We all know Yodel, the company we love to hate. We have all seen them on BBC’s Watchdog. We have read about them on Money Saving Expert’s website. But are they REALLY that bad?

Last week I bought a case of 8 Toilet Duck from Amazon, it was on offer and less than half what I normally pay so was all happy with saving some money & placed an order.

Then came Monday I had the dispatch e-mail saying it has been shipped via Yodel. Was not happy at all. Yodel the worst parcel delivery company in the UK was delivering me a case of bleach. I was worried it would all go wrong, the box would leak, they would not turn up when they said that would……the list was endless.

But didn’t need to worry, Tuesday morning came, Yodel sent me a tweet to say it was out and I would have it by 7.00pm, they don’t give 1 hour slots like other well known companies do, you just need to wait in 10 hours.

Then 4.00pm it came, yes the driver got the wrong house to start, but he found me in the end. Box wasn’t leaking & I was happy.

Do I still hate Yodel? Well no, not any-more after the pretty good customer service from Laura on Yodel’s Twitter team. But I still like DPD with the 1 hour slots better :p

Till next time,

Lee x

Hey guys!

I’ve decided to chat about my favourite website, and a brand new comedy duo I heard about last week.

Let’s start with www.TVCatchup.com. What is it? Well… it’s a website where you can watch 100% free TV in the UK. No need to download anything, no more annoying live feeds on ITV.com. It is just free live TV channels at it’s best. You get the basic BBC1, BBC2, ITV, C4 etc, but you also get BBC3, ITV2, E4, More 4, Dave & loads more so it’s basically Freeview online. They did used to have price-drop.TV and my favourite Bid.TV but unfortunately they have been taken off.

What’s more they have an iPhone app and are adding new apps all of the time for devices like Android and Windows. You do need to put up with one advert before the stream starts but you can live with that (ITV’s own stream has three ads and loads of buffering, so it’s much better than that).

If you do have a problem just drop them a tweet or e-mail and they will reply normally the same day. I have been using the site for around two years and only had one problem when the site went down for two hours so I missed my Heartbeat on ITV3, but that’s just me being a Heartbeat addict!

Now, let’s talk about a new comedy duo I found out about last week. As some of you may know I run a charity called Stop Self Harm. Last week we received this tweet…

When we get tweets like that I sometimes click on the profile and have a little look. This time the profile said they where a comedy duo and if you know me you will know I love comedy; Lee Mack, Mrs. Brown’s Boys, Would I Lie To You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Tim Vine, Paul Foot, Dawn French, Victoria Wood, Rob Brydon and the classic Laurel and Hardy to name just a few of who I love to watch.

I’m ashamed to admit, my first thought is that they would be okay but not amazing. But as the saying goes…don’t judge a book by it’s cover…and it is right. When I watched one of there sketches “You’re Dumped” I was taken back right from the start, the script had both drama and comedy, you don’t get that much on YouTube at all. Take my word for it, BBC One in a few years you will see these two, then we will get the repeat’s on Dave & GOLD lol. Check them out.

Till next time,

Lee x

We all think we know what we get from our phone and internet provider, don’t we? Well I did up until this week…

While spending one evening this week downloading all of series three of Mrs Brown Boys onto my laptop via the BBC iPlayer computer app, I was met with a warning on my screen which informed me that I’d already downloaded 4.11GB onto my machine and that some internet service providers have a fair usage policy.

Seeing as I had truly unlimited broadband, I knew that it’d be okay. However, to be on the safe side I tweeted TalkTalk Business just to check. The response I got was not what I was expecting; they had a 100GB per month limit!

After reading the tweet, they linked me to a PDF about their fair use policy; I noticed I was breaking two of their policy rules.

1. I use more than 100GB per month of data

2. I only call 0800/0808 freephone numbers despite the fact TalkTalk Business only allowed 20% of my calls to be to 08/09 numbers.

After a quick call to customer services, the person I spoke to had no idea that these fair use policies even existed, and his manager had no idea too. He said he would need to contact someone “high up” and would phone me back later.

This was fine with me, I said I would like one of two things to happen:

1) An e-mail to confirm that even though I am going over my limits, I would not be charged extra fees.

2) I would like to leave with no cancellation fees and I’d move to BT or Sky who offer a truly unlimited service.

Within a couple of hours I had a phone call back and they agreed to accept my first proposal. Here’s an email I received as confirmation.

Just a warning: be sure to know whether the ‘unlimited’ you think you get truly is unlimited!

Till next time

Lee x