Tips from Idea15 Web Design

Big news here today:

T-Mobile staff sold customer data
Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers, a spokesman for the firm has confirmed. The suspected illegal trade emerged after the firm alerted the information watchdog, Christopher Graham. He said brokers bought the data and sold it on to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers, as their contracts were due to expire.

I was targeted by two of these calls, and almost wrote a blog post about it as a scam warning, but couldn’t be bothered.

My phone account is an unusual thing: I have had the same number and pay-as-you-go SIM for seven years, and before that it was my mother in law’s SIM, so it is probably approaching 10 years old.  It’s on Virgin Mobile, which piggybacks on the T-Mobile network.  Like me, Virgin Mobile users will be accustomed to seeing their service occasionally identifying itself as T-Mobile, but my account is so old that on paper it technically is T-Mobile.

So when the phone rang with Welsh call centre staff diving right into it – “I understand your T-Mobile contract is about to run out.  Have you received a new phone in the last year?  Well then I’ll put your order through” – I was able to shout certain variations on “whoa nelly!” right away.  I’m not on a contract, I rather like my zippy little Samsung, and I pay my phone money to Virgin Mobile.  But someone in Wales was looking at a computer screen which said I was a T-Mobile customer due to receive a new phone.

As a business owner you get these high-pressure offers all the time, but this one was odd.  It was specific, it was confident, and it was too dodgy.  Their call list, rather than being plucked from the phone book, had some real records.  And when I retorted to the callers that this was quite obviously a scam, they backed off right away.  Normally these callers deny it all and keep up the sweet talk no matter what you say, but these kids were spooked about something.  Now we know why: they were working off an illegally pirated sales list.

Incidentally, having had the misfortune to spend a few weeks temping in a mobile phone company’s call centre, watching dozens of “permanent temps” with no legal rights being pushed, prodded, emotionally abused, humiliated, and manipulated for an hourly wage barely worth getting out of bed for, I can understand their motivations for seeking a side income and revenge – no matter how misguided – completely.

In the spirit of trying something new, I’ve had an article published on the excellent Find Networking Events site.

Click here to learn what to do if your web site designer has gone out of business.

We self-employed freelancers, as you know, don’t get sick days. So there’s nothing worse than feeling the first sign of a cold coming on. You might as well just blank a few days out in your diary where you know you’ll get nothing done. Sick days to the self-employed don’t have the same cheeky pleasure they did when you were an employee; just the opposite, they cause self-pity and guilt.

A few weeks ago I began to feel “The Tickle” – the scratchy feeling in the back of my throat which has been the harbinger of a cold since I was a little kid. “I really, really do not have time for this,” I thought to myself, and went off in search of a cold remedy. Then I thought I might finally give that Vicks First Defence spray a try. It’s a bit pricey (almost £7) but I thought it might be a small price to pay not to lose a week of my life. So I gave it a go.

And holy crap, this shiz works. The cold was stopped in its tracks and was never heard from again.

That could have been a one-off, but this week hubby has had the office cold and did his best to pass it on to me.  Out came the First Defence again; away went the nascent cold.

Figuring that a cold renders me useless for about four days, that little £7 bottle has now saved me eight working days.  If you’re a freelancer, self employed, or just cannot be bothered with yet another cold, get some of this stuff up your nose.  It really works.

A consumer protection story on the BBC News website this morning had an interesting twist.  In the usual straightforward story about someone being ripped off by a legitimate looking e-commerce web site, it transpired that the .co.uk domain is one of the least protected and regulated national domains in the world.  Anyone anywhere can buy them, including in this case a fake designer trainer sweatshop in China, and use a little guile to make the site look local to Gravesend and not Guangzhao.

A few years ago I attempted to buy a .fr domain for a client, but couldn’t do so because I didn’t have a handwritten letter en Francais written on official French letterhead and scribed by the secret monks who live under the Louvre and sealed with a wax imprint of the holy symbol.  OK, it wasn’t that bad, but it was clear that a massive amount of bureaucracy and permissions stood in the way of anyone outside France just buying a .fr domain.  By contrast, .co.uk domains are so readily available that my registrar of choice even puts them “on sale” from time to time, slashing the price as if they were something on a store shelf.

So, do we need tighter regulations on the .co.uk domain, or will this be extra bureaucracy which the scammers will still find ways to get around?  Personally I hate bureacracy and regulation – as much as I hate having my time wasted on an almost daily basis by third world rip-off artists who bring my whole industry down.  So what’s the solution?

My deep-seated aversion to bureaucracy and BS was put to the test this week when I was asked to provide proof of having an Equality and Diversity Policy as well as an Environmental Policy for my business.  As you know, I am a sole trader who works from a home office. But even one-woman bands like me are now being asked to provide written policies codifying how we conduct ourselves in our own homes.  Sadly, it seems to be a growing trend.

One of the reasons I went into business for myself was to get away from the paperwork nonsense demanded by people trying to create jobs for themselves.  There can be no other explanation for why someone wants to know what environmental policies I apply to my “staff” under my own roof, which at the moment include “crayons aren’t for eating” and “gonnae open a windae when ye dae that!”  My work is not, and will never be, a box ticking exercise, and it begs the question of why I wasted my time trying to curry favour with the sort of people who view it as something to benefit their targets and not my bottom line.

So without giving the fun away, I spent half an hour yesterday writing a quick Equality and Diversity Policy and an Environmental Policy to keep the powers that be happy.  And I’ve completely taken the piss with them – after all, the request was a piss take in the first place.  I’ve codified my right to heave insults at Man United supporters and to drop clients who ask me if my husband is on the level.  I’ve codified “putting the toys away in the toy box” in my “Environmental Policy”.  I’ve also added a few aspects which I’m sure will pose a challenge to the recipients when they find out exactly what my idea of “equality and diversity” really means.  I’m sure they will never have seen anything like it; assuming they read these things at all after ticking the box to confirm that they exist.