sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

The Day Today
... is looking somewhere between good and not good.

What's not good is...
I've just killed some IMAP processes on my colo box (I am like a UNIX baby now), but Outlook is still tempermental (or, as my Dad would say, exhibiting an intermittent error). I know I have the best setup I could - my pst is 850MB, and that's not even with all my current folders which are on the server, and I know outlook gets cranky with a big file. But I don't know what else to do.

The fixed rate on my mortgage is up in a couple of months, so I called up two weeks ago to get information on their flexible mortgage at 5.5% ... seems like a good deal, and better than jumping through new hoops with another mortgage provider when I'm self employed. They're in the post. At 8am today I realised they never arrived. I check the website, and see not only is there a 5.5% deal, there's a 5.24% deal if you pay £395. I ask about that. Barbara (my friendly CSR) tells me it'll cost me £695. Why? Because I'm an existing customer. So, I ask, it costs me more to get the same product than a new customer? Those are the rates, she tells me. I ask why it costs me nearly twice as much. Barbara tells me some waffle about how it's all do with the cost of getting the customer.

Of course, she shouldn't mess with me. I have a background in direct marketing. I tell her the cost of new customer acquisition far outweighs the cost of getting an existing customer to sign up for a new product, and anyway, since when did financial services firms pass on their marketing costs to customers? She knows I've rumbled her, but doesn't have any answers. I do a quick calculation and realise it'll take me three years to "pay off the arrangement fee", and I'll probably have won the lottery and bought a house in Hampstead by then, so I shouldn't worry.

I was supposed to be having a "week off" to write this week before I start a new project, but everything's overrun because (a) things do, and (b) I spent so much time on my volunteer stuff and fixing my wireless that it took a whole day out of last week, in total.

What's good is...
I have just painted my toenails taupe with pink glitter.

It's a nice day. Scrap that - it's a fabulous day.

I'm going to the library this afternoon for some peace and writing.

And in the time it's taken to write this post, Outlook has miraculously performed the laying-on-of-hands on itself and is better.