Goodbye to all that.

After a busy week failing to get shots finalled for Wolf Man (and hence why I'll be working on Sunday) I left work yesterday, walked up to Euston Station and headed north to my mum's. The last time I did this the journey took 5 hours thanks to engineering work. They must have finished as yesterday the feat was achieve in an hour and a half: much more respectable.

The reason for the whistle stop visit is that my ma has decided to move house to a smaller cottage and therefore she had decided that she could no longer store some items that I'd left at her current and previous houses over the years. So after a quick bite of supper I set to work. There were many things which I had forgotten about and some which I never knew were technically mine in the first place. Elderly relatives of mine had a habit of leaving things to me in their wills but I was never explicitly told that they were now mine. Then there were the things such as my "birth spoon". Until yesterday I had no idea that such things as "birth spoons" existed let alone that I was the proud owner of one. This is what I have discovered: If you have parents who are keen on the whole antiques schtick (big yes for my folks) then to celebrate the birth of their offspring they have all the details of the happy event etched into an ornate silver spoon. And I have one, well had one; I told my mother I had no use nor for desire to keep it (never having known of it before) and so ownership has reverted to my mum who couldn't bear to see it got rid of.

Having sorted through the stuff that came as a surprise to me I set to throwing away reams of letters from friends and ex-girlfriends that for some reason I'd stuffed into an enormous jiffy bag. Whilst I'm a big soppy romantic, I'm not very sentimental about stuff and so the letters went into the trash along with years of old photographs and all the artwork I made at school and college. I don't have the space to keep it in London nor frankly the desire. By midnight I had several distinct piles: items to go into the recycling bin, items to go to the local tip, items to go to the charity shop and a tiny pile of items I actually wanted to keep and bring back to London on the train with me.

After breakfast this morning we loaded my mum's car and took the load destined for the charity shop. Having delighted the lady in the store with her haul of very decent china we returned to my mum's and loaded up for the tip. Upon our return from there all that was left for me was to load up my rucksack with my keepsies and get the train back. The items I kept were mostly out of print books, a couple of comics and 4 Victorian cartoons by Rowlandson that my dad bought and gave to me when he ran out of wall space. The final item to carry was my second guitar, bought nearly twenty years ago by a long-haired pimply 14 year old Mr Atrocity. I shall write a piece about that guitar and its destiny in a follow-up post soon. By 2 o'clock this afternoon I was back home in London, exhausted but relieved that I'd finally sorted through the last vestiges of my formative years that had been in storage for so long.

When Too Much Choice is a Bad Thing

On Saturday morning, as T was curled up in bed grumbling with a headache brought on by one too many glasses of fizzy pop the previous night, I decided to take myself off for breakfast. As is my wont I ended up at The Breakfast Club, a cafe with trendy pretensions in Soho. It may be faux scruffy chic but it does do the best fry-up in those parts and reliably so. I was delighted to see, upon my arrival, that only one couple stood between me and the counter. It did however take me ten minutes to get served. The reason for this was that said couple, well half of the couple at any rate, were ordering by the following method, "We'd like a Full Monty breakfast but can I have a bagel not bread and can I have poached eggs and can I swap the sausage for another piece of bacon and don't make the eggs too runny and can I have this yogurt smoothie but can I have banana rather than yogurt?" and on and on. The poor guy entering the order on the gizmo that tells the kitchen what to cook seemed almost at the end of his tether by the time they finished up. "She's so particular" said the, until this moment, silent party in the couple. Particular? Ye gods and little fishes that's not particular that's insane.

We are all aware, I imagine, of the idea that the customer should get what he or she wants, that the customer is right and that the role of the server and establishment is merely to serve. The idea above all that more choice is always better. But is it I ask myself? I had much opportunity to ponder this question and asked it of myself many times as I stood in line behind this prattling half-wit. No, I decided, sometimes more choice is not better.

It is not always better for several reasons. Firstly it is rude. If it takes you ten minutes to order breakfast how long must it take you to do anything important and how many hungry people must you make wait whilst you do? This is the same rudeness as those who like to order eight coffees in tiny coffee shops at rush hour, just as the queue is already stretching out of the door. It shows an astonishing level of arrogance and a total inability to behave sociably to those around you. "Do unto others" and so on.

The second reason why choice isn't always better is because you probably don't know best. When I see someone in, say an award-winning coffee shop, telling the barista that they'd like "An extra hot cappuccino with extra foam" I think ill of them. Are they seriously doing this because they know how to create a better tasting cup of coffee than someone who makes coffee for a living and who has carved out, through hard work, a serious reputation for them self? No. They do it because they are a pseud and they think it shows they are sophisticated. This is not the case. The sophisticate is the person who takes the trouble to find the best people at any given task and goes to them and allows them to work their magic. To return to Saturday's example, I appreciate that a basic fry-up is not an extravagant work of gastronomic sophistication but it is easy to screw up, it is a dish that requires balance to work well, and some pimply trustafarian with a whole host of imagined allergies and intolerances which are actually just fey fickleness does not know better than a battle hardened short order cook how best this might be achieved. In short it is insulting to crafts-people. In even shorter short, why do these people keep finding the few remaining places where there are people who care about how things should be done and then mock these good people with their imbecility?

If you want to choose from 87000 possible coffee combinations to make your soya moccha frappuccino individual then Starbucks would seem to be ideal and their billboards now advertise this feature of their operation. If, on the other hand, you would rather have a good cup of coffee then ask a barista in a proper coffee shop to make you a cappuccino or latte or flat white and let them do their magic.

And don't, for Christ's sake, take ten minutes over it.

Sun Burn

I spent all yesterday at Pinewood Studios for a miniature shoot for the film I'm currently working on. It was an 8 a.m. call meaning that I was in a car at about 7 a.m. heading up there. As usual the day went very slowly and we were out on the back lot for most of it. You learn pretty fast that hearing "going on set" should trigger the thought "take some sun-block". I did remember this and covered my lily-coloured geek-pasty skin with factor 50 for the whole day. I felt a bit slimy but only the tops of my ears got a little toasty. The one highlight of the day was the inevitable fried breakfast in the Pinewood canteen. It's a very long way from sophisticated dining, quite like school dinners, but we must take our crumbs of comfort where we may. I did see one, rather large, fellow with a plate stacked with a baked potato and chips. Very fond of potato obviously.

On the journey back the car that came to collect us was a Toyota Prius, the hybrid car. I have seen plenty about but never had a ride in one. I was rather impressed. It was quiet, comfortable and brisk. With me (a little over six foot) and my colleague of similar height behind me we both had enough legroom to be comfortable and in a car of that size you can't often say that. The driver was saying that the saving in fuel from the hybrid car over the Mercedes he used to drive was over £200 a week. Now obviously this guy does serious mileages but to be able to save £10 000 a year in fuel is crazy. If were thinking of buying a car, which I'm not, I'd definitely put the Prius on the list.

In Hellboy 2 promo news there's a new trailer out which has excerpts from three of the shots I did. There's a whole lot of stone giant in this one at about 1:10 in:

OK, self-promotion over. Time for bed.

Pinky Drive

I've been having another "Oh my freaking Jeebus, I'm living in the future" day. My venerable old USB thumbdrive which, when I bought it 5 years ago packed an astounding 128mb of memory, has finally fallen apart. And so it was that I braved Tottenham Court Road this lunchtime to get something with which to replace it.

After my slack-jawed amazement when I got a micro-SD card for my Nintendo DS homebrew kit I thought I'd seen it all. But no. Sony have now made "Tiny Vault" USB drives that are about the size of half a stick of gums. It's absolutely tiny and yet it is mountable as a drive on a computer and somehow manages to fit 4Gb storage within its tiny frame. Initially I just stared at the packages on the shelves for a while trying to figure out the catch, trying to work out if it was actually a drive in its own right or whether it was like a camera flash drive and would need an adapter. No adapter is needed. I must have looked like the first person to be shown television staring at this glowing box and wondering how they managed to fit all those tiny people inside it. Having convinced myself that it was what I wanted I purchased the wee fellow and have just copied 2.6 Gb of data onto it. Essentially I now have a gizmo which is capable of storing the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and yet is also easily swallowable. That's a scary thought. Now where the hell did I put it down?

Speak My Brains

I've just been back into work, albeit briefly, to do an interview for the "making of" documentary that will be on the Hellboy 2 DVD. I've done interviews before, plenty in print and a couple for the radio but this is the first time I've done one on camera. I have absolutely no idea how I sounded or looked. I did notice that I picked the perfect day to have a big zit on my chin so you can look out for that come November. Perfect.

I'd carefully prepared a load of bullet points for topics I'd quite like to have discussed pertaining to the shots I did but the interviewer had his own set of questions so my notes went on the floor and I had to wing it. They attractively lit the wall behind me with a sea blue, no doubt to match my natural skin colouring though I was too busy trying to keep my head still so that they didn't get excessive flare off my glasses from the light they were blasting onto my face to really notice too much. I have, and I'm only writing this an hour after the fact, absolutely no idea what I said. I probably came across as a complete tosser but time will tell.

I find doing interviews for non specialist press difficult from a pitching stand-point. When I'm talking to journalists from computer graphics or film-making publications I know the sort of things they want to hear and I also have a level of expectation on what terms I can expect the audience to understand. It's the same thing with lecturing to students. I know I'll be able to say "diffuse shading", "ambient occlusion" and "displacement mapping" and not have to explain myself plus the people I'm talking to want to know how we did what we did so they can further their own knowledge. What does the viewer of a DVD feature want to know? Do they care how we did the work or do they just want to hear the amusing anecdote about how I spilled coffee all over the director? It's tough to know. Even if they do want to hear how it was done it's difficult to explain it without resorting to a lot of technical terminology. If you don't use jargon you end up saying, "well we shot it all in front of a green screen and then used computer graphics to add in the foreground". No shit? That's so non-specific as to be meaningless. Anyway all of this is really just me excusing myself for when I appear for 5 seconds on this documentary sounding like an ignorant ares-hole. Sorry in advance.

I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

There is a new thing in Schossadlerflug. A friend of ours, who currently has a bad back and a new book deal decided that what her life needed was less vacuuming and more future. To that end she bought a Roomba, a small robotic vacuum cleaner. Tinseltroos, who has been working serious overtime of late and is in a self-present state of mind was not about to let that slide and so took herself off to John Lewis yesterday and returned with a Roomba of our own.

The Roomba, or Murphy as it is now known, sits in the hall in its Roomba hutch waiting expectantly for one or other of us to tickle it behind its robotic ear and press the "clean" button. On that command it chirrups happily and then blunders around the flat bumping into things. At present I do not fear imminent take-over by our heavily-armed robotic nemeses as the Roomba is clearly far too stupid. It tried to shut itself in the bedroom repeatedly by knocking out the wedge that keeps the door open five times. That said, for a wee machine it does a good job and once you've removed things like boot laces off the floor it gets along just fine. There was a moment on its first sortie last night where it attempted to eat one of Tinseltroos' piratey boots and we had to perform open Roomba surgery to disentangle the laces from its innards.

I can tell that I'm going to have an ongoing series of existential crises with this thing. For example I already feel guilty about switching it on to clean the living room as we left for work this morning. Poor little guy, all alone in the flat, with nothing in its life apart from cleaning for ungrateful humans. I feel quite wretched that we'll get home where it will have happily peeped to unlistening ears to announce that it has found its little house and is going to have a quiet charge for a bit. I feel wretched and I shouldn't. God I hate this inability I have not to form meaningful relationships with pieces of technology. I'm certain that the Roomba does not feel the same way but then we've all been in those unrequited affection situations haven't we?

If I get home and the floor is clean and the Roomba is sat it its hutch quietly like an obedient spaniel I shall probably cry. If, on the other hand, I find the flat empty with only a sprinkling of saw-dust to hint at the previous existence of my guitars there will be trouble. If I also find a fat little Roomba sat on the sofa, complaining about how full it is, watching our TV and drinking my scotch then there'll be hell to pay.

From The Trenches

I am at present in the midst of a maelstrom of trying to finish my current project, arranging and attending meetings about what will hopefully be my next project, organising a talk I'm due to give at a university the week after next and putting the finishing touches to a course I shall be delivering at work. Argh, makes my tiny brain ache keeping this number of plates spinning at once.


My main source of entertainment at present is the US Presidential election campaign which, as Warren Ellis has noted, is "better than sumo" as a spectator sport. I tend to agree. The levels of spending, vitriol and protracted cruelty outdo anything we have in Europe. Hell's teeth, Bubba, here in the UK we don't even get to elect our head of state so we must leap on these crumbs of comfort from across the sea when we can.

As I do whenever there's a Presidential campaign I am reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. It's as delicious an exposé and satire of the whole venal enterprise as can be conceived of. Thompson, known primarily for guerilla incursions into the worlds of the great and the good, tackles the whole campaign from first caucus through to Nixon utterly stomping George McGovern in November. This had an extra poignancy during the last campaign watching Bush getting elected again, legally this time. Ye Gods and little fishes what strange, dark times they were.

One of the more impressive qualities of Thompson's book is how he stuck to his task no matter how relentless and degenerate the whole process became. It is a long drawn out book describing a long and drawn out process but a brief pithy account of a campaign just wouldn't do it justice. Presidential campaigns are for people who are in this game for the long haul, those who like cheap, quick thrills can look elsewhere, like the UK where the whole national election process is done and dusted inside six weeks. I enjoy the US approach, the trial by endurance and meaness, rather like watching the candidates being dumped in the middle of the Sahara with a single canteen of water between them to see who makes it out alive and who, and how brutally, they've had to despatch in order to get there. This is the stuff of real drama, earthy and bloody.

And now, as I settle back into my chair at work with a final cup of tea for the day I can catch up on how Senators Obama and Clinton have each attempted to gouge the eyeballs out of the other in the last twenty four hours. Every day rings a new slur, a new accusation or twist on an old tale. The GOP must be loving this. As the great man once observed, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

Age Before Beauty

Yesterday was the day when I decided the time had come to get a new domestic laptop. I have two laptops, one for work that has Maya, Shake, Photoshop and so on, and another consumer spec machine for surfing the net, iTunes and all that kind of thing. My original domestic machine is now nearly five years old and in this high-def, broadband, widescreen world its creaky 800Mhz Power PC chip doesn't really cut the mustard anymore. Having done my research I'd decided upon an Apple MacBook. My feelings about Apple, their stores and their corporate culture have been covered in detail in the past here so you will no doubt be unsurprised that I entered the Apple Store on Regent Street with some trepidation.

I was almost immediately accosted by a spotty emo youth who was, at a guess, about nineteen. Did he have a black MacBook with 2Gb RAM in stock I asked? He consulted his Star Trek tricoder thingy. Indeed he did. Thirty seconds later, and without getting anywhere near a cash register my bank account was suddenly considerably lighter and I had a very pretty cardboard box in my sweaty little hand. The callow youth inquired whether I had used a Mac before? I answered in the affirmative. He then asked if I used any of their professional applications? I answered that I used Shake. He informed me that they did training courses in Shake in the store. This was the moment where I had to bite my aging lip. My desire to say, "Young man, I have been using Shake, in all its many guises, since before you started secondary school" was almost uncontainable, but contain it I did. I smiled and explained that I was quite used to the sofware now and had become reasonably adept. He seemed surprised that somoeone so old should have even heard of their professional compositing application, let alone claim to know a bit about it. Bloody kids.

Curiouser and Curiouser

For the last half hour I've consistently had over 20 people reading this page. That's about 21 more people than is normal. Hello! Where have you all been coming from, I'm curious? Should I be feeling paranoid?

Update: And then like Keyser Söze, they were gone and normal service was resumed. What just happened there? For 40 minutes I was popular. I guess that's 25 more minutes than Andy Warhol felt was my due.

Curse The Internet

Nathan Barley anyone?, originally uploaded by macdermog.

I am in need of a new collective noun. I need to know what a packed mass of hipsters might be called. At present the best I can come up with is either "an hauteur" or "a pretension". Other suggestions are welcome.

I was presented with this knotty little problem because of a trip to my local coffee shop this afternoon. As I've worked both days this weekend I've been in serious need of caffeinated refreshment and as is usual I took a trip to Flat White, a lovely little coffee shop that's been making great coffee in Soho for about 2 years. I've been a customer of theirs practically since they opened.

I am used to seeing the same grizzled, battle-weary faces of post-production types like me who are pulling similarly ridiculous hours and are there for the same reason, i.e. to get a ten minute break from our workstations and to get a good cup of coffee. At the weekends you get a few others who have come to Soho shopping but it's normally still pretty civilised.

This has all changed thanks to the BBC. On Friday they ran this piece on their news website. I was talking to the guy who owns Flat White about it yesterday and he told me that the traffic to Flat White's website that this piece had generated was such that it had taken out their server on Friday afternoon. It appeared that Flat White had created a buzz for itself. Saturday seemed busier than usual in the cafe but today was unreal. I have never seen so many low-riding skinny-fit black jeans paired with white trainers, emo fringes and assorted keffiyeh knotted around skinny necks, desperately trying to out-cool one another with their 'phones, gadgets and apathetic disinterest. I felt suddenly trapped in an episode of Nathan Barley. To be surrounded by a cafe rammed with self-facilitating media nodes is pretty nasty.

My one saving grace was that because I am such a frequent customer the staff know me and this meant that once I'd fought my way through the massed ranks of trustafarians and put in my order I could then beat a hasty retreat outside to wait, knowing that when my coffee was ready I would be waved at through the window to come and collect my brew. I am hoping that the notoriously fickle venality of this new group of empty-headed toss-pots will last but a couple of weeks until the next hot place is annointed by their hive mind and they vacate, like a swarm of distressed-denim clad locusts. I am keeping my fingers crossed, I want my cafe back.

Champions

British Gas have smashed their own Appalling Service World Record in a dazzling display of incompetence the like of which has not been seen since Thomas Farriner, a Pudding Lane baker in 1666 said, "Oh I'll just pop out for 5 minutes; I'm sure those buns will be fine". Many commentators felt that their engineer breaking the boiler he was meant to be servicing had raised uselessness to a level unobtainable by the competition. Surely the only people who could raise their game to challenge that would be British Gas themselves. And so they did. Having left us without heating and scarcely any hot water for 3 weeks we finally managed to get them to commit to today as the day that they would fix that which they broke. We checked yesterday that the parts were in and an engineer was primed and ready to install them. We were informed that this was indeed the case.

So this morning Tinseltroos waited in the flat from 8 a.m. until 10.30 and I took over after that. We were solemnly promised an engineer would arrive between 8 and 1 o'clock. Surely a new world record couldn't be in the offing, could it? Oh it could. And how. The non-arrival of the engineer at any point during the 5 hour window had me reaching for the telephone to inform a British Gas sales rep of their achievement. He was surprised no-one had called he told me, it was all there in black and white. This was true I agreed although it didn't mitigate his actual non-appearance. The best he could do for me, he said in solemn tones, was to get the "parts department" to call me "immediately" to arrange another appointment. With this he hung up. Did the parts department call? Of course not. I suspect they don't actually exist. By this time I was back in work and Tinseltroos 'phoned them again and shouted at them until they agreed to send an engineer on Friday, "between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.".

Why do I have this strange prickle of déjà vu creeping down my spine?

Les Misérables - a short review

Saw this musical for the first time tonight. Here's its report card:

Story - C
Music - C-
Libretto - FAIL
Cast - C-
Set - B
Costume - C
Audience - FAIL

Overall - Semi-skimmed melodrama.

Brigstocke Hits The Nail On The Head Again

Spiral of Despair

And downwards and ever backwards into the ever deepening pit of no-telephone despair. Once again Tinseltroos and I have spent the better part of a day taking turns waiting for a BT engineer to turn up. Having begun our ordeal at 8.00 a.m. with Tinseltroos holding the fort it was a big no-show. I took over at 10.30 and sat, twiddling my thumbs, as the morning ebbed away. I received a classically impersonal SMSBT were "sorry" (how sorry a machine can be is somewhat moot) and that all their engineers were running late. This I had noticed given the presence of no engineers in the flat. He finally arrived at 2.30, which BT, is not "in the morning" i.e. when you claimed that he would arrive. I had to leave to come back to work and left Tinseltroos, who'd come racing back, to deal with the unfolding situation. Please can we have a phone line now? It's been over 6 weeks and I begin to give up hope that I will ever surf the web at home. Once again, apologies for the lightness of posting but I can only write this stuff whilst waiting for renders or sims at work. At present I'm simulating pouring boulders into a large statue shaped mould for a film due out next year sometime. There aren't that many people who could claim that today I'd wager.

UPDATE:

Tinseltroos has just phoned from our new B.T. land-line. Right, now to try and organise some broadband from, surprisingly enough, another supplier than B.T. Mr. Atrocity heaves a heavy sigh and trudges off to argue the futility of existence with another service "provider".

Wherever I Go, I Cannot Escape My Past

Tuttle Not Buttle

Right so the electricity meter isn't in the embassy, it's the other next door. The company that occupied the bottom two floors of that building has now vacated the premises so the key to the meter cupboard currently resides with a recruitment agency on the second floor. And they won't give us the key; they don't think they're allowed to. We have to go back on Thursday when Samantha will be in and ask her. She may think differently.

This is achieving a level of bureaucratic insanity I did not believe possible. I've obviously been working with motivated competent people for far too long and had forgotten about the majority of lazy jobsworths whose sole desire in life is to make sure their own arses are so completely covered that they can never appear to be responsible for anything. They generally achieve this by inaction and continual buck-passing. It is slowly driving me mad. It's a bit like those puzzles in Zelda where you have to get an item that allows you to do a thing so you can talk to the wizard who, in return for another thing, will give you a doodad so you can finally take a fucking electricity reading.

The saga continues...

Spiralling Out Of Control

It appears our electricity meter is in the High Comission of a major African nation. Oh God, can the madness stop now? please? The world has become too weird for me.

Misanthropebook

I finally received one too many Facebook invitations and decided something had to be done. I've made this spoof website to show an idea of what an anti-social networking site might look like:

www.misanthropebook.com

I got the idea of doing a one page spoof website from this fantastic Second Life satire:

www.getafirstlife.com

Grumble

I'm too angry to write much now. I took half a day of my very limited and precious annual leave in order to have a phone line put in only for me not have a phone line put in. Now I need to chase up a whole bunch of other people to get access to various cupboards and then go through the torture of contacting BT again. It's taken three weeks to have nothing at all happen. Argh!

Metamorphosis

I hate bureaucracy. I hate its glacial slowness. I hate its unbending certainty. I hate its crushing ineptitude and I hate its ability to suck the joy and merriment out of your life.

After moving into Schossadlerflug we've been wanting to get a phone line installed mostly so it can have broadband and we can play on the interwebs. Wondering why posting has been so light? Now you have your answer. I'm writing this at the studio between renders on the three projects I seem to be working concurrently on.

Ten days ago I used the surprisingly efficient online ordering system at www.bt.com to order a new line to be put into the flat. Let's not forget, that isn't the internet, this is just a phone line so we can then order the internet. For eight days I hear nothing, though they do seem to have gratefully accepted a hundred and twenty quid of my money for this inactivity. On Tuesday I returned from a meeting to discover an answerphone message on my mobile from someone at BT to inform me that they were trying to contact me to discuss my order. They didn't allude what they wished to talk about but they did give me a number to call. So call it I did. I waited for twenty minutes until the call was answered. It then took another half hour for the friendly but clueless operator to work out that he couldn't help me and I was given another number which, I was assured, had someone on the other end who would be able to tell me what was going on.

Undaunted by my hour long phone-call with nothing to show I dialled again. And I waited and then waited some more. I waited for forty minutes as the dialling tone was periodically interrupted by a robot to tell me that their lines were very busy at the moment, for which the soulless machine was very sorry, and that my call would be answered as soon as possible. I gave up and decided to call later. I phoned again at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and again my call went unanswered for forty minutes each time. My mood darkened and yet I would not give up just yet. So this morning I got into work at 8 a.m. sharp and dialled one more time. I waited for an hour and yet there was still no response other than the robot telling me how busy they still were so I screamed at the injustice of the world and gave up. Though I've ordered my line online, I can't check its progress online as BT's order-tracking works by you telling it the phone number of the line you wish to query - which I don't have yet. And I can't telephone the telephone company to either check on progress or cancel my damn order because they refuse to answer the bloody thing.

I might not expect BT to be terribly good at paper-work or to have a sparkling online presence but I do expect the premier telephone company to be able to run a call centre and answer the damn device they seem determined not to supply me with. This whole affair is taking on Kafka-ian proportions now, "One morning Gregor Atrocity awoke to discover he'd been turned into a gigantic BT sales agent." One might imagine that if customers of a major telecommunications provider have to wait for longer than an hour to get any service, for which they have paid, the company would hire more people for their call centre. Sadly BT only made £6 billion in profits last year so a few more telephone operators would probably put too much of a strain on resources.