An Open Letter to the Manchester Evening News

Dear Sir,
I read with interest the nominations for the BBC Sports Personality of the year show, which is to be broadcast from the Greater Manchester region later this year. As always, there are a number of differing views on who should have been included on the shortlist provided by the BBC. Spending some time looking through the nominations of the "great and good" expert journalists, ad a Manchester resident, I was dismayed to view the list provided by your publication. The Manchester Evening News serves a region which is famous for its love of sport, and is a home to a huge variety of sports, and yet you managed to only represent 4 sports in your list of 10 nominations. Despite the hosting of a huge variety of sports; Manchester the national centres for squash and cycling, and Salford having regularly hosted World class triathlon to name just a few, you managed to ignore all sports apart from golf, cricket, football and a token swimmer... More worryingly, it appears that you haven't quite understood that this award traditionally goes to a British sportsperson, there being an Overseas Personality also awarded.

Leaving aside the nationality issue, the nomination of 4 footballers from the 2 Manchester teams, and 2 cricketers from Lancashire, does smack of localism, which as the BBC spotlight turns onto the Greater Manchester area, is surely something that should be avoided, when for years, the London centric focus of the mass media has been harshly criticised by many people outside.

I would be hugely interested to know how you came up with these suggestions, and more importantly, when you study them as part of national submissions, whether you are embarrassed by the clear show of ignorance which these shambolic nominations demonstrate.

Yours sincerely,

Andy Gould

Customer service..... hmmmm

Its not often I feel obliged to blog, this is more an observation than a rant. I, and I would imagine a number of other people, spend a good proportion of my working life, trying to keep customers and clients happy. One of the main ways of doing this, is ensuring good communication. Now, as far as I am concerned, good communication, doesn't mean making a lot of noise, it means imparting useful information when it is available, or explaining why information can't be given if it's not available. Part of that "useful information" is often about managing expectations. If I'm not going to deliver something by a particular date, then I won't tell my client that it'll be there, even if that's what they'd ultimately like, because when that date comes, they'll be more than a bit annoyed.

Where is he going with this, I hear you ask. Well, I have had a Motorola Defy, for about 6 months. When I bought it, it had Android 2.1 on it, but with a promise of an update to 2.2 ( froyo) to come. I was never particularly worried about this update, but at the end of june, TMobile decided to tweet this: "Good News to all our Motorola Defy wielding customers, Android 2.2(Froyo) will start rolling out beginning of july". Excellent! So I keep checking for updates, but nothing appears... its now 11th July - which I think you can stop calling the beginning of july, and today, I decided to follow TMObileUKHelp on twitter, which is being inundated with questions along the lines of "where's my update". The standard response is " sorry, we don't know when its going to arrive". So, if TMobile don't know when the update is going to arrive, why did they shout about it? Surely, there was no conceivable benefit to that message. In fact, for the sake of a couple of days, why not hold off completely, and then tweet " Here it is!" then everyone would be happy.

Interesting idea of customer service...