the stairs before the first wave of gastric fireworks started and with a mouthful of partially digested Thai and wine I scurried up stairs trying to beat the second wave that would make everything explosive and messy. I almost made it. I’d got into the bathroom, kneeling before the porcelain god. All of a sudden my stomach exploded like something out of Aliens.  All the while I was painfully aware that I had to leave the house in 15 minutes and I really had to clean up the atrocious mess before I left. It was like Charlie Manson had gone on a brief killing spree while on the toilet! The toilet was stained red, all up the bowl, round the rim, under the seat (that was lifted!) and the sheer pressure and volume of my upchuck had managed to splash across the bathroom wall to add insult to injury.  Ten minutes before I have to leave.  Long story short, I managed to get the mess cleaned up, get changed, brush my teeth, find my shoes and make the bus I was aiming for.  Short story long, anything by Dickens.