Canal Walk held me hostage

7 comments

Posted on 18th January 2012 by Tony in Rant

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This is a bit of a rant-post, so please excuse me … but I’m a little annoyed by Canal Walk Shopping Centre.

If you don’t know, Canal Walk is the biggest shopping mall in Cape Town and incredibly popular. It’s not the closest shopping mall to me, but it’s central which means that I do have quite a few meetings there with clients who want to meet somewhere central, rather than driving through to my offices in West Beach.

Now, Peeve #1: Canal Walk has incredibly expensive parking. R8.00 for the first hour, after which it steadily climbs. I am personally opposed to shopping malls who charge for parking. Especially at Canal Walk, where there really is no alternative – they’re slap bang in the middle of unusable marsh-land that stretches out for miles, and you can’t park outside the precinct and use public transport, because, well, there isn’t any. OK, so I’m forced to pay for parking.

Peeve #2: Their parking machines don’t accept Credit Cards. If you’re the biggest mall in the Western Cape, with the rates you charge for parking, please accept credit cards. Happily the V&A Waterfront now accepts Credit Cards at their machines, and so does the Airport … no one keeps enough cash on them, and if you do have cash, the stupid machine spits out a pile of R5 coins when paying with R50.00.

Which leads to the incident yesterday where Canal Walk Shopping Centre held me hostage:

I had a meeting yesterday with my landlord to discuss a few things and realised after the meeting I had no cash on me, so I quickly drew some cash at the ATM. Since the devaluation of the rand over the last while, you may have noticed that ATMs no longer spit out R50 notes. The smallest amount I could draw was R100.00 – which puts me in a pickle … the Parking Machines don’t accept R100 notes! No problem, I’ll ask at the Canal Walk Information Desk if they can give me change … and this was their response: “We don’t give change for parking”. Which is the response I got from all the shops along the way from the Parking Machine to the Information Desk.

I explained my dilemma to the man at the Information Desk. I normally don’t carry cash with me, I drew money from the ATM and they only spit out R100 notes. What now? “Ah yes,” he says, “we are aware of that problem. A lot of people come to us and say the same thing. Sorry, we don’t give change”.

Well then, what am I supposed to do?

I can go pay my parking at the ticket office, but it’s in some dark dingy part of the parking garages, diametrically opposed to where I had parked. My alternative, is to go into a shop and buy something. I eventually ceded to the ransom demand and bought a bottle of water so that I had enough change to pay for my parking.

On twitter, a few followers suggested I could have gone to the bank and asked for change … but have you seen the queues at banks?

My gripes:

  1. If Canal Walk Management is aware of the problem (ATMs spitting out R100 notes, and machines not accepting them) what exactly are they doing about it?
  2. Why do Canal Walk machines not accept Credit Cards?
  3. Why not give your Information Desk the tools/ability to give out change?
  4. Why not allow the Parking Offices some space in two or three points in the mall to dish out change?

Why am I forced to buy something to get change to pay for my parking?

It’s absolutely unacceptable – and let’s not even talk about the attitude I got from the people at the Information Desk – they were as helpful as a screen-door on a submarine.

 

Popularity: 4% [?]


DMA Rules are going to increase SPAM …

2 comments

Posted on 20th June 2011 by Tony in Rant

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As a member of the Direct Marketing Association in South Africa (DMA) I take the marketing rules really seriously. I strongly believe that if someone doesn’t want to be contacted, then we should respect that. There’s really no point to annoy people – bad for the company, bad for the brand and bad for business.

Everyone knows that the new Consumer Protection Act comes with a series of onerous responsibilities for business owners, specifically that if someone subscribes to a National Database (DNC LIST) you are not allowed to contact them. I have no idea what the penalties are going to be, but it makes absolute sense to me to do this.

As yet, there is no government controlled DNC LIST which means everyone is still trying to figure things out until something actually happens. In the mean time, the Direct Marketing Association has always had a DNC LIST for it’s members, which was emailed to us once a month. This works perfectly with Industry standards for email programmes – basically you use an “exclude” system, which tells the software:

Send Email to This person, unless they appear on the DNC LIST.

Unfortunately during April/May there was some idiot who decided to distribute the DNC LIST to a whole bunch of spammers … as you can imagine, a big mess, with loads of people who specifically asked not to receive emails, now getting heaps of emails.

The DMA (who are tendering for the government contract to manage the National Registry) have now decided to handle the list-exclude on their server. Basically this means that I have to regularly upload my list to them, they’ll remove the duplicates and then return the list to me. Sounds fair-enough, except the DMA have decided to use ID Numbers as the exclude criteria (instead of email addresses and/or cellphone numbers). I don’t know about you, but when last did anyone ask you for your ID number when signing up to join a newsletter?

I suspect loads of people are now going to get more spam, even after registering with the DMA because the marketing guys don’t know you’ve unsubscribed – even guys like me, who really don’t want to be spamming you.

I have made contact with the folks at the DMA and they have told me that if I have problems with their system, I need to email them a non-disclosure agreement and a copy of my list, they’ll clean it up and email me the clean list. Besides the fact that my list is about 60MB big – how often do they expect to do this?

Currently the DMA only has a few hundred members. What happens if they win the government contract and you have 100 000 companies who need their list cleaned up?

This is an absolute disaster in my personal opinion. I would have left the system as it was and then nailed the idiot who broke the rules really hard.

Why is there always one idiot who decides to spoil it for everyone else?

Popularity: 5% [?]


Pastel Accounting – Software Dinosaur

46 comments

Posted on 24th March 2010 by Tony in Rant

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I have been a reluctant user of Pastel Accounting since 2007. This is because every bookkeeper, accountant and SARS themselves tell you that you need to use Pastel. The main reason (compared to quickbooks) is that you can’t edit transactions once they have been processed. It leaves electronic paper-trails, which apparently is what SARS likes.

Let me not beat around the bush. I hate Pastel. It is the most irritating and frustrating piece of software ever created – specifically designed to make the average user feel absolutely stupid and fuel the egos of aforementioned accountants and bookkeepers.

For instance, when you draw a statement for a client it is not chronological (as one would think) nor it is arranged in any way that resembles logical thought. This means that one has to “hunt” through a statement to pair up payments and invoices. Why?

But the reason for my rant of the day is this:

Last week some time (is it only a week, it feels like a year?) my trusty 7 year old XP computer was chomped up by a malicious trojan. The only reason I keep a Microsoft PC is because Pastel does not support MAC OSX or cloud computing (thin client/browser based). So in my otherwise perfect world AKA Mac-ville, I had to go out and buy a new PC – which came with Windows 7 Home Basic.

Install Pastel – sorry, we need to have Outlook. No, not Mozilla or a plethora of other email clients, it must be OUTLOOK for Pastel to work. R1700 later for the entry-level office-suite with Outlook … only to discover that my pervasive database doesn’t work on windows 7 (you did know that Pastel needs pervasive didn’t you? Stupid phleb for not knowing).

OK, so I need an upgrade patch … R960 for that. Extortion. After I pay the invoice I phone the Support Centre. Right, where’s the link so I can download it?

No, sir, we ship the produce on CD.

Say whaaaaaat?

4-10 day delivery. Besides the fact that today is 24 March. I have to send off invoices, I now have to wait for a frigging CD to ship? PASTEL PLEASE WAKE UP – IT’S 2010 not 1985.

If you want to run business (any business) on the Internet … consider:

  1. That your product works across all platforms.
  2. That (preferably it’s cloud based).
  3. People can pay by Credit Card.
  4. Delivery is immediate by download.

R6700 later and I am still unable to send off an email. That could very well be a new lounge suite (which I need) or a holiday to Victoria Falls (which I want).

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we’re expected to use software like Pastel. Please, go and die gracefully like all the other dinosaurs.

Popularity: 73% [?]



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