This morning I noticed a charge on my bank statement that looked like THREE were still taking money from my account, so I rang them up to see why.

They basically explained that they sent my daughter a PAC code (so that she could transfer her number to a new provider), but she had decided to just take the new number without bothering to transfer it.

They said that the PAC code expired in 30 days. This is no problem, I knew and understood this. What I didn’t expect was that after 30 days they would reinstate the contract and start taking money off me again. That was January and now it’s August – so giving them a month for the cancellation period thats
7 months x £15.32 per month = £107.24 for nothing.

So I asked for the money back as the phone had not been used and they refused on the basis that they had sent text messages to the phone explaining that the contract would continue if the PAC code was not used. Whilst this may seem fair enough, we never read the text messages as we had a new phone contract with a different provider and not used the phone since January. I expected them to see this was reasonable, but unfortunately all I got was the robotic-like answer that it was in the contract (which I believed I’d cancelled).

So I asked to speak with the Manager, Rushmi Jajiv, to see if I could get any further. The response was the same.So I got no refund. According to Rushmi, this is industry “standard”. If it is, then BEWARE because THREE may steal money from you too.

So, CANCEL the direct debit when you cancel the phone – if they want the additional month while the contract finishes the final 30 days, let them write to you and ask for it, then send a cheque.

This was an opportunity (like most customer complaints) to secure a loyal fan; some one to tell a story of how reasonable they were, how they seem like a good company who treat you fairly. It would have been a positive story about THREE to be spreading. It’s a shame for THREE and a shame that people who work for THREE are employed to deceive people especially when they could do with the business.

Of course, this practice is criminal really, and THREE have lost any chance that I, my wife and my two children will ever use them again. They may have also lost the custom of any people I tell about this story to, either friends and family, or who ever sees this blog. It’s not the amount of money, it’s the principle of not taking money in an underhand way.

THREE should be ashamed of themselves.

I did this and it sat happily waiting for 2 minutes 48 seconds when it finally went to the next field in the form. I closed the form, opened it and tried again with the same values and it went to the next field almost instantly. So that told me that it was likely to be a query, and the database had returned the value so quickly this second time because the data was sat in memory and the database didn’t need to go and get the data from the disks which is a slower than accessing memory.

So I traced the form action and tkprof’d it to see what was happening. The slow running query which took the majority of the time in the trace file looked like this:

SELECT
 party.party_name
,acct.cust_account_id cust_account_id
,acct.account_number account_number
,party.email_address email_address
,nvl(party.gsa_indicator_flag, 'N') gsa_indicator
FROM
 hz_parties party
,hz_cust_accounts acct
WHERE 1=1
AND acct.party_id = party.party_id
AND acct.status = 'A'
AND party.party_id = nvl(:blk_search.party_id, party.party_id)
AND EXISTS (
  SELECT
  NULL
  FROM
   oe_order_headers h
  ,oe_transaction_types_all t
  ,oe_transaction_types_all_dfv tdfv
  ,fnd_lookup_values_vl lv
  ,fnd_lookup_values_dfv lvdfv
  WHERE 1=1
  AND h.sold_to_org_id = acct.cust_account_id
  AND h.open_flag = 'Y'
  AND h.order_type_id = t.transaction_type_id
  AND t.rowid = tdfv.row_id
  AND tdfv.order_type = lv.lookup_code
  AND lv.lookup_type = 'XXSYK_KC_ORDER_TYPES'
  AND lv.rowid = lvdfv.row_id
  AND lvdfv.locator_prefix = 'Y'
)
ORDER BY
3 

What I noticed about this query was there was no bind variable to represent what the user had entered (customer number 3801016) first before validation. So it appeared to me that the LOV was doing a blind query and returning all the data and only then looking for the value 3801016. So I added a line to the LOV query in the form itself:

  AND acct_account_number like :blk_search.customer_number||’%’

When testing this now was much faster (less than a couple of seconds) as long as there was some data in this field; if left blank it would perform as poorly as before which isn’t surprising as there was no limiting criteria to use an index with.

For the first few days I was beginning to think so. Then this morning I was just leaving my house when I thought I should check to see if I’ve been paid by my client – if not then I could chase up on the payment today. So I went in to my home office and switched my computer on; forget that, it’ll take 3 minutes to boot and load windows, then another couple of minutes to get to the web site and log on to the internet bank. So I went upstairs to use my wife’s computer; but she also had it switched off. Then I remembered the Ipad. So I switched on. Instantly. Then I navigated to the website. Again quick wifi connection got me there quickly. I logged on, found out I had been paid and disconnected, all quicker than my PC could have booted up.

So I don’t need that every day, but to instantly connect to the web now from the comfort of my living room will change my behaviour. The whole web page was readable without messing around scrolling a window to view it on my phone – actually, that’s a surprisingly major advantage which until you’re using it and doing it is hard to sell; it’s got to be experienced to appreciate it.

Earlier in the week, I found all my family using it at various times. I’m the computer nerd and my wife and 2 teenage kids are computer savvy but it’s so easy to use that we all were very competent users and no ones opened a manual or asked for help… hmm ok, another advantage – it’s very easy to use. I can even see my Mum (who is the original fundamentalist luddite) using this – note to self, I need to take it down to her and see if I’m right.

Then it occurred to me that i only have been getting the opinions of computer nerds, er I mean professional collegues. They all talk about a laptop’s cheaper, can do more, it doesn’t do ‘flash’ etc. Most people don’t need the ‘more’ they talk about; they need it to do exactly what the Ipad does – play music, show photos, access internet, keep diary, read magazines…. we’ve been led to believe that everyone needs Windows; they do not and Apple are going to make a fortune as they’ve realized and made what most people want. As for ‘flash’, this may spell the end of it. If the Ipad doesn’t support it then it doesn’t exist to Ipad users and you find the content somewhere else.

It’s all about the experience of using a window on the web, not using a computer. The web is our collective computer which we all use; we don’t need our own local hard disks anymore, we can access and save our information from anywhere in the world.

This is the new dawn for the way the world works.

Checking for viruses, changing back parameters on my wireless network and other changes made me think I had totally lost it but then I saw a light! I had earlier added a new entry in the hosts file as instructed by my employer and thought I should include this in my investigation and found multiple entries of the same IP Address… I decided to remove the multiples and it appears that this has fixed the problem!

Out of the 10730 users on the wiki, I am now the 5th top user given that I’ve done 532 page edits during the migration. There’s a screen shot of this below; this is the power law graph and the long tail in action, with the top contributor making 1510 page edits.