Tag: service

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Cruises Are More Fun That You’d Think

When you think of cruise holidays, what do you think of? One too many blue rinses? Families of chavs dive bombing the swimming pool every five seconds? You wouldn’t be alone in thinking this, but in reality cruise holidays are a lot of fun and today we will provide you with seven wonderful reasons why.

1. Food glorious food. Holidays, my friend, are for eating, and if you opt for a cruise you will be surprised by the quality and sheer amount of food on offer. Breakfast buffets piled high with croissants, fresh fruit, yoghurt, not to mention the wonder that is the ‘omelette station’ – and that’s just breakfast! Try and save room for the evening’s fine dining – the food served of an evening on certain cruise ships can rival even the fanciest Michelin star restaurants. Dine on salads before you go, because we guarantee that you’ll still be able to wear anything that doesn’t have an elasticated waistband by the end of your trip!

2. A chance to be fancy. On what other type of holiday do you have the chance to don your finest glad-rags each and every evening? Exactly. One of the best things about cruise holidays is just how formal the evenings are – fine food, wine and company teamed with an excuse to wear that ball gown that’s been hanging in the back of your closet for years.

3. Everything is within your reach. Nowadays cruise ships have every activity that you could possibly want to try, all on one gigantic floating city. Whether you fancy a spot of golf, trying your hand on the surf simulator or scrambling up the climbing wall – you won’t have to venture far from your cabin to do it. For those of you who don’t like anything this active, there will be swimming pools and sunbeds galore (no matter how many Germans are on your ship to get there before you!) and you can also while away a few hours in the on-board library or cinema. There is something for everyone.

4. Avoid the perils of packing and unpacking. No-one enjoys cramming all of their holidays essentials into one tiny bag and jamming it shut via the use of all of your body weight! This is a task that should be repeated only once or twice per trip max. The joy of a cruise is that although you are visiting multiple destinations – you only have to unpack once! Splendid.

5. See multiple places. Admit it – airports are annoying! Cruises eradicate the need to face stern-faced security officials menacingly telling you to remove your belt, and that’s before we even get on to the horror of aeroplane food! Phew. On a cruise you can literally wake up in a different place every day without the hassle that comes with getting yourself there.

6. Superb service. Let’s be honest, the service that you experience in that Costa del Sol all-inclusive hotel is, more often than not, more Faulty Towers than First Class! Not so upon a cruise ship. The staff are typically interesting folk who have seen the world, and the performers wouldn’t be out of place on the West End stage.

7. Booze is included. If you want to start the day with a Bloody Mary, casually move into late morning Pimms, afternoon Champagne and evening cocktails – you can do so! Just try to avoid drunken walks on the deck!

April 26, 2013
7 Reasons That This Is The Greatest Bus Service Ever

Great news for 7 Reasons readers that are also fans of buses! For the third time in our history, we’re writing a bus-related piece featuring – you guessed it – buses!   The reason for this is simple; as reported today, by various news organisations, a brilliant and ground-breaking innovation in the field of public transport has occurred in, of all places Wiltshire (and Hampshire) where residents of Winterslow can now avail themselves of what is effectively a one-way bus service to Andover, on weekdays and weekends. It does go in the other direction too, but the return service departs before the outbound service arrives. Here are seven reasons that this is a brilliant idea.

Not actual 87 bus.

1. It Utilizes Underused Resources. At night, once buses have stopped running, bus stops stand idle and unpopulated, making them ideal targets for ne’er-do-wells, rapscallions and vandals. Not in Andover though. With the new one-way timetable, bus stops in Andover will be used outside of peak periods, in fact, all through the night, as bus-users from Winterslow use them to shelter from the elements as they wait until the next day to return home from their visits to WH Smith and Poundland. The new timetable brilliantly uses passengers from Winterslow as a free security force to protect Andover’s bus stops from vandalism at night. A free security force. Ingenious.

2. It’s Innovative. It really is. The history of Britain is peppered with examples of blue-sky, outside-of-the-box, joined-up-thinking and ground-breaking innovation and no one can say that this bus timetable isn’t innovative. A bus that only goes one way. It’s revolutionary! Or at least it would be, if it went full-circle and returned from whence it departed. But it doesn’t. It is, however, definitely an innovation. A one-way bus! A bus that takes you somewhere and then abandons you there. Have you ever been on one of those before? No, I don’t suppose you have.

3. It Encourages Further Innovation. Not only is the one-way bus to Andover innovative, it encourages further innovation. Because for great creative and inventive thinking to occur, three things are required: Time, will and an environment conducive to uninterrupted thought. Spending hours on end in a deserted bus stop takes care of the first and the third things and who, faced with waiting until the next day for the bus home (or having had their bus home leave before they’ve arrived) wouldn’t want to invent a time-machine? The bus-users of Winterslow could achieve great things while they’re waiting for their bus. How brilliant of their local authority to create the environment in which the creative talents of the people of Winterslow can bear fruit.

4. It’s Soothing. This public-transport quantum-leap eliminates one of the biggest objections people have to travelling by public transport. Timetable-anxiety: That nagging feeling that haunts people who know they have to finish whatever they’re doing punctually and get to a certain place at a certain time in order to return home. But now the residents of Winterslow won’t have to hurriedly conduct their affairs in Andover. They will experience no more the subliminal torment and creeping trepidation associated with having to rush their business to meet a tight deadline. The people of Winterslow can’t go home.   They have been liberated from the tyranny of the timetable. And from housework and nice, warm beds and things.

5. It Elevates Bus Travel From The Realms Of The Mundane. Why do the people of Winterslow take the bus to Andover? I’m sure that’s a question that none of us ever thought we’d be facing but it’s there now, so let’s brainstorm it (very briefly). Okay, are we all agreed that it’s to use the more comprehensive facilities and amenities generally associated with a larger town; shops, banks, post offices and the railway station etc? Good. But those are all rather dull things (except for etc which is redolent of mystery). Now, however, a trip to Andover has been turned into a stopover. It’s not a trip to the bank before returning home, it’s a holiday. The bus-users of Winterslow are now tourists; travellers. They’re the diesel-set. It’s so much more glamorous than a regular bus service.

6. It Saves Money. It saves the local authority money as they only have to run a bus one way (unless the bus depot is in Winterslow. Or Andover) and it saves the passengers money as they’ll only be paying for single tickets (plus they can turn the heating off in their houses for the night and they won’t be using their televisions or hobs and ovens or washing machines). So everyone wins here and, when they’re not working on their time-machine, the bus-users of Winterslow will be able to spend their night in the bus shelter calculating just how much money they’ve saved!   How thrilling and uplifting for them. This is the sort of financial whizz-kiddery that could revolutionise the public sector.

7. It’s Traditional. Wiltshire Council are merely the latest innovators in a grand tradition of cutting-edge bus-timetable thinking in the UK. With their one-way bus service, they may even have surpassed the nation’s previous high-water-mark in radical timetable departures: In 1976, it was reported that buses on the Hanley to Bagnall route in Staffordshire regularly sailed past queues of up to thirty people. This was because – in the words of Councillor Arthur Cholerton – if these buses stopped to pick up passengers, it would disrupt the timetable.* I think the one way bus service may well have topped the no-passenger model. I think the people of Wiltshire can feel rightly proud of their council’s accomplishment. And they’ll have a lot of spare time to feel proud in. Wiltshire District Council, we salute you!

Source: The Book of Heroic Failures (1979). Stephen Pile (An excellent read).

September 20, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why Eating Out Is Better Than Cooking At Home

Welcome to another Saturday. We can’t take credit for the weekend, but we can take credit for the sensational Guest Post slot. Over the last year we have had a diverse mix of guest post, but the one thing we haven’t had is someone telling us why we should go out to eat. Today that changes as we are joined on the 7 Reasons sofa by Sophie Jenkins. I say we are ‘joined’, that’s not exactly true. The 7 Reasons sofa has been abandoned somewhere between York and Kent due to snow. So Sophie is actually alone. But that’s good because she can put her feet up. Which is not something you can do if you eat out. But that’s the only disadvantage there is, as Sophie now explains. And if you like what you read you may well want to check out Bookatable. Maybe on the Bookatable website, the Bookatable facebook page or the Bookatable twitter page. They’ve got it covered.

Dirty Dinner by Cinnamon Cooper

1. Laziness. The first obvious reason is ease. Just go out to eat! No cooking, no washing up all those pans (pans are the worst, cutlery is easy), no cleaning the mess you made in the kitchen. Just book a table, turn up at the restaurant, order, eat, pay and leave. Preferably in that order. In the words of Aleksandr the meerkat – Simples!

2. Shopping. No food shopping, trudging around busy and noisy (and often freezing cold) supermarkets trying to decide what on earth to buy. Even if you have a recipe in mind, the supermarket will no doubt have run out of the ingredients you need, or they will be too bizarre to ever feature on the shelves anyway. If you do find the necessary ingredients after hours of hunting, you then have the fun of lugging heavy bags home too! None of this at a restaurant, because of…..

3. Service. These are perhaps all following the ‘lazy’ thread, but at a restaurant you are not only allowed to be lazy, you are meant to be lazy. People are there to wait on you hand and foot! Plus it’s not like at home, where your parents/partner/younger sibling/flatmate have a moan about being subjected to your orders – in a restaurant people are paid to serve you and not complain about it! Dream come true?

4. Taste. What are you going to cook at home? Spaghetti bolognaise again?! Boring. Maybe you will try to branch out and cook something new. Erm, this doesn’t taste right…Just eat out! You can eat food you would never in a million years be able to cook, try food you have never seen or heard of before! Even if you do order the usual spag bol, it’s going to taste better than what you would have thrown together at home. Do you have a Michelin star? No. Does the chef at the restaurant? Well, that depends on the restaurant I suppose.

5. Safety. Oops, is the microwave meant to be flaming? You can eat pork medium-rare, right? What happened to the hamster…? No risk of fire, flooding, and much less risk of food poisoning. It is much safer to ditch the oven and eat out every night instead. Let a professional take care of the difficult and dangerous bits, while you sit in comfort and stress-free safety.

6. Convenience. A friend/grandparent/in-law wants to see you for lunch. The house looks like a bomb has hit it from the party you had the night before. You woke up late, hungover, and definitely don’t have time to tidy the mess AND cook an impressive meal! Meet at a restaurant instead! There is no need for anyone to set foot in the nightmare that is your house, or any chance of that impressive meal becoming an inedible disaster. Eating out makes life so much easier (and if you foot the bill it still looks like you made a huge effort).

7. Surprise. When you pop into a restaurant, you never know who you will meet – Johnny Depp might be sat at the table next to you (fingers and toes crossed)! He is, however, less likely to turn up at your house for your spicy chilli, no matter how infamous it may be (have to cross your toes as well as fingers for that one).

You can make online table bookings for free through sites like Bookatable.com, from chains like Prezzo to high-end restaurants such as The Ivy. It couldn’t be easier if it tried!

December 4, 2010
We’ve Moved!

It’s Sunday, so no reasons today. Here’s something different. Last week we brought you a tale of horror and woe, and this week we bring you…a tale of horror and woe, because we have an announcement:

We’ve moved! You may not have noticed yet, but we have. We’ve moved from Gloucestershire to Kent. Strange, the website doesn’t look any different, you’re probably thinking; I can’t see any oast-houses or Dover Castle or France, but I promise you that we’ve moved. We’ve changed our web-hosts from Fasthosts to EZPZ hosting.

And we hope the new web-hosts that we’ve moved to will provide you, the reader and us, the men who have spent many, many, many of the hours that they should have spent writing in the last year trying to get answers from Fasthosts about why our website wasn’t being hosted effectively, with a more reliable experience. As our experience with Fasthosts has been appalling.

In fact, we started monitoring our site’s uptime over the past few weeks, and it turns out that with Fasthosts, our site was working less than 99% of the time. Imagine if you had a car that wasn’t there 1% of the time when you came to use it. Or your house wasn’t there for over three and a half days out of the year, but you didn’t know when that would be, or that the sun vanished intermittently.

And it’s not just that the site would disappear while we were trying to read it; it would also disappear while we were trying to write it, which resulted in an awful lot of lost work. In fact, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time that I should have spent creating stuff and writing for the website monitoring its performance and corresponding with the web hosts.

As a result of the many support tickets that we have raised and the many questions we have asked them in the past year, Fasthosts have properly investigated our downtime twice. And they’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a problem at their end and that it must be our fault, which is strange as, since we’ve moved the website, it has been working for 100% of the time. Which rather undermines their claims.

It’s not just technical incompetence. A couple of days ago – we disabled the auto-renew facility some time ago – they tried to take money from my credit card to pay for web hosting for the coming year (something they didn’t have permission to do). Fortunately, they have the details of an old card and it didn’t go through.

Anyway, we’ve moved and we wanted our experiences with Fasthosts to have a home on the internet so that anyone thinking of using them and perhaps googling “Should I switch to Fasthosts”, “Are Fasthosts any good” or, “naked web hosting” (people search for almost everything pre-fixed by the word naked) would find this piece and would be forewarned.

Hopefully now, the 7 Reasons team will have less correspondence like this:

Jon,

I fully intended to forward any response on why we’re down to you. But, other than the initial automated (and pointless) response to our first email from Shithosts, there has been none. Nor have they replied to us via Twitter. This is on their webshite:

Websites hosted on 88.208.252.193 will currently be unavailable. Our engineers are investigating.

Update: 8:35: Our engineers have found the cause of the issue. However, it is likely that a resolution will require a server rebuild. We will restore all data from a recent backup and will update this page when further information and a completion time become available. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

This issue is presently under investigation:

Our ip address is 88.208.252.3:21so whether this applies to us is a mystery to me, I’ll update you as soon as I hear anything/they bother to reply/I turn up at their offices in Gloucester brandishing a weapon,

Marc.

P.S. Makes me really glad I spent 8 hours working on today’s post now.

P.P.S. Do you have backups of all of the posts that you uploaded yesterday?

P.P.P.S. We were on course to have one of our best Mondays ever yesterday. Before our site disappeared.

And more correspondence like this:

Jon,

The website is working fine. It’s nice here in Kent. Look, I can see deer strolling through the meadow next to the tiramisu farm. Would you like some beer from the perpetual fountain?

Marc.

In conclusion: If you are looking for web hosting. Never, ever use Fasthosts. They’re no good at web hosting, their customer service is woeful, they can’t be trusted with your credit card details and they’re expensive (our new hosting is almost two and a half times cheaper).

7 Reasons (.org) will return tomorrow; I can state with utter confidence.

November 7, 2010