Had a bit of an interesting one with Alliance & Leicester yesterday. We use them for our business banking and I had a couple of fairly large cheques to pay in. Normally I pop them in an envelope and take them into a post office, but this takes over a week to get them into our account, so I went to a local branch and used their deposit machine.

Their deposit machines are pretty neat, in that they take a photo of the cheque and put it on your receipt. Yesterday however, the machine couldn’t work out the value of one of the cheques, so it used a zero value. I cancelled the transaction and used the old fashioned paper paying in slip and took it to the counter. The lady behind the counter noticed it was a commercial bank account and promptly told me that I couldn’t pay money in over the counter.
Apparently our terms and conditions with the bank mean we can’t pay in money over the counter, only via the deposit machines and the post office. A little odd really seeing as the local bank will just empty the deposit machine and process it there.

[We]…relaunched Virgin Cola with a further $25 million investment. Our goal: to take on Coke on their home territory. Coke wanted war. So we drove a British tank into Times Square in New York and fired a mock round at the Coca-Cola sign (we’d secretly had it wired up the night before by a pyrotechnical team and it looked like it had gone up in smoke) before ploughing through a massive wall of cola tins. Sightseers ran wailing from the square and we nearly ended up in jail.

Business Striped Bare by Richard Branson is a fantastic insight into the Virgin brand. It’s a great read, which is insightful, entertaining and well written.

Some of you may know that I’ve gone into a partnership with two other friends. We’ve been attempting to open a business bank account with the Abbey for well over a month now. It’s come to the point where we’ve asked them to cease the creation of the account. As this is a rather long post, all is explained below by clicking the link!
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Their website screams out “London’s largest minicab service”.
Yet when I tried ringing them last night for a pickup in Greenwich, I was told that they were busy.
No estimated time of an available taxi, no apology that they couldn’t fulfil my request, not even a smile down the phone when speaking to me.

My first impression of Addison Lee PLC is one of disrespect to the people that pay them and an unwilling and unhelpful approach to communication. Will I be ringing them again in the future? No. Their contact number has been deleted already. Instead I’ll be calling Data Cars who were happy to have my custom and were polite and friendly on the phone.

Even if you can’t satisfy someone’s request, a positive happy attitude when speaking to them will make them come back another day.

I’m working on a new business card design as my current one is getting a little old and I fancy something new looking to carry around and pimp my services via.
I came across this interesting idea earlier. A card impregnated with seeds, which when subjected to light and a little moisture, sprout! What a great idea for a landscape architects card!