Some useful information for readers of this siteI'd like to pass on a few useful web sites and tips to readers of this site. The first ones are basic things like how to find out certain types of information such as phone numbers, postcodes, even your council tax band. The second group gives you an idea how to save money on certain phone calls, and how to try and deal with junk mail, phone calls and emails. I would be very grateful for readers to add others! Some basic resourcesThere are no charges for these unless otherwise indicated
Some useful tips for readers
Avoiding 0870 and 0845 phone numbersApparently I’m not the only one to find these “non geographical” phone numbers irritating. 0845 numbers used to have one benefit, that you paid a local call charge whether calling locally or long-distance within the UK. But these days most of us (I think) pay the same for local or longer distance (the old STD) calls, so they are a bit redundant. And in fact, as many of us have packages from the phone company whereby we pay a flat rate per month and get unlimited calls, it makes the whole 0845 idea redundant, or more expensive! But if you want expensive calls, try an 0870 number. I never understood these anyway, but the same thing applies, except that these calls can be really expensive—it’s often indicated on the advert. Worse still, these numbers tend to be used by phone sales and query lines, where you end up hanging on for ages for a response. BUT DID YOU KNOW the owners of these lines actually receive part of the charge you pay for the call? So in actual fact, the longer you hang on, the more profit the company you are calling makes! Isn’t this crazy? Contrast the USA: any commercial organisation worth its salt has a completely free 1-800 number. In the UK, we have a few 0800 free numbers, but not a lot. And now you can see why! Here’s a solution. Every 0870 and 0845 number has to have a geographical ‘real’ number behind it. There is a web site called ‘Say No to 0870’ which collects this information, and will allow you to look up a free or geographical number for a particular company, or you can type in an 0870 or 0845 number and it will tell you if there is a geographical or free number and what it is: It works! Give it a try, and don’t contribute to the extra profit made from these numbers. If people want your business, they shouldn’t profit from the phone call as well! Thus for example, the South Cambridgeshire DC general enquiries number 0845 0450500 is also 01954 713000. Cambridgeshire County Council (0845 045 5200) is 01223 717111. Stopping Junk MailLots of people complain about getting unsolicited mail dropping through their letterboxes. Often this happens simply because some company has built a database from the electoral roll, or from the phone book, or because you’ve signed up to some other service and someone has sold on your address. There is a way to stop this, called the Mail Preference Service. This is a database, to which all respectable bulk (junk) mail companies are supposed to subscribe; if you are in that database, you will be removed from the subscribing company’s database. More can be found on this web site: I can assure you that it works. We signed up for it before we came to Whaddon, and signed up again with the new address when we moved, and we do not get any addressed junk mail. Stopping unsolicited marketing phone callsPhone databases are built up in all sorts of ways, and there are few more irritating things being ‘cold called’ by someone trying to sell double glazing, phone services, etc. Well, there is the Telephone Preference Service to deal with this. It works the same way as the junk mail one just described: Again, I can vouch for the fact that it works. We just don’t get marketing calls now. Stopping unaddressed ‘door to door’ mail delivered by Royal MailI bet you are as annoyed as I by the weekly amount of advertising which the postman puts in your letterbox in addition to the stuff actually addressed to you. Of course the Royal Mail makes money out of doing this, but it is possible to stop it. Ironically, this is the hardest of all of them to stop (surprise…). This is how it is supposed to work: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/content1?catId=400126&mediaId=500081 We have found this not to be 100% reliable, but it should in theory work, although it is very dependent on the individual postman. Try it, and think of the trees you’ll save! Computer Spam"Spam" is the nickname given to the junk email which fills our computer mailboxes. The name comes from the Monty Python "spam, spam, spam" sketch. This is the hardest problem of all to deal with, and there is no totally effective solution, no web site which can give you all the answers. The normal way to start to deal with it is to check your service provider for their junk email/spam filter and try and get that working. The danger with all spam filters is that they will guess wrong, and a perfectly OK email will be treated as spam. You can tune these filters quite a bit, but never let spam be deleted automatically, in case a real message is in there. |