Dave the Dealer

Taking security a too little far

I decided to get out of the office last week, to enjoy a bit of this great British summertime. I visited one of my contacts at a well-known telecoms distributor. The meeting itself was fantastic, the guy was great and we talked the talk all afternoon. It was when I came to leave though that I got worried; standing in the car park, I noticed a used condom on the floor. After my initial disgust, I realised there was a bight side: hopefully they treated all their partners, business and social, in the same careful, secure and thoughtful way.

Good news bad news

Good news: First thing in the post this morning is an order. Bad news: it’s a restraining order from a customer that we have recently been bombarding with phone calls. Separately, Shirl, Trev and myself have all been pestering the poor bugger, trying to cross sell and upsell (as they say in customer relationship marketing) to him.

Now he has finally snapped. He says that we shouldn’t call it customer relationship software. Instead, we should call it customer stalking software.

Age concerns

I heard about this Italian pensioner who called the police after her TV broke down. The 90-year-old told officers to come to her flat to deal with an “emergency”. She was told not to call police for household repairs but they fixed the TV anyway! Could be a nice little sideline for policemen: electrical repairs while investigating a crime. Maybe I should get in with the local police. They could let me know when a robbery has taken place in Dagenham and I could flog the victim replacement PCs.

Fraud focus

I heard a scary tale from Neville the Sandwich Man the other day. His mate paid £11.95 for a bar meal recently but ended up paying a £7,888 tip. The four-figure sum had accidentally appeared as a gratuity on the till. The manager of the restaurant said there was a glitch with the card system, and Barclays said it would look into the payment and refund it to his account. Sounds like a bit of a scam going on to me. Personally I prefer cash – none of this chip-and-PIN malarkey for me. I may be old fashioned but at least I won’t be a victim of this identity fraud.

Porn nation

I almost fell off my chair yesterday. I couldn’t believe it: some geezers down at Clearswift have been tracking the amount and content of spam and it seems spammers of the world have turned their back on pornography. Apparently porn only accounts for five per sent of spam these days. Now the spammers are targeting the financial and healthcare markets – more money so they reckon. The study also discovered that dog-related spam hit a high in May and that for the first time Egyptian sheets and cigars made an appearance. Perhaps those spammers don’t have their minds entirely fixed just on the money markets after all.