Qwest (our local telco) has a corporate tagline "Spirit of Service". Let's just cut to the chase, and say that this is a pile of horse shit.

I've just been through an office move. We moved a total of 0.96 miles, or eight blocks over and two up. We didn't cross any international borders, or even state lines.

This, it would seem, doesn't stop Qwest bollocksing things up at every possible turn. I know large corporations have a habit of being less efficient than smaller organisations, but the Qwest Business Office take incompetance to a new level.

I really don't want to go into all the details, because I've barely started to bring my blood-pressure back down to human levels since the office move. Suffice it to say, whenever I thought to myself, "well, they can't fuck anything else up. Darn it, a child of eight would get this right...", Qwest's elite team of absent-minded liars would swing (very very slowly) into action, and be completely unable to remember ANY of the details of my order.

Repeatedly.

Again, and again.

Every single fucking time I rang them.

I'm not kidding.

It was like I'd miss-dialled and got through to the Alzheimer's ward at a nearby hospital. I had to remind them of all the details of what had and hadn't been ordered, every time. Almost as if they didn't really write down, or type any of the order, ever.

But it gets worse.

We had to postpone the move for two weeks - due to matters beyond our control - so this involved rescheduling the phone move order. I'll spare you the details of the SEVEN PHONE CALLS it took to get service restored, but the lying started with the very first call, where I was told it'd take an hour to restore service.

It took a day and a half.

Then there was the fact that they connected the lines back up in the wrong order, so faxes were going to line two, and calls to line two were going to the fax machine. Eventually, I was told that I must have wired the phone jacks (sockets if you're British) up wrongly. When I suggested that the problem wasn't in our building, I was all but called a liar. They just would not accept that the problem was at their end, even though no-one had touched a single wire at hour end.

It didn't stop there either.

There were more problems at the old location, and then yet more, at the new location. The final two lies were:

• Telling me they'd shipped our new DSL modem 10+ days ago, but being unable to provide me with a tracking number as proof of shipment
• Claiming to have 'over-nighted' a second modem to the new address, but actually telling UPS to send it to the old address.

And let's not forget classics like, "Hanging up on the customer, when the customer asks an awkward question they don't have a good answer to, and then claiming that they don't know how the call got cut off" - hello? You're the fucking phone company! If YOU don't know how the phone system works, who the hell does? They did the "hanging up on awkward questions" routine twice during our office move.

Oh, and let's not forget NEVER EVER returning any calls, when left a voicemail by me.

So much for a "spirit of service". All these folks did, was spirit away my will to live. Time to break out the cocoa tins and string?

When it comes to insular foreign policy, mixed with arrogant comtempt of foreigners, the U.S.A. really is #1.

Don't get me wrong, over the years I've lived here, and made many friends, and have come to love the country and its people, but there are always people like this to drag the average down.

Thanks to my friend Mary for spotting this picture.

Just in case you hadn't heard enough about my new regular radio show, you can click here to hear the trailer I recorded for it.

Bear in mind, I wrote it, and Erik and I recorded, edited and mixed it in about an hour and a quarter (I had to get back to the day job).

p..s. Other non-radio stories are in the works. No, really.

OK, so today I did the first edition of my own regular show on jaz89.

It went well, with no big surprises. Nothing much to report really.

On Wednesday of this week, I'll be in the studio recording a trailer to promote the show, that'll be played throughout the week.

As you might imagine, I've come up with several highly amusing ideas for trailers, however, knowing TPTB as I do, the one we actually record will be short, to the point, and "hold the zany".

As you know, I'm a volunteer Public Radio broadcaster on Denver's jazz89 KUVO. I've been on-air since January 2003, as a substitute host, filling in for the regular presenters of shows, whenever they were on vacation, sick, or just busy.

Vacancies to be the regular host of a show are rare, but a few months ago, two shows opened up. I was potentially a candidate for either time-slot: Friday nights (9pm-12am), or Saturday afternoons (3-5pm).

Yesterday, I found out that I didn't get the gig hosting Friday nights (my preferred timeslot, if only because you can be a bit more experimental with your music late at night). I was pretty bummed. I'd worked hard to trying to differentiate my show on Fridays, over the other weekday evening shows.

Today, however, I had a call from the station offering me the Saturday afternoon show. I gladly accepted. It's a timeslot that's dear to my heart, because it was this timeslot in which I did my first ever radio show. It was pointed out to me that this slot has a much bigger audience, than the Friday one, and so needs a strong presenter.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share the good news with you all. I've waited a long time to get my own show, working all sorts of hours for the station, often at very short notice.

Thanks to all of you who have offered me support and/or encouragement with my radio career over the past couple of years.

So, tonight, I finally got to try out a Denver legend - Benny's. This would be the Mexican restaurant on the corner of 7th and Grant.

The décor, atmosphere and food were wonderful. It was down-market, loud and had great food. Kind of like The Blue Bonnet, only with good food, and a better deal on drinks.

The only fly in the ointment was the guy on the next table. You know the sort, there's one in every restaurant. It's the guy who's booming, bellowing voice cuts through any conversation on your table, forcing everyone to listen to his tedious anecdotes.

So, imagine if you well, I'm waiting for a fabulous plate of fajitas to arrive, when our fog-horn friend starts to loudly bellow a tale, that begins with the words, "Did I tell you about my barium enema?", at which point, my waitress places a small bowl of red-brown salsa in front of me, along with some chips.

I kid you not. His timing was impeccable. If you wrote this for an episode of Seinfeld, people would tell you it was too far-fetched.

He continued, "Yeah, three whole litres of the stuff....", as I tried with all my might to not listen. At this point, as the food was placed in front of me, I was unable to not hear, "...three nurses around me, with my ass stuck up in the air, facing the entire room...."

Eventually, they left, whilst I still had food to eat, but I'm left wondering just what level of sociopath does it take to conduct such a conversation, at fog-horn level, while all around him, innocent strangers are trying to eat?

However, whilst he was there, I came so close to leaning over and pointing out that, unlike him, some of us were still trying to eat, and that he should take his conversation and shove it where they put the barium.

Whilst I favour OS X-powered Macintoshes, I still have a PC. It comes in handy for computer games, occastional software development, and keeping doors open.

It used to be such a reliable machine, way back in 1997, when I bought it. My problem was that (as chronicled here) upgrading the motherboard and processor turned it into a nightmarishly unreliable piece of crap. Putting Windows XP (which stands for Extremely Painful) didn't exactly help matters either.

Just recently, despite minimal use, it got a virus. As a regular Mac user, viruses are something that happen to other people (namely Windows users), so you can imagine just how prepared I was to deal with it.

Several hours later, and my PC is disinfected. Great, so back to trouble-free operation, right? No. No, because whilst I may have removed the multiple viruses and trojan horses infecting the system, I hadn't removed the "Adware".

For those who don't know, adware is pretty much the same thing as a virus, except it just takes over some of the functionality of your (Microsoft) web browser, changing things like the home page, the default search page, the colour of your browser's underwear, and so on, to point to advertisements for online casinos, porn sites, or Dick Cheney's Yahoo briefcase.

So now, I'm running - daily - virus scanning and adware scanning software. Two software packages to buy, and run, constantly, and update, constantly, just to keep the basic operating system running. Yes folks, it's the magic that is... Microsoft Windows.

I'll just keep using my OS-X powered Macintoshes. One more tool I need, to really sort out my Windows machine...a new bit of hardware...a shiny new sledgehammer.