Tesco Minky experience

I bought one of these for my mother.

The item was delivered with a piece missing – it's supposed to have 4 wheeled feet; there were only three in the packaging. The Tesco Direct Customer Service phone line said they could not help, and told me I had to take it back to a store.

Due to unclear signage in the store, I spent 20 minutes queuing at the Customer Service desk (one person on duty in the Christmas week), only to be told I had to go to the Tesco Direct customer service desk in another part of the store.

The Tesco Direct customer service desk said the people on the phone line should have dealt with it and re-ordered. It was going to take an hour on hold for the store customer services to help, so they decided to refund and re-order.

Lo and behold, the price had gone up in the interim few days, so I wound up paying 25% more.

Result: it's cost ME 25% more purely due to Tesco's incompetence. Really not impressed.

When the familiar isn't familiar any more

Last Sunday, I took my son to his baseball practice session. Yes, I'm in the UK and yes, I said baseball, but that's the subject of another post, another day. The practice takes place in Hemel Hempstead. Now I worked in Hemel for over 10 years, so I know it well, or so I thought.

Not wanting to hang around for 3 hours and not able to join in thanks to having tweaked my hamstring playing football that morning, I decided to head into town, to find somewhere to sit and read my book. An old friend/colleague suggested a few places, so I drove around a little, looking to see what was where and also to find the best place to park. The Water Gardens car park now charges to park 7 days a week (!), so I turned back out of it and carried onwards. Eventually found somewhere, parked and walked into the Marlowes shopping centre. Spent a pleasant hour browsing around Maplins, then sat down at a cafe to read.

When the post dropped through the letter box today, there's an envelope postmarked Hertfordshire Country Council (PO Box 1049, Northampton!!!). Ticket for driving in a bus lane. Where there never was a bus lane before.

£30 down the drain because I didn't spot a sign that, according to Google Street View, is hidden behind a lamp post. I'm taking a camera with me next Sunday to see if it's visible.

Update: I'd forgotten about this post. Weirdly, about a year later, I received a letter from the council saying that the enforcement had been illegal, and I was due a refund of the penalty paid. A cheque duly arrived a few weeks later.

Who checked the MMR research?

I well remember the angst my wife and I went through as the MMR controversy raged around us. With two young kids, we were right in the firing line. Added to which, probably by complete co-incidence, our previously healthy son became quite ill after his first MMR jab at 10 months, and it was around 4-6 months before he was fully well again. Given the storm of publicity raging at the time, we immediately suspected the vaccine. Probably incorrect, but when you're rushing a child to hospital, you're not always completely rational.

I heard on the radio yesterday that the Lancet have 'accepted' that the MMR study performed by Dr Andrew Wakefield was false. Reading the detail, it seems that their objection is to his methodology and his (lack of) ethics and standards in performing the research. They still haven't discredited the results, although plenty of other studies have done so.

Separately, I heard an item about stem cell research being blocked from publication. Whether that's true or not is not germane to my point here. What was interesting was that this article contained the information that all such publications send research articles for review by respected and senior peers, only publishing if these peers indicate that the article stands up to scrutiny.

So, here's my question: if all papers submitted to journals are peer reviewed before publication, who were the 'peers' who reviewed Wakefield's flawed MMR study? And what's their position now?