Trains, Pains and Call Centres

I had an interesting, yet frustrating experience last week. I was booked on an engagement that saw me just off Saville Row, London, for 4 days. I decided to do the commute for the 4 days on the train, as I can get door to door in just over 3 hours.

Most folks' perceptions these days of trains are getting stranded at Birmingham New Street with only a donner kebab to console you with. It's far from the truth these days, and the long distance Virgin lines have been running with rather good efficiency for some time - I know, because I'm always on them.

Booking this journey though, was up there with NTL support. I'm a tolerant person by Buddhist monk standards, but this got me rattled.

My first 'apparent' mistake was that I was booking multiple journeys. I entered in Tuesday's journey, and instead of 'proceed to payment', I chose 'add another journey' - simple right? So, add Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; total cost £600. Ouch!

Now I'm off to 'proceed to payment', enter all the details and what not, and finally click 'make payment'. Wait a few seconds…'Card issuer declined' - Eh? I must have made a mistake somewhere. Check the details, no they're correct; try again. Same thing 'Card issuer declined' - Bollocks!

So I get on the blower to AMEX. Have to enter my card number which is a bit fiddly on a PDA soft phone, but I get through, and very quick I might add. The support person knows her stuff, and takes time to explain everything as we go along. It transpires that Virgin in their ultimate wisdom didn't want to take £600 off me. They though it much better to make a transaction for each ticket, or 4 x £150. So you can guess what happened.

Yup, the card declined the transaction, as it saw it as a bit dodgy - rightly so. In fact, it wasn't actually declined, more held pending for manual authorisation, so the authorisation was complete, they just needed confirmation. Virgin Rails booking system isn't that clever though, so they just binned off the booking as declined.

AMEX told me, as the transactions were pending, I had to call Virgin Rail and get them to either manually authorise with their merchant ID, or for them to cancel the transaction. This is where the fun and games really started. As I dialled the number for Virgin, little did I realise, my call was being trunked across to India.

Now I'm all for a bit of multi-culture. In fact India is just about my favourite destination in the world; I've travelled there since 1996. But, Indian call centres are a complete nightmare. First off, the culture is very very different. When I've got a problem, I want somebody that understands 'me', not the other way around. Whatever problem I have, I want it sorting, and with the minimum of fuss; after all, I'm paying for a service. There are language difficulties, and their English accent is harder to understand - and I'm pretty good at it.

Anyway, my call centre guy was clearly reading off a teleprompt/screen, and there was just zero flexibility to what he could do or help me with, unless it was on the screen. He didn't really understand what was going on, apart from what he was prompted to tell me. Now it's not his fault, and I wasn't shitty at any point, but I was sharp. I was told that I'd just have to wait 24-48 hours, and try again.

While explaining my problem, I must have mentioned that I was travelling from Warrington to London Euston at 6:27 on Tuesday about 10 times. He decided that he'd try to make the reservation over the phone - but his first question was 'what is your destination and time of travel'. Queue the mute button, and me screaming my fucking head off. After 5 minutes, his computer crashed, and I was told to call back in 15 minutes - arghghhghgh - OMFG!!!!!

It's the Indian way though. If there's one thing I've learned being over there, is you just can't fight it. You have to go with the flow and be patient. I just had to switch myself into that mode again, and the pain soon started to subside. Soon after, I had a chuckle, all be it with still slightly elevated blood pressure, but I smiled.

I eventually put the journey on another card; one that I don't use for work. I was able to use my AMEX for the day after thank God. I did call customer services (not the booking line) to explain my plight, and that centre was based in the UK. The guy was flexible and understood what was going on. He told me there'd been an upgrade in January, and he'd seen a few instances of this happening. He said he'd pass my comments on to the business support team. All reassuring, and professional at last.

I won't be booking multiple tickets with Virgin again in a rush, no matter how much I love India.

Digital Lifestyle: Video Cameras

Stemming from a love of photography, I really got into video about 10 years ago. I was working as a system administrator in Warrington, and becoming perpetually bored, with what I perceived a mundane career. It wasn't 'that' mundane; I just didn't have any creative outlets. "Yeh maaaan!, whatever…"

Anyway, so off I went, and did what I'm best at - research and learning. Within days, I was going to be the next Robert Rodriguez, and started to study film production and direction in my spare time. With my higher than average IT contractor wages, I was off buying expensive video kit; Canon GL1, matte boxes, Sennheiser mics and windshields, boom poles, tripods; you name it, I had it. God, I must have spent thousands.

I ran out of steam though; as quite commonly I do; much to my wife's (girlfriend then) distaste - ah well!

Still, I loved doing all the clever things with video. It was creative, but technically challenging. I got a real sense of satisfaction, cutting a home video in iMovie, adding soundtracks, and banging it out to a DVD in iDVD. But I'm a picky bugger these days in my old(er) age. My problem is, I won't commit to doing anything, until I've found the perfect way of doing it. I like to call it obsessive compulsive technology disorder - my digital life just 'has' to be in perfect order.

About a year ago, I was examining my digital lifestyle creative outlets, and realised I'd not outputted any video for years. I used to love it so much; why did I stop? I soon found the answer. I absolutely hated carrying around a MiniDV camcorder with me. Even worse, was the fact that carrying a camcorder usually meant I had a stills camera with me also, not to mention the SLR.

I decided enough was enough, and video was coming back to town. What I needed was a convergence device; an in the pocket device that would do a multitude of things, and good quality also. Convergence devices can be a right pain in the arse though, and tend to do a crap job at most things. It seems the more you add, the shitter they get. My phone had a camera and did video, and it did the phone bits, and the other data functions I needed it for, very well. The media quality was appalling though.

Pocket cameras that shot video were a promising choice. I'd had a couple of these previously, and the video quality was pretty good. The problem was the format. Most pocket cameras these days shoot using the MJPEG format; and while it is good quality, the format is a pig. First off, it eats memory cards faster than a Labrador can eat a gravy bone. And secondly, once you have the AVI file, it's not the greatest format for sharing with. Also, frame sizes and rates used to be small, due to the high bitrates. And quality per Mb, it's not all that. Well, it's better for editing with - I suppose. But overall, it is outdated and behind the times. Sony's offerings include MPEG1 recording, and yes, you can fit loads on a card - shame it looks shit though. It seemed like video was going back on the shelf for a while. Or was it?

I was doing some heavy research on dpreview.com, as I'd seen some solid state memory MPEG-4 (part 2) recorders, and wanted to try to find a point and shoot that did the same. I came across the Casio range of cameras, and they appeared to have a whole line of cameras that recorded to MPEG-4. I trawled through countless reviews, and from what I could gather, the photo quality was average, but the video quality was good, more so considering the compression. They also did widescreen mode shooting, which I prefer, as my intended audience is 16:9. I settled on the Casio S770, as it was card sized, meaning it would go nearly everywhere with me, and most importantly wouldn't be a chore.

It's no DV camera though. You can't zoom while recording, it'll only record up to 10 minutes on the EU version due to some EU legislative crap - used as a video recorder, more tax blah blah! The lens can flare quite badly, in direct bright light, but that's nothing out of the ordinary. The quality is superb considering this is a £170 camera, recording to MPEG-4. It records roughly 1.7GB per hour, that's about 140 minutes on a 4GB card. 4GB SD cards weigh in at about £15 these days.

Because it records to SD memory cards, it's a cinch to get it onto your computer; none of this OHCI IEEE1394 camera control bollocks - just stick it in and go - nice! The files are AVIs, but that's just a wrapper like Quicktime MOV. The actual codec of the video is MPEG-4 Part 2, which is basically what DivX, XviD, Quicktime 6 etc use. This means that the files are widely playable on a whole host of devices. A lot of DVD players these days support MPEG-4 playback too, so it's easy to pop your files on a disc and play them on the big telly. Or, if you are like me, you can stream them across a network to a media player like XBOX Media Center (XBMC) or similar - more on that some other time.

It was about 14 months ago that I bought this camera. As is life in the digital world, there have now been 45 million revisions of the product that I originally bought - sort of. Casio now offer an even more interesting proposition for video recording, in the form of MPEG-4 Part 10. It sounds like a really long drawn out movie sequel, but the format is also more commonly known as H.264, or MPEG-4 AVC. The format can be stunning. I've not seen the results from the new Casio cameras yet, but I'd imagine it to be better. The resolution is still only SD, but that's all I need for now, as the digital workflow around HD is just far too lengthy for simple home movies.

On our recent trip to India, a brief sand storm almost totalled the lens contraction mechanism on our S770. A little devil on my shoulder secretly wants it to die a death, so I can upgrade to H.264 - don't tell Sally though :-)

I told you I was obsessed with this stuff, and honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you've decided on the video capture device you want, it's then time to start thinking about intended output. How do you get from capture to output, in the least fuss, in the least time, while still maintaining the picky (or in my case arsey) quality you desire? Well, I'll go into that in another entry soon.