Okay, I’m a little bored and egocentric, so I was reading back through my old posts and comments when I came across my rant about Toucan and their cold-calling antics. On that article, there’s a few comments from random strangers. Most of them are reporting similar negative experiences. One of them is different, from someone calling themselves “James”. He says:

I switched to Toucan from BT and I’m saving tons of cash. I guess you can stay loyal to BT but there is a cost.

This immediately set bells ringing. I mean, it’s entirely possible that someone really has had a good experience with Toucan, I suppose. It’s possible also that the sun will go out tomorrow and the world will be plunged into eternal darkness. Who knows? Also, there’s something about the language used in the comment that just doesn’t sit right with me: the phrases “stay loyal” and “there is a cost” sound just like the sort of thing telemarketing scummers use.

Anyway, spider-sense a-tingling, I had a dig through my logs for when that comment was posted, and found the poster’s IP address – 169.132.18.1. Plugging this IP address into whois reveals that it’s part of the range owned by a company called International Discount Telecommunications (who, it seems, have an interesting customer satisfaction record themselves).

A little more digging showed that Toucan is in fact IDT’s trading name in the UK (search for Toucan on that page). So we know our visitor came from an IP address allocated to IDT/Toucan. Now, I’ll concede that it’s perfectly possible that this IP address is simply one they’ve allocated to a customer – indeed, if anyone can confirm this, let me know – but I’m still suspicious; the commenter didn’t mention whether he was with Toucan for just phonecalls or for internet access too. So, it’s back to my logs again.

It seems the same IP address has hit my site several times since I wrote that post – and every single time the referrer URL was a search engine with terms like “Toucan Blog” or “Toucan Telecom Complaint”; and when they did come, they didn’t hang around to read any other posts (which is unusual, going by my other search-engine sourced traffic).

Now, either they really are a customer who likes the company so much they’re dedicated to searching out people – continually, over the course of several months – who’ve badmouthed them and pointing out the error of their ways, or this is actually someone inside Toucan doing a crafty marketing job. This sort of thing has happened before.

So, what do you think? Genuine customer – and if James is out there reading this and wishes to defend his innocence, he’s invited to do so – or more scumworthy marketing from a company with an already less-than-stellar reputation for honesty and integrity in this area?

I can take off my glasses and stare fixedly at my monitors, and it looks like I’m concentrating really hard on work, but in actual fact I can’t see a damn thing and my mind is miles away thinking about, like, Christmas and beer and all the hot ladies from High School that I’ll be seeing over Christmas. Being shortsighted is ace.

Reality Heroin Withdrawal!

We turned up. We played 14 songs. We left.

Nobody noticed.

Sign up and receive a new DVD every month – as picked by The Great Bill himself! Utterly crazy, but it might just work.

I imported Animal Crossing: Wild World. It’s kind of like the Sims, except with animals. You wander around, catch fish, dig up fossils, talk to people, send them letters, buy furniture and try to pay off the absurdly huge mortgage some crafty raccoon by the name of Tom Nook has saddled you with. Today, there’s a fishing competition on in my town.

It’s a curious game with no real point – there’s no way to “win”, as such, and there’s no real guide as to what you should be doing; you just sort of bumble along making friends, designing shirts and doing interior decorating (I got a space station, but it took up too much space so I sent it to Nibbles the Squirrel; I notice he hasn’t put it in his room yet, either).

But despite the lack of objectives and that, it’s strangely addictive – especially with the addition over the Gamecube version of being able to visit other players’ towns over the internet. It’s silly, cute and quite fun. It also has one entire screen on the DS devoted to showing blue sky whilst you’re wandering around. How can it not be great, eh?

I want one!

I was going to write something really exciting this afternoon, but we’ve just been for our team Christmas lunch (at Koreana). It took two and a half hours and we’re all stuffed to the gills and drifting off to sleep at hour desks as we digest enormous amounts of oriental goodness.

Wake me up when it’s time to go home….

So, there I was in Oddbins on my way home, chatting to the girl behind the counter. She asked what I had on my iPod, and I replied that I was listening to Asian Kung-fu Generation, a CD picked up whilst visiting my brother in Tokyo.

“Oh yes? What’s he doing there?”, she said

“He teaches English, and gets paid very well for it by all accounts.”

“Cool. I had a friend that did that for a while, too. She’s back now, though.”

“Awesome. My brother’s still there and loving it, so far as I can tell.” – and by this point I’d got my change so I said goodbye and left.

About five minutes later I remembered that one of the people I’d met (for “met”, read “gone to a karaoke place and got horribly drunk with and sung bad songs until the early hours of the morning with”) there was a friend of my brothers – also an English teacher, who also lived in Chorlton when she lived in England, and apparently was now living in England again. Of course, by now it was far too late to go back and find out if it was the same person or not, but, y’know, it could very well be.

Of course, the only way I can find out now is by going back into Oddbins on the offchance the same girl is working there so I can ask. So, yes. I’m not an alcoholic. It’s just rude to go into a shop and not buy anything. Right? Right.

It maybe says something about the relationship between Naomi and me that when I mentioned the “Cute Overload” website that I posted about the other day and said it was the best website ever and stuff, she went all thin lipped and glarey, because she assumed that by “cute” it meant “fit girls”, not “small fluffy animals that make you go ‘awwww’.”