How many of us ever bother to read all the terms and conditions seemingly linked to our everyday lives these days?
You can’t even start using a mobile phone til you agree the terms which can often seemingly go on for ever!
Indeed any company that holds personal data, including small businesses and charities, has to have a privacy policy under the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation 2018, so even tiny coffee shops have privacy notices on their websites.
How many of us ever read all the terms and conditions seemingly linked to our everyday lives these days?
You can’t even start using a mobile phone til you agree the terms which can often seemingly go on for ever! Indeed any company that holds personal data, including small businesses and charities, has to have a privacy policy under the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation 2018 so even tiny coffee shops have privacy notices on their websites.
So an organisation dealing with tax affairs decided to put matters to the test by hiding a clause in their terms offering a free bottle of wine to whoever spotted it.
The small print was adjusted to read, “We know nobody reads this, because we added in February that we’d send a bottle of good wine to the first person to contact us, and it was only in May that we got a response.”
It so happens that this isn’t the first time they’d resorted to sneaking in a special clause as they did this 2 years earlier and thought they’d try it again to see if people are paying any more attention. Turns out they’re not!
In fact it seems that the winner of the top rated bottle of wine only spotted the message because they were trying to compose their own terms and conditions and so were looking at various examples.
However at least the individual concerned secured a bonus bottle of top rated wine, so maybe it’s time we all started taking a bit more attention to the T’s & C’s!
In the second hour of today’s show we looked at a recent incident when passengers erupted in fury after a mainline train missed a scheduled stop.
Obviously there wasn’t much chance of the train completing a “U-Turn”.
It seems that a London bound GWR train from Penzance, zoomed straight through Swindon, causing passengers for that station to try to alert the driver by incessantly pulling on the communication chord, an action which resulted in the train being delayed by more than an hour.
After arriving at Reading, two hours after it had been scheduled to arrive at Paddington, and much to the delight of Swindon bound passengers, the train did finally return to Swindon via Chippenham.
Meanwhile the London bound passengers on the train were forced to get off the train at Reading and told to use connecting services, which themselves had been disrupted by the fiasco!
GWR said that due to overcrowding a decision had been taken to cancel some of the scheduled stops, however it seems that the system used to make announcements was not working properly so many passengers were unaware of the changes.
Clearly a good time was had for all involved!
I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow,
Scott