As you can see, I’m now 1000 words into my 2500-word Mencap spellathon challenge. I think I underestimated how many words make 2500 – it turns out that 2500 is quite a lot. So keep sponsoring me, and keep me spelling!

Mencap is a great cause, supporting the 1.5 million people in the UK with learning disabilities. If you gave me a penny for ever ten words – that’s just £2.50 – Mencap could make that go a long way. So get over to the JustGiving page Mencap have created for me, and give them some cash.

Thanks for your support!

I’ve volunteered to be part of Mencap’s spellathon, and have agreed to learn to correctly spell 2,500 of what Mencap claim are English’s hardest words. I think there’s also some backwards spelling involved, just in case ordinary spelling should prove too straightforward.

I’m looking for anybody to sponsor my achievement of this mountainous feat in aid of Mencap, who provide all sorts of support for people with learning disabilities. I worked with children with combined learning disabilities and mental health problems for a few weeks in 2007, and can testify that it’s a very worthy cause.

A penny a word – i.e. a donation of £25 – would be absolutely fantastic, but times are hard, and I’ll more than happily take anything that’s going. I can only accept donations via the JustGiving page Mencap has created for me, so click through and be generous.

Right, I’m off to eat a dictionary…

This in-joke in the Love Never Dies DVD preview actually made me laugh out loud.

A little while ago, before I did all that App reviewing nonsense, I blogged about Natwest’s utterly unambitious Customer Charter.

You’ll probably have seen on TV ads and billboards nationwide that they’ve just published their first independent review of progress – it’s online here, and it’s well worth a read and a chuckle.

Let me share with you some of the highlights.

You’ll remember that one of the commitments I derided the most was “We will aim to serve the majority of our customers within five minutes in our branches.” They have two pages dedicated to this commitment in their follow-up report. The first is congratulatory, with big ticks heralding the arrival of more cash machines and a queue management system. Neither of those is the crucial outcome measure, though. That comes on the next page, with this pearl of wisdom:

We know … that there are times and places where customers have waited longer and we have much more to work on … We are testing a new tool to measure queues.

Their solution to improve waiting times is… to change the way waiting times are measured. Because, dear customer, this represents “Helpful Banking”. Presumably, you’ll stand in the queue for exactly the same length of time, but their report will look better. Fantastic.

Another promise was that they’d only piss off 10% of their customers: “9 out of 10 customers will rate us friendly and helpful.” How did they do?

8 out of 10 customers rated us friendly and helpful during 2010.

They failed. But, not to worry, they still include this congraulatory customer quote:

A 9 out of 10 customer satisfaction rate … does help to reassure me that they are serious about their commitment.

Not only would pissing off 10% of customers not go a long way to reassuring me that NatWest is serious about “Helpful Banking”, the fact is that they didn’t achieve it. So it doesn’t reassure anyone about anything!

Some quick-fire ones now.

Promise: “75% of our customers to be satisfied with the way their complaint has been handled.”

57% of our customers were satisfied with the way their complaint was handled.

Promise: “[We will provide] more than 22,000 days each year to community volunteering”

During 2010, [we] gave 7,547 days of volunteering to their local communities.

Promise: “We will answer 90% of calls in less than a minute.”

We answered 91.4% of calls made to our telephone banking centres in less than 3 a minute.

Hmm, that last one looks good. It looks like they’re meeting their target. And, in fact, they are.

I’ve included it because of the ludicrous way they define the target, which is curiously hidden from the main report.

Their published result makes it look like I can phone up, and my call will be answered by a real person within a minute. That’s actually not true, because there’s often an automated machine answer first. They have then gone on to exclude from the sample anyone who fails to get through the automated machine’s ‘screening’ of calls. If you can’t find out how to speak to an actual person, you’re excluded from the figures. If the machine won’t let you speak to a real person – perhaps because “lines are busy, please try later” – you’re excluded from the figures. Extraordinary.

I can only repeat my advice from last time: Switch.

Swtich to Smile. Switch to First Direct. Switch to The Co-op.

Switch to anyone who actually gives a damn about customer service, instead of waiting for change for a bank which clearly doesn’t know how to prioritise customer service, and whose solution to poor customer service appears to commit to more poor customer service.

Don’t put up with it. Switching is quick and painless. The more you put up bad service, the more these corporate idiots think its acceptable, and the more it propagates.

Please, for the good of us all: Switch!

Love Never Dies Poster

I really, really like Love Never Dies. I saw the original production and loved it, and saw the revised version and loved it still more. Well, maybe not more, but at least equally, and I appreciated that the changes were necessary for those less familiar with the backstory.

ALW is on the media circuit down-under at the moment due to the Antipodean opening of the aforementioned musical. In a recent interview (that I now can’t find), there was some tangential comparison between Love Never Dies and Jesus Christ Superstar, including the assertion that the latter was never intended as as a stage show, but merely a concept album.

Jesus Christ Superstar is something that I probably grew up with, and never really understood. So I dug it out on Spotify for a re-listen, and ultimately found that it bore several re-listens over several days. I actually found that I really quite liked it, but there was something missing.

It was the search for the thing that was not-quite-right that lead to me listening to the album more times over than is probably healthy, frequently on may way into or home from work. The album seemed to have everything: love, lust, jeopardy, moral complexity, and, of course, great music.

But something didn’t “hang” right.

The last time I had this feeling was over the wildly successful Wicked. I eventually realised that the missing ingredient here was moral complexity: the story is fairytale simple, with “good” and “evil”. This removes the intrinsic interest of moral complexity, and any sense of jeopardy, since the moralistic absolutes mean that the outcome is clearly predetermined.

And if anyone points out that this is obvious in a musical that’s aimed at children, I’d point them in the direction of Captain Scarlet, possibly the most morally complex TV series ever made, which was aimed squarely at children. The concepts explored in that are essentially the same concepts that Tony Blair battled with when deciding whether to invade Iraq. But I digress…

Jesus Christ Superstar

Moral absolutism meant that Wicked‘s outcome is predetermined. In itself, that’s not a problem that affects Jesus Christ Superstar. The morality is absolutist, but not out-and-out so. Jesus is not always immediately perfect in the musical – he gets angry, shouts, and is generally portrayed as having a human temperament, even if the backstory makes clear that ultimately he was on the side of the angels. So to speak.

The problem with Jesus Christ Superstar is Judas: his character’s storyline is never completed, which makes the whole musical unbalanced. In the musical, it is predetermined that Judas will betray Jesus. Judas duly betrays Jesus, Jesus gets cross and berates Judas who hangs himself, Judas’s ghost gives his reasons for his betrayal (whilst simultaneously knowing that it was predetermined and not really his fault), and Jesus promptly dies.

There’s no forgiving of Judas. There’s no relief for Judas from his wracked guilt. He’s left at the low-point of his story-arc, despite the musical constantly reminding us that Jesus, and by extension God, are forgiving. There’s no resolution.

This seemed a really odd choice. A couple of lines in the penultimate song (“Crucifixion”) with Jesus asking God to forgive Judas would fix it – yet he merely asks God to forgive everyone else. Obviously, Judas being stopped from hanging himself would be all the better, but hey-ho.

So why does the musical leave this story, ahem, hanging?

Luca Lionello as Judas in a movie I've never seen

Well, it turns out that it’s based on the Biblical story. As a non-believer, I’m not sure if it’s right for me to write posts poking holes in Christian theology, but I see no problem with pointing out holes in the plot of the book.

It is make explicit that Judas had no choice but to betray Jesus. It was prophesied that he would do so, hence his fate was effectively pre-determined. Luke says that he was possessed by Satan at the time, which adds yet more weight to the argument (Luke 22:3).

Given that Judas effectively had no say in the matter, it seem logical that his actions should be forgiven. Judas even confesses his sins (Matthew 27:4). Jesus has previously said that he would view anyone who did God’s will as his blood relative (Matthew 12:50). Punishment for actions over which there was no choice, and fulfilled God’s predetermined plan, and for which Judas has asked forgiveness, seems sadistic and vengeful.

Because of that, what happened to Judas after the betrayal becomes really important. A forgiving Jesus who “turns the other cheek” should absolve Judas, and all should live happily ever after.

Yet, bizarrely, the Bible is really unclear on what happened afterwards. Matthew says he committed suicide (Matthew 27:9-10). This doesn’t seem a great ending: Follow the path that God has laid for you and you’ll end up so guilt-ridden that you’ll kill yourself. Though perhaps that explains why suicide rates are higher in Christian than Muslim countries. Still, not something you here being preached every day.

Acts has a different story. Here, Judas buys a field, and falls over in it, causing his entire body to explode with bowels gushing everywhere (Acts 1:18). It’s difficult to imagine that this is intended to have happened by natural means, so it seems that God is directly punishing Judas on Earth for something that God had planned for Judas to do. How rewarding.

The non-canonical Gospel of Judas describes Judas being stoned to death by the other disciples. That’s Peter stoning to death Judas for following God’s pre-determined path. How does that sit with the Catholic church?

Barnabas reckons that, by some miracle, Judas was crucified instead of Jesus. Not friendly treatment.

And, lastly, Papias preached that Judas swelled up to quite an extraordinary size, until he was crushed by a chariot which was so huge it couldn’t get past him. That sounds worse than crucifixion. Again, apparently divine punishment for following a divine path.

Whichever one you choose, it represents a sticky end for Judas which seems entirely unjustifiable given that he was doing things which were pre-determined.

So the treatment of Judas is my Big Fat Theological Question of the Day: Why is Judas punished in the most horrendous way for following the will of God?

To my non-religious mind, that seems like a big ‘plot hole’ in the Biblical story.

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, because this particular issue has been on my wick for some considerable time. Now is the moment to get it off my chest!

NatWest’s marketing department has been running irritating TV ads for a long while now promoting it’s ‘Customer Charter’. I find these adverts intensely irritating, primarily because of the poor quality of the promises featured in the ‘Charter’.

It reflects a sad state of consumer affairs in the UK when a bank feels able to make a song and dance about these fourteen pathetic promises:

1. We will extend the opening hours in our busiest branches.

NatWest has committed to opening 600 of its branches on Saturdays. That’s about a third of their branches. Given that the bank wants us to give it our money, it isn’t exactly reaching for the sky in extending opening hours, is it? When the ‘Charter’ is fully implemented, the vast majority of its branches still won’t be open when the vast majority of consumers are most able to access them: weekends.

2. We will aim to serve the majority of our customers within five minutes in our branches.

That is, your custom means so little to NatWest that they expect you to queue for over five minutes to speak to them about half of the time. They expect you to queue to give them money. And we are supposed to be grateful for this apparent concession. How has service become so poor in this country, and how so especially in the banking sector? Tesco will open another till if I have to queue: NatWest will leave me hanging around.

3. We will provide you with friendly, helpful service whenever you deal with us.

The rubric for this item suggests that they want to piss off only 10% of customers. Again, not exactly aiming high, are we?

4. We will help you to make the right choices for you and your money, providing a clear product range with simply explained features and charges

That is, of course, provided that the ‘right choices’ happen to fit in with NatWest’s product range and profit margins. There is no commitment to providing independent financial advice, despite that being what’s hinted at by this promise. Not exactly reassuring.

5. We will provide a 24/7 telephone banking service.

The rubric for this one contains the now oft-quoted concealed racism of promising “UK call centres”. And is there actually any major bank that doesn’t provide this as part of their normal service? Surely not.

6. We will work with you to keep you safe when you bank online with us

Again, this seems an utterly bizarre promise. Keeping me safe when I bank online with NatWest is, in the most part, about NatWest having secure systems. I would liked to have taken that as read.

7. We will help you quickly if your debit card is lost or stolen and you need access to cash

Once again – wow. They have to make a special promise to enable me to access my cash if I happen to lose the card that provides the bank with the most convenient method of me accessing my own money? Again, I’d have very much liked to have taken that as read.

8. We will continue to be a responsible lender and are committed to finding new ways to help

The bank that lent a single woman on benefits £5000 for a nose-job will ‘continue’ to lend responsibly? Great!

9. We pledge to stay open for business if we are the last bank in town and will consider a range of options to ensure a local banking service is available

I’m supposed to be grateful that a bank is promising not to close if there isn’t another bank nearby? You mean I’m supposed to be grateful that NatWest guarantee to maintain a monopoly? And note that the first half of the sentence – suggesting that they’ll maintain the branch – is seemingly contradicted by the last half, suggesting that they will ‘consider a range of options’. Like a once-weekly service in the back of a van.

10. We will provide young people with financial education through our independently accredited MoneySense programme

11. We will actively support the local community in which we live and work

It’s difficult to complain too heavily about these commitments, except to say that they have very little to do with any promise to customers, and everything to do with demonstrating corporate responsibility… And that both programmes cost only the tiniest fraction of the profits of the organisation.

12. We will resolve customer complaints fairly, consistently, and promptly

Apparently, they only want 25% of complainants to be annoyed at the handling of their complaint. Note that the Bank has just been fined £2.8m by the FSA for poor handling of complaints. So how’s that promise going?

13. Twice a year we will publish the most common of complaints

Twice a year they’ll tell us what we complain about? But I already know what I moan about. Why tell me about it? Why not just fix it?

14. We will actively seek your thoughts and suggestions on how we can become more helpful

But, other thank listening, they’ll do nothing. There’s no commitment to following the suggestions, or responding to the thoughts. Thanks, NatWest.

So what do I suggest? Simple: switch.

Swtich to Smile. Switch to First Direct. Switch to The Co-op.

Switch to anyone who actually gives a damn about customer service, instead of waiting for change for a bank which clearly doesn’t know how to prioritise customer service, and whose solution to poor customer service appears to commit to more poor customer service.

Don’t put up with it. The more you put up with it, the more these corporate idiots think its acceptable, and the more poor service propagates.

Swtich, switch, swtich!

To promote their new website, the advertising company SA Group staged a bizarre stunt in which they dangled a person in front of a billboard during rush hour last week. It caught my eye as I drove past, and I ended up Googling the company involved. Here cometh the company’s video of the stunt:

Billboard Corruption PR Stunt from SA Group on Vimeo.

Yes, I know that the stunt has got me talking about and linking to the company and so in that sense has been a success, but I can’t help thinking that their Press Release about the event will ruffle a few feathers.

You’ll note their headline – “Newcastle Billboard Stunt” – and their claim that

Known as billboard corruption www.sagroupuk.com targeted rush hour traffic with a head turning billboard message supported with a live kidnap stunt where a person was suspended from the top of a billboard in Newcastle City Centre.

All very well, except for the minor fact that this happened in Gateshead, not Newcastle, and next to the B1600, not exactly the city centre of either Gateshead or Newcastle. They’re based in the North East themselves, so surely they know the difference?

And given that my attention wasn’t exactly focused on the poster’s logo, when I came to Google the stunt, it was very difficult to find any information as to who the advertiser was – as I naturally wasn’t searching for “Newcastle City Centre”, since it happened in a different city. Even substituting the city for Newcastle, only the narrowest possible search terms bring up any results – and then we’re talking about the above Vimeo video, rather than the company’s own site.

I’m sure their “billboard corruption” makes for wonderful PR, but these guys really need to work on their web approach. I don’t know whether they bought some AdWords nearer the time and I just missed the campaign, but surely I’m not the only one looking this up a couple of days later.

So, in summary: Eye catching stunt, geography and web strategy need some serious work.

Three years ago, everyone’s favourite Guardian columnist Tim Dowling wrote a G2 article listing low-cost ways to transform your human existence, in Even £50 can change your life.

His lowest budget suggestion was buying socks:

£50 [is] enough to be able to throw out your entire sock collection and buy a new set from Tesco. No more holes or mismatched pairs. Just fresh, clean socks every morning from now on.

Doesn’t that sound appealing?

Around the same time, another of my Guardian favourites, Anna Pickard, was blogging about the frustrations of socks, and perhaps because of the sheer volume of sock-orietated content that permeated my brain around then, the idea of having a whole new collection of socks has been lodged firmly in my mind ever since.

Now, back to 2010. Having recently accepted a dream job in Public Health, and having just about finished my job in General Practice, I was in the mood to treat myself this weekend. But this being credit-crunch Britain, and the job I’ve just finished being un-banded, the celebration was hardly going to be grandiose.

But – given Tim’s advice – why not make it life-changing nonetheless?

So off all my socks went to Oxfam (well, nearly all of them, I kept my favourite ones). And, clutching Clubcard vouchers, Partnership Card vouchers, and a Debenhams voucher from Kantar, off I went to the shops, and procured myself three fine sets of shiny new life-changing socks for nothing.

This does mean that I’ve swapped a whole drawer of socks for just about fourteen pairs, but it cost me nothing, and who needs more than two weeks’ worth of socks anyway?

I can officially declare that it is entirely liberating to have a whole collection of comfortable, hole-free, well matched pairs of brand new socks. That initial sense of mild disappointment and frustration each morning that “all my nice socks are in the wash” has been eliminated.

And my feet have never felt happier.

A Happy Foot - It's not mine, it's just illustrative. Courtesy of evelynishere (used under licence).

By-the-by, it turns out, that the Guardian‘s position on this has changed. Michael ‘Smugface’ White doesn’t do new socks. Instead…

I still wear my own children’s discarded socks and, if they were a particularly good black pair, occasionally even darn them.

Just think of his poor feet.

Is this really, as he claims, an environmental micro-choice which remains with him from his time spent growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War? Or is it just a pitiable sign of a being a tight, grumpy old bastard? It’s hard to say for sure, but I know which explanation I favour.

Knowing what’s under his highly polished shoes, will we ever be able to take his pompous self-righteous TV political commentary seriously again? Here’s hoping no-one will.

The recent update to the layout of this site means that it’s now effectively broken in Internet Explorer 6. Given that only a tiny proportion of my readers now use IE6, I’ve stopped trying to hack the code to make it work.

Previously, I’ve tried to make the site as widely accessible as possible, but the effort of making things work in an outdated, horrible browser has become greater than the reward it brings in terms of visitors.

The site is still viewable in IE6, but the design is a little messed up. IE6 visitors will see an advisory message in addition to the messed up site explaining that they are using a very outdated browser and pointing them in the direction of four good upgrade options.

I hope any IE6 users out there will understand the decision.

The pilot episode of James O’Malley’s new podcast, to which I have contributed, is now available at poddelusion.co.uk, and also on twitter @poddelusion.

Go now! It’s fun!