Hi clare,
In a word, no. Thanks for their number but I’ve found an alternative service in the meantime. I suggest you contact the relevant person on my behalf and pass on my feedback. I leave it in your hands. Feel free to close this call.
Regards,
Steve
Quoting “boots.com - Customer Service”
>
> Dear Steve
>
> Thank you for contacting us at boots.com
>
> As your query is about Bootsphoto.com and not boots.com could you please
> contact their helpdesk on 0870 240 3115. You can also email them on
> support@contactus.bootsphoto.com
>
> Best
> wishes
> Clare
> Customer Care Team
> www.boots.com
>
> boots.com is a trading name of Digital Wellbeing Limited (Registered Office,
> 1, Thane Road West, Nottingham, NG2 3AA. Registered England 4077870) which
> is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Boots Company
> PLC.
>
> Customer name: Steve Carter
> Customer e-mail: [my email]
> Functional area: Technical problems
> Order Number:
> Contact Telephone Number :
> Subject: I get an error
> page
> Message:
> http://www.boots.com/shop/category_new_template.jsp
> ?classificationid=1025183
>
> gives a 404 after clicking an internal link to the online photo store. It
> was then a challenge to find a way to tell you about it. I recommend putting
> an email
> address or link on the error page.
>
> Do you monitor error logs?
>
>
> Also, can you point me to the online digital photo store?
>
> Thanks
>
> Steve
>
>
> Email me
>
> Customer id:
I got the following in part of a salsa-scene bulletin from back home:
CHEAPER PARKING IN YORK!Yup, finally after a great deal of hassle from the public and local businesses, York City Council have agreed to lower their parking fees to a standard all night rate of �2 for non-York residents and �1 for York residents. I have spoken to the councillor in person and she says that this will be implemented at the end of November 04′.
So in case you thought York had a lot to offer (and it is fairly pretty, but not all THAT exciting of an evening) please bear in mind they don’t want your car. I suggest you take your business to Leeds where there is more of everything apart from churches and old walls. The drains don’t smell as bad there either.
When I was young I used to think I was different and strange. This is a perfectly normal part of growing up. During adolescence a membrane round part of your brain goes through a period of development and the extra blood and warmth in that area gently toasts the synapses that deal with your sense of self and individuality. This is where we get teeny goths, “you’re not my real parents” and all that stuff. When I learned about this, I thought “oh good! It’s not just me having all these crazy thoughts, it’s everyone, but they’re just too shy to say so”.
However, over time, I have discovered that, not to put too fine a point on it, I *am* different and strange, and there’s no point in trying to be normal cos I’m not very good at it. Most times I’ve started “is it just me or…” then it turned out yes, it WAS just me. Best I can do is keep a lid on it and avoid detection.
So, today I realised that I probably spend about 80% of my time worrying that the thing I’m doing isn’t the most important thing and that I should be doing something else. Do you get that? Anyone? anyone? bueller? bueller? No? Thought not.
Considering I spend more than 1/6 of my time sleeping, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for relaxing.
In a tiny community in Queensland, consisting of a few shacks, a fuel station and a crossroads: We stopped for a comfort break, and in the garage I saw ‘Aussie Pie’ advertised on a hot cabinet. I asked the cross-eyed drooling girl behind the counter what ‘Aussie Pie’ was. She looked at me (or it might have been past me) for a long few seconds and said ‘you have pie in England don’t you?’… Well, I didn’t bother explaining I was enquiring as to the *contents* of the pie…
/Edit. This was definitely not in Queensland, it was in New South Wales. I think it was during the drive from Sydney, west into the Blue Mountains, then south down dirt roads into Goulburn.
The people I was with had gone to play pool. I don’t really play pool so I guess I wasn’t with anyone at that point. I’d just asked what time the bar closed and everyone had laughed at my expression when they told me 5:30AM. “That just doesn’t happen back home” I said. They seemed pleased at my implicit flattery of their country.
I made my way across the spacious, near-empty wooden floor towards the toilets, feeling charming and invincible. I noticed a girl moving carefully away from the bar with a drink in her hand. She had a mop of blonde frizzy hair in an unfashionable but not ugly style, and wore a white blouse and beige plaid pleated skirt. Her face was hidden by her hair as she focussed on not spilling her drink. Her skirt was of the type that would normally render me unable to speak to a girl, but something in her demeanour spelled “geek” and I was intrigued by the counterpoint. I’m still not sure whether it was courage or instinct or blind foolishness that kicked it off, but as our paths met I stopped her by her hips: gently, unambiguously, but not invasively, like I might lead a salsa partner.
Oh shit I thought. I’ve started something.
She looked up.
“Sorry,” I said.
Oh shit. An excruciatingly long 2.2853 seconds passed
My stage experience told me nothing can hurt you while you maintain composure.
“It’s a bit crowded in here” i offered, a blatant lie.
I made a show of not being able to figure out which way to go, like when two strangers passing on a path both step the same way, then correct, then correct, ending up face to face and apologetic. I squeezed past, apologetic, despite the apparent acres of space around us, and continued toward the toilet, chuckling that I’d been both stupid enough to get in the situation and smart enough to get out of it with a story to tell.
As I approached the door that divided the two bars, I became aware of a movement at my elbow. She was following me, catching up. Strewth! As we approached the door I was drawing a blank as to what one ought to do in these situations. I slowed to allow her to draw alongside. In single file we’d fit through the door perfectly, but where was the fun in that?
She slipped one foot past me, slightly tripping me. As I mock-stumbled I gently barged shoulders, apologising and making a big show of being mortified to have been so clumsy. Having shoved slightly in front of her, I stepped back and gave a slight bow - “After You” - and then neatly stepped alongside as she headed through the narrow doorway. After much apologising and suppressed hysteria on both sides, we were half way through the door, and to any onlooker would have seemed hopelessly wedged, every defensible border gently transgressed, both parties seemingly trying to extricate themselves from the mess.
Then I woke up.
Dang!
I don’t know if you get this on waking, but I tend to remember my dreams in reverse order. I remembered arriving at the bar after hitching a lift in the kiddy trailer of some tandem cyclists after having started my journey in a 1927 Bugatti and, in order to get it to go faster, having transformed it slowly into a ferrari-red rubber jumpsuit that, though it went faster and faster the more I straightened my flying body and lost bits of car, turned out not to be a vehicle and thus was absolutely useless for locomotion the moment I stopped at a T junction. On arrival at the bar, in the middle of the day, the tandem cyclists were in fact a family of young chavs who I struggled to get along with. I wish dreams had better continuity. They always contain scenes that would be really good if they made any sense, but fall way short of being screenplays.
Of all the insidious frustrations of computer use, this morning Kurt Vonnegut enlightened me to the worst. This is not the worst because of its cost to commerce or its direct influence on productivity, but its symbolic significance. It boils down to this:
Why can’t you turn a computer off?
In Vonnegut’s the Sirens of Titan (a must-read, by the way, if you think Douglas Adams was unique and original) the mothership of the first army of mars has a capacity for 2 persons and 500 years’ worth of hamburgers, sporting equipment, and other morale-boosting materials, and only two controls. The button marked ‘ON’ takes you from Mars to a predetermined landing position under full automatic control, and ‘OFF’, which isn’t wired to anything but was fitted because Martian mental health experts held that humans are more comfortable with a machine they think can be switched off.
Vonnegut wrote this in 1959, long before the BBC micro showed up in schools across Britain. Britons of a certain age may remember when prompted that you should never switch off a BBC micro with a disk in the drive, and you should never take a disk out of the drive while the light is on. Either transgression could result in loss of your ‘O’ level computer studies project, or worse, your favourite pirated game.
This was the beginning of a Dark Age in computer use. Don’t get me wrong, it was progress. Before this time, computers were used exclusively by trained scientists and by hardcore geeks whose skills were mathematics and electronics, two skills which were absolutely necessary to own a computer since you had to solder the thing together yourself and program it by waggling switches and trying not to drop too much scurf from your bushy ’70s beard into the circuit board.
The Dark Age was at the same time a Dawning. A dawning because for the first time, users were people whose primary interests were “home accounting”, “getting help with your homework” and most importantly “beaming yourself and your family into the future”. The technology was nascent, and the science of user interface design was neither particularly mature nor perceived as particularly relevant by the manufacturers of these machines. The machines were unique in being both scientific instruments and scientific subjects, and as such enjoyed a special reverence which led the user to tolerate traps such as that above. It was a Dark Age because though the traps were easily explainable and obvious to anyone who had ever built a computer, they were not so clear to anyone who hadn’t, and an easy majority of users fell into this category. Computers became god-like, a rich tradition of rites and suspicions rising up around them. Some school classes were forbidden to touch the science lab’s sole BBC micro, even when switched off, for fear they would do something too clever for the teachers to undo again.
Much later, when the PC undeservedly but unavoidably displaced the BBC micro from the classroom, again it came with a golden rule: do not switch it off without ‘parking the heads’. This was in fact the same technical issue as suffered by the BBC micro. The tiny electromagnets that read and wrote data to the disk could get uppity in the few microseconds after their power was unexpectedly removed. If they were anywhere near the data surface of the disk they might scramble some small piece of data. If that randomly-selected small piece of data were particularly important, you might lose everything stored on the disk.
Nowadays there are many safeguards against data loss. Disk drives get told, milliseconds in advance, when their power is going to be switched off, and they get the hell out of the danger zone before damage can result. Nowadays, even the power switch doesn’t really switch the power off. It sends a message to the computer ‘Hey, the user’s pressing the button on your case. I think he or she wants you to do something’. Here is the key to my objection. The computer is sovereign. The PC gets to say when it shuts down, not the user. To compound the indiginty, to reinforce its superiority, the computer requires us to ask it nicely, through the START menu, to shut down, and then to sit patiently in case it wants to ask us difficult questions: “Do you want to save this?”… “This program doesn’t want to shut down. Do you want to fight it, bearing in mind it has all your projected figures for next quarter?”.
We accept this because we believe two things as a legacy of the Dark Ages: 1) we believe that the computer has at its disposal a practically infinite variety of ways to crush our aspirations through such techniques as catastrophic data loss, costly and mysterious trips to bearded men with screwdrivers, and plain refusal to cooperate; and 2) we believe the rituals imposed by the computer to be necessary, on account of science.
Point (1) is certainly as true today as it ever has been. Though the chances of data loss are today far reduced from those of twenty years ago, the volume and import of data we keep are far greater. Over every PC is a ‘hell of a lot of messing around getting people’s addresses and emails and trying to remember stuff’ of Damocles.
Point (2) however, is pure superstition. There is no technical reason why you can’t hit the ‘ON’ button, wait a moment for various things to orient themselves, send your emails, download your illicit music, shoot some martians, then hit the ‘OFF’ button and walk away. There is no longer any technical reason why sovereignty cannot be handed back to the user.
We owe it to ourselves to demand it.
I sneezed.
“Bless you”
“Thankyou”
“Oo,” chipped in someone, I can’t remember who or where, except she was female and obviously wooly-minded. “you’ve killed a fairy!”
“What?”
“If someone blesses you, and you say thankyou, it breaks the blessing and kills a fairy”
Now every time I sneeze and someone says gezundheit or pruset (however it’s spelled) or bless you, I have a quandary. Do I stay silent and risk looking rude? Do I say “thank you” and risk killing a fairy? Do I ask whether the blesser believes in fairies and risk getting a funny look and/or thrown out of the gay bar?
I usually opt for the silence. Not because I want to save a fairy, but because if there is any action that will encourage someone who believes in fairies to talk to me, I’d like to avoid it.
Last time I came to Santa Barbara I decided airport shuttles and things were too complicated so I hired a car at LA and drove the two hours to Santa Barbara. I had to pull over and sleep after I got to the stage where I had to consciously focus my eyes, and continually dart them around on account of my peripheral vision having switched off.
I decided that this time, knowing santa barbara a little better, I could afford to fly right in to the airport and catch the airport shuttle or a cab to the condo.
The plane from Chicago to L.A. was delayed by about 15 minutes, and when we got to our connection we found that yes, technically we could get to the plane in time but no, we wouldn’t be getting on it as they had given our seats away. But we of course would be given a complimentary fighting chance to get on the next plane which was in only 3 hours’ time.
A few of us didn’t think this was too good to refuse, so 3 older ladies and I hopped in a rental car and drove to Santa Barbara. One of the ladies was Bernice, an intense matriarch, a retired American Airlines Employee and a dab hand at getting free stuff. We hired a huge Buick one way, with drop-off fee waived, for $43 including tax between 4 people. Superb. Turned out she was into ballroom dancing and knew a couple of people I knew from the salsa scene in SB. Small world.
After dropping two of the ladies off in Santa Barbara, discovering that there was no key at the corporate condo for me, and dropping he rental car at he airport, I remembered my baggage. Doh! After faffing a bit, I picked a hotel out of the blue and had them send the luggage there, then caught a $30 cab and booked in there for the night. Unfortunately I forgot to keep a receipt for the cab. Mind you, this morning’s cabbie gave me a blank receipt so not all is lost…
I’m home! And there is a tub of brownies on the counter, and a rogan josh and naan bread in the fridge!
Oo I could probably marry someone around here, if I ever became worthy of her, and if it wasn’t too late by then.
You often hear that women wish that men were more in touch with their feelings - less so since men tried to be feely in the late ’80s and you ended up with Dance Of The Blue Turtles and a bunch of sick-making didjeridu-owning rainforest-saving New Men. I think womankind realised the folly of persuading men to be more sensitive in a general sense, and now put it in more specific terms, referring to toilet lids, shopping, shoes and other important things.
The thing is, men don’t even have the same emotions as women. George Best was in touch with his emotions. Today I paid extra attention to my feelings, imagining I decided to share them all with the lady of my life. Actually I suppose I’ve just done that since she reads this. Hope she’s still speaking to me afterwards…. My memory is not good at the best of times, but here’s a dramatisation based on a true story. It starts with waking:
My balls itch.
Where can I get sex?
Damn I’m in Australia.
Mm, shower was nice I feel clean enough to have sex now.
She’s hot.
Mm toast. Nice.
There’s that american bitch that stole my toast two days ago. I’d like to shag her though.
Am I allowed to be hungry this soon after breakfast?
My balls itch
Let’s see what’s out there in the world - ooh a pancake house.
Is it too early in the day to get drunk?
I do not want to shag the waitress. Does that make me shallow?
I am inadequate because I can’t tell which of these sunglasses are womens and which are unisex.
She’s hot.
Kate would look good in that skirt. If it suited her.
I am inadequate because I can’t tell which of these trainers are womens and which are not.
Kate would like these trainers.
If they were her style.
I need a drink.
I’m tired. I need sleep. Followed by a shag.
Nice bum.
Wow the zoo. Better not go in the “children’s entrance” as they will think I am a kiddy fiddler.
I am inadequate because I do not have children.
Condoms are rubbish.
So is monogamy.
Poor goat.
Poor wallaby.
Poor lion.
Tigers are cool.
These people and their progeny are scum and should be sent to forced labour camps forthwith.
Sealions are bigger than I thought.
I would get bored in that pool and I’m smaller than that sealion and can’t swim as fast. I hope sealions are really stupid cos then they won’t mind being in there for the rest of their lives.
Is it unacceptable to pee in the sealion pool?
Did she notice I was looking down her cleavage?
Yes, because that’s the reason I noticed I was doing it.
Bill Bryson makes a lot of good points about Britain’s crapness, but how can you fix it?
I’d like a pond one day.
Cool, a “contact area”, you get to pet a deer.
Oh shit it’s for kids now everyone thinks I’m a kiddy fiddler.
I wonder if I should have a fountain - dang she’s hot.
Mmm Mocha.
York could do with trams.
And wider roads. Pity about all the romans buried under it all.
I wonder if I could be a writer.
Would that make me happy?
Happines comes from within.
And from rampant sex.
With multiple partners.
At once.
This is a cool little stream.
I am inadequate because I am not among the snogging couples on the river bank.
Hahah, the things kids say! Makes you want to hug ‘em.
Or throw them in the water.
Pelicans! Cool.
Is it too early to eat again?
She’s hot.
Wonder if I’ll ever afford a house.
How can you find out if somebody wants you to fuck off without making them want you to fuck off?
I’m lonely and bored and want to go home - oo pedal boats!
I would never go in a strip club. Does that make me inadequate?
Happiness comes from within.
Except in my case.
Blimey, she’s a fine example.
Oo, internet! At AU$4 an hour!