Trains and Pains

We spent five hours on a Virgin train today travelling from Oxford to York. It wasn't delayed, it was just slow. Technically we could have switched to a faster train at Birmingham or at Doncaster but we were being a little lazy and I tend to be of the opinion that it's better to stay on a train that is definitely running than to switch to a faster train that may not be there.

Virgin have taken recently to running most of their trains as two trains joined together. This is fine, it means more seats, except that they have one of the trains as all reserved and the one one as all unreserved. Hence if you get on the train and it then leaves the station, it's easy to have trouble getting a seat at busy times. I don't really understand why they don't have a mixture of reserved and unreserved seats in each half.

This problem resulted in us having to change train-halves at Birmingham. Which was a little annoying but better than standing for a few hours which we might have had to do if we hadn't been able to find a seat.

Multiple Virgins

My broadband has been provided by Virgin since I first got it many years ago. The service has always been fine and I've never had any problems. Following the recent change in the regulations for people providing these things, Virgin have merged with NTL (I think) and now provide land phones and stuff like that.

I rarely use my landline, so my cost of calls is generally close to zero. However, by switching my main call provider from BT to Virgin, I was able to get cheaper broadband. No extra cost on my BT bill (it'll just be line rental I think) and a reduced monthly broadband cost was something of a no-brainer so I changed over.

I then got an email from Virgin confirming I had done this. This was fine because I had. Then, over the next six hours and fifty-five minutes, I got four more emails from Virgin, all identical to the first one. This was odd, but also fine. Then I got a letter from BT saying I had done it. Which was also fine because I had done it.

Then, today I got five (count 'em!) letters from Virgin telling me when the new phone service would be active. This was less fine since it seemed like a bit of a waste. They all had exactly the same info on, so at least I have no contradictory information to deal with. Five emails and letters seems a little excessive though.

I figured that as long as they don't actually charge me five times then I'll be ok. But when I checked my credit card just now I found they had charged me once only, but for £1 less than I expected (just £13.99). So now I'm a bit confused.

Guess I shouldn't complain as long as it all works. Touch wood.