hail to the thief...

Statistically, I suppose it was always bound to happen sooner or later: after more than ten years happily buying stuff over the internet, this weekend I was finally the victim of that online identity theft and attempted fraud you read so much about.

I was down in Oxford for the weekend, so I didn't pick up my emails until Sunday morning after a distinctly leisurely start to the day. What I saw quickly snapped me out of my slightly fuzzy, morning after the night before kind of a mood. Amongst the usual pre-Christmas marketing guff, a few emails caught my eye: one was a confirmation from PayPal saying that I'd authorised a payment from Dabs.com, then there was an email from PayPal saying they'd limited access to my account, then there was an order confirmation from Dabs.com and finally there was an email confirming a change to my account details at Dabs.com.

Eh?

This was strange and alarming because I had no recollection of placing any kind of order with anyone, and I haven't actually used Dabs.com at all for more than five years. A quick read of the emails and my fears were realised: someone had placed an order for two Playstation 3s -- worth £598 -- using my long dormant account on Dabs.com and had paid for it using my PayPal account. There was my name and address on the invoice, right above a delivery address somewhere in Telford.

I wasn't immediately sure what to do, but quickly made my way straight to the money and tried to report the fraudulent transaction to PayPal. They were way ahead of me, it seemed, and even as I looked at my account, the transaction was being removed from my account before my eyes. Pausing only to change my PayPal logon and password, I then went off to Dabs to make sure that the order was cancelled at their end. Here I had less joy. Dabs.com may well be very cheap, but one of the ways that they appear to have saved money (and they're hardly alone in this) is by making it impossible to contact them directly: any question has to be put to them either through email or via a "live link" to a customer services operator. According to their site, all their customer service advisors were busy, so I had to fire off an email and hope they got back to me.

It turns out, as I found out on Monday when I tried contacting them again when they hadn't bothered to reply to my email by lunchtime, that the customer service advisors at Dabs were not busy on Sunday at all... they just weren't there full stop... they shut for the weekend (perhaps explaining why the fraudulent order was placed at 7pm on Friday night, when I would have no chance of getting the order cancelled until Monday morning). My email would be responded to, the online advisor told me, but she insisted that she couldn't tell me anything about the status of my order. By now I was reasonably sure that I wouldn't lose any money as a result of this attempted fraud, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of communication from Dabs when it was clear that the attack had started on their website with someone hacking my account. They may well have spotted this order as fraudulent the moment it was placed, and it may well actually have been them that cancelled the transaction with PayPal, but they were giving me - the victim here - no sign that they cared about me at all. At one point, the advisor told me that the Web Accounts team had sent me an email to my new registered address.... an address that had been changed by the fraudster when they changed my account details to prevent me cancelling the order myself.

In the end, they sent me an email confirming that the order had been cancelled and that they had deleted my account. The sign off was priceless:

"I am sorry that you have been a victim, but would like to highlight that dabs.com Plc is one of the most secure e-commerce companies in the UK, unfortunately identity theft can be the hardest type of Fraud to detect."

Right, so in spite of the fact that my details have been hacked out of your systems and someone has tried to steal £600 from me, you'd like to tell me how secure your site is?

How reassuring.

So I'm cross. I'm cross that someone tried to steal from me like this; I'm cross that they were nearly able to; I'm cross that Dabs.com have made it as difficult for their customers to contact them as they possibly can and that they clearly haven't cared about how they handle their customers; I'm delighted that PayPal seemed to react so swiftly to kill the order and were available to me on the phone on a Sunday morning, but I'm a bit cross that my account access has now been limited (even though I was still able to access it fully and change all my account details on Sunday morning.... and if I could, then presumably the fraudster could have done too). Above all, I'm cross that I probably put myself in this position by being lazy with my online passwords and not changing them around enough to make it as difficult as possible for someone to crack them and try to steal from me.

The internet remains an amazing resource and a great place to find and buy the most obscure things at the best possible prices....I'm hardly likely to be giving that up anytime soon. There are, after all, thieves in the offline world too.

But, all the same..... grrr!

In short: go change your passwords and under no circumstances shop at Dabs.com. In fact, if you have an account with Dabs.com - even if you haven't used it in years - I suggest you go and delete it.

repossess and crucify....

In April last year, I was struggling to get my bank to care about a mortgage payment they had lost. All they had to do was to transfer it from my current account to my mortgage account with a different bank. They transferred it out okay, but sadly they didn't transfer it to the right place and didn't actually know where it had ended up at all. I wasn't sure how that was even possible in the digital era, so not surprisingly I was hopping mad and anxious to find my money. You'd think my bank would be anxious to find it to, right? Wrong. They couldn't have made it clearer that they didn't think it was anything other than my problem or that they had any kind of responsibility at all. I was actually told by my local branch manager that I wasn't actually able to complain about it. Needless to say, I did complain, long and loud and pointlessly. I waved the banking code at them, I waded through the endless circles of hell that is their call centre, where poor undertrained people on the other side of the world tried everything to politely make me go away, including at one point, putting me on hold on then bringing me back and pretending that I was now through to the complaints department.

In the end I found the money myself. They'd transferred it to another account I sometimes make payments to. I moved it out and made up my mind that the £20 compensation they eventually paid me wouldn't be enough to prevent me from moving my account.

Needless to say, although I opened another bank account with an ethical bank, I haven't yet been bothered to shift my current account. This, of course, is what they count on.... but I've got a long memory: I know that this is a bank that can't be trusted with anything and who ultimately don't give a monkeys about their customers or - ultimately - their customer's money.

Imagine my total lack of surprise, then, when I received a phonecall this afternoon from the "Premiere Account Advisor" at the local branch of my bank. The very same branch, you'll remember, where the manager told me to my face that I wasn't able to make a complaint. Now what on earth would make them want to suddenly call me up out of the blue a mere five working days after I paid in a cheque worth more than three year's salary? Oh, HSBC... your total predictability is almost awe-inspiring.

Was I aware of the Premiere Service the bank offered? No, but I was aware that HSBC have been doing everything they can to make me think I should pay for their lack of service, but I was not aware of any Premiere Service they offered. Oh, it's for our favourite customers with a shit pile of cash (I'm paraphrasing) in their accounts. We offer them all kinds of free services, including access to our "independent" financial advisor. Independent? Yes, she spends all her time in different HSBC branches. Right, I see. What are you planning to do with all that money? Remove it from your crappy bank as soon as possible and talk to a real financial advisor, as it happens. Undeterred by this news, or perhaps following her bank's noble tradition of not listening to what I had actually said, she pushed on. Can I give you my mobile phone number? Just in case you think things over and decide you want to talk to me.....

Unbelievable. Alright, it's my own fault for not pulling my finger out and moving my current account business sooner, but - like I said - I've got a long memory. Longer than them, anyway. They might not be able to remember losing my money eighteen months ago, but I do, and if these clowns think I'm leaving my money in their bank for any longer than necessary, then they've another thing coming. Honestly, it it wasn't for the fact that even their derisory rates of interest are preferable not cashing the cheque at all, the bloody thing would still be sitting on my bedside table now.

As always, Richie had it right:

"Economic forecast soothe our dereliction
Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine
Carried away with useless advertising dreams
Blinding children, life as autonotomes"

Death sanitized through credit indeed.

no easy way out....

You might have missed this, but the other day, a weight-loss drug was shifted from being prescription only to being widely available over the counter in your local chemists. How is Alli different to the drugs that you've been offered for years in those emails that you might find in your spam folder? Well, it actually works: it stops your body from absorbing approximately 1/4 of all of the fat that you eat as part of your normal diet. As a result, so they say, you are able to lose 50% more weight than you would normally shift through dieting alone - lost 2lb on a normal diet, and you would have lost 3lb if you'd been using Alli.

In theory, this drug is only to be used in conjunction with a healthy, low fat diet. It's only supposed to be used by people with a body mass index of more than 28 (i.e. "overweight"). You can see the attraction, right? Apparently 40% of the population are trying to lose weight at any given time, but I'm not sure I know many people who wouldn't be happy to take a shortcut like this that would cut a bit of extra fat out of their diet without them needing to do a single thing differently. Who doesn't feel like they've over-indulged at Christmas? Who doesn't occasionally feel regretful about that late-night curry or that portion of fish and chips when you couldn't be bothered to cook? Well, if you took Alli, then 25% of that extra fat would simply not be absorbed by your body. It's a "get out of jail free" card. Brilliant, no?

No.

There was a programme on telly the other day talking about the huge surge in the numbers of people getting gastric bands. It showed the healthcare professionals consulting with people who swore blind that they'd tried everything to lose weight and that this was their last chance. It also showed those same people nipping into McDonalds and having a Happy Meal to keep them going until they got home for their tea. In short, it showed that people were resorting to surgery instead of changing their lifestyles; instead of facing up to the simple equation that if calorific intake is greater than the rate of calory burn, then the result is weight gain, these people were going in search of the magic bullet that would help them lose weight without changing a damn thing about their lifestyle. For these people, Alli is simply going to be another form of magic bullet.

There's another type of person who will be desperate to take this drug though: the kind of person who is probably at a perfectly healthy weight, but who, for some reason, wants to lose a bit of weight. They might have body issues (who doesn't?) and want to lose a bit of weight; they may simply want to tone up a bit before their holidays or to go out for a really big meal and not feel like a fat bastard. These people will take Alli. Yes, technically you need to have a BMI of 28 before you can get the drug, but how is that going to stop anyone? The drug company and the retailers know that the diet market is massive and they know that people are going to be swallowing these pills down like candy. How hard are they going to enforce that guideline? Well, judging by the website of one well-known UK high street retailer.... not very. They ask you to confirm your height and weight, and they ask you a few other questions about your dietary habits.... but then they'll happily sell you the drug, with prices starting at £32.95 for 42 tablets. Hell, there's a recession on, you know. You have to make your money somewhere, right?

But there's a sting in the tail. What do you think happens to all the fat that this drug stops your body from absorbing? It passes through your body, of course. Sadly, your body isn't really equipped to prevent pure fat from exiting your body in this way, and do you know what that means? Yes, it means anal leakage. You shit fat. Mmm. Nice.



Think you can live with that? Well, apparently it also means that the fat passes straight through your body. You might sit down to enjoy a curry, but you probably won't make it home before some of that richness tries to make an unscheduled exit from your body. Are you ready for that? I know a guy who was on this stuff when it was only available through prescription. He tells me that it doesn't take very long before you realise that a curry simply isn't worth the cost and you give it a miss. Nice.

This may very well be a tremendous aid to helping people lose weight, but you cannot tell me that the prime market for this isn't going to be people who simply don't need to use it. Retailers know this, but they can't see past the amount of money they will make from selling this as fast as they can. They're making a few token efforts to make it look like they're not just selling this to everyone, but really they're just selling it to everybody. In my view, they don't care enough. How long before someone kills themselves with this stuff? There are enough people with eating disorders already, do they really need access to something that will help them starve their body of nutrients and to starve themselves to death? Why has this been shifted from prescription only... when you'd need a doctor to agree that this was a sensible option.... to being readily available instore? Money.

Oh, why am I bothering? You're reading this and thinking you can see the appeal, aren't you? Well, plenty of places will be happy to sell it to you. Be my guest. You might want to buy yourself some more pants, but be my guest.....

snake eyes watching you....

Of an evening, when I've got nothing better to do, I quite often find that the TV works its way towards Dave and I end up watching old episodes of Top Gear, QI, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Mock the Week and suchlike. They're repeats, of course, but they are generally pretty funny and it's an easy way to pass the time. Easier, certainly, than watching Celebrity Big Brother, anyway.

One thing really gets up my nose though: the primetime coverage on Dave is sponsored by Cobra beer, and we get little adverts at the start and end of every advertising break. There's nothing wrong with that, particularly, and generally I find adverts fairly easy to tune out, but I find these particular adverts absolutely insufferable.

They feature the three characters pictured above, sitting at the bar in a pub chatting over a Cobra, and they have the tagline "Prime time on Dave with Cobra beer -- Now You're Talking". I think the idea, although it's not very clearly articulated, is that Cobra is less gassy than other beers, thus promoting easier conversation in the pub.

Eh? Well, exactly.

The trouble is that not only are these ads not in the slightest bit funny, but they are also irritating, smug and self-satisfied.... which I'm not sure is entirely what Cobra had in mind when they commissioned them.

Here's a sample.

[waitress breezes past with a tray of food]
"Wow, the food here looks amazing"
"Is this a gastro pub?"
Well, they've got [pause] gastronomical prices"
Smug laughter all round.

or

[barman is making cocktails in the background]
"I've got a recipe for a cocktail"
"Oh yes?"
"Yes, you take half a pint of Cobra, and you mix it with another half pint of Cobra"
Smug laughter all round.
Prime time with Cobra. Now you're talking.

Or

[man singing tunelessly into a microphone]
"You've got to love karaoke night"
"Someone always murders 'my way'"
"....by doing it their way"
Smug laughter all round.
Prime time with Cobra. Now you're talking.

...you get the general idea.

There are loads of them. None are funny. All are irritating.

What are Cobra going for here? Are they suggesting that people who drink Cobra beer are smug wankers, or are they trying to sell their beer to the smug wankers who they believe watch Dave? Either way, I have to be honest and say that neither scenario makes me want to be the kind of person who buys Cobra. Quite why anyone would want to associate their brand with this rubbish is beyond me.

What do you mean I'm wasting my time being irritated by something as pointless and inconsequential as this?

In case you hadn't noticed, that's what I do.

you're only a customer....

It being the season of goodwill to all men, I'm a little loathe to launch straight into a rant...but, you know.

A little while ago, I was idly considering buying myself a Garmin watch that had a GPS chip in it and would help me to track my runs more accurately. It's not cheap, but I thought that it would really pep up my running to know how I was doing against my own previous times on the same route and stuff like that. Luckily, I discovered a brilliant application for the iPhone that did pretty much exactly the same thing and was going to cost me absolutely nothing. It's hard to sing RunKeeper's praises enough really: it uses the GPS functionality in the iPhone to track distance, time, speed and gradient to help you get a much more accurate idea of what you are doing and how you are performing. By way of example, here's my run in Oxford on Saturday before the Christmas party.



Not bad, eh?

Anyway. Because I don't really like holding onto my iPhone when I'm running, I thought that what would make this application perfect would be something that would enable me to clip the phone to my arm as I ran. That way I would be able to track the run and to use it is an iPod without needing to worry much about it. As luck would have it, I saw a recommendation in the paper for just the thing I needed: an armband for the 3G iPhone made by Gear4. Brilliant. I ordered on the spot. Job done. It was 5th Novermber and in less than a week, I would be able to run handsfree again.

No. Apparently not.

A little later, on 13th November, mindful of the £3.60 I was paying for 2-5 day delivery, I tentatively emailed them to find out what was going on. Ah, we're out of stock, they told me. Next shipment will be 19th November. Fine. 29th November, having received no product and no further contact from them, I emailed them again. Ah, we're still out of stock. The next shipment is 5th December. By now I was starting to become a little agitated. I wanted an armband. I had paid for an armband. I didn't have an armband but was unable to buy any of the ones I saw because I was already committed. The 5th of December came and went. Weeks passed. Nothing. Today - 22nd December - I got an email telling me, out of the blue, that they had despatched my order. When I got home, I found it was already here. It looks pretty good, but do you know what? I'm furious about the shitty customer service I have received.

Why did they take my order (and my money) when they were out of stock?
Why did it take me emailing them to find out that it was out of stock?
Why did they not update me of the status of the order until months past the date when I might reasonably expected to have received my goods?

That stuff isn't hard, is it?

The product I have is fine, but I can't help but conclude that Gear4 ultimately don't give a shit about their customers. If that's truly the case, then they really don't deserve any customers at all. You'd think that in the current economic climate, they'd value every customer they could get. Apparently (and bafflingly) this is clearly not the case.

Next time, I'm voting with my feet.

Avoid.

ticket to ride....

It looks as though hundreds of fans hoping to attend festivals this year have been ripped off by their ticket agency. They'd bought their tickets from SOS Master Tickets and the tickets never turned up. Some poor sods were even advised to travel to the V Festival last weekend to pick up their tickets at the door from one of their agents who would meet them. They travelled, but of course, the agents never turned up, switched their mobiles off, took their website down and were never seen or heard from again. It looks as though hundreds more are going to miss out on the Reading & Leeds Festivals this weekend when their tickets fail to turn up.

Oh dear. The thing is though that, whilst I am sympathetic to the plight of these fans to some extent, my sympathy is somewhat limited by the fact that SOS Master Tickets is, and never was, an official ticketing agent for any of these tickets. The tickets that they sold to desperate people and were being sold way over the face value. I'm sorry, but to hand over hundreds of pounds to an unofficial ticketing site and expect the tickets to turn up without a hitch is simply being naive. Even Ebay has a recommendation system that offers you at least some degree of assurance that a trader might be kosher, and even then I think you're better off giving the whole thing a miss. Buying tickets from this kind of website isn't very different to buying penny stock on the recommendation of a spam email or sending money to Nigeria to help liberate a vast sum of money that will, in time, be transferred over to your bank account.

I see that the official ticketing agencies are wasting no time in getting onto their high horses. It's not their fault, of course. The Director of the V Festival said:

"As concert promoters, we urge the public not to get tickets from these secondary ticket outlets, whether that be unofficial ticket outlets or through auction sites, as it could well lead to disappointment."

Yes, but let's not forget that even the official ticket promoters are far from spotless in this affair, after all... they sell tickets on to these secondary ticketing agencies in large quantities, don't they? Besides, the official ticket agencies are the ones who charge their own mark up in the shape of extortionate booking fees and postage PER TICKET that you buy; they're the ones who release the tickets online in a carefully controlled way that means that all of their servers will crash and all the phone lines will be engaged for hours at a time ; they're the ones who will take your credit card details and not send you a confirmation that you've got your tickets for days; they're the ones who will sometimes allocate you tickets, even telling you the seat numbers you've got, before emailing you back a few hours later telling you that there's been a problem... a problem for you, the poor mug customer, that is.

You take your chances when you fork out above face value for a ticket from an unofficial dealer, for sure, but it's not as though the official agencies are really that much better or a great deal more reliable, is it?

death sanitised through credit....

A little over twenty-five years ago, I opened up my first bank account. Naturally, I opened that account with the same bank that my parents used, and I became a "Griffin Saver" with the Midland Bank. As a sweetener for the deal, the bank gave me a rather natty little bag and a small dictionary. I'm not sure that this account ever handled anything more than the odd bit of birthday money, but I think that the bank more than recouped their investment as I have never quite got around to moving my bank account since. Oh sure, I'm not a Griffin Saver any more. When I was 13 years old I was automatically shifted into a "Live Cash" account, and then a few years later, when I was a student, they moved me on again into something called an "Orchard" account. I moved my account holding branch a couple of times, first from Milton Keynes to the branch on the University of Warwick campus, and then from there to the branch on High Street in York. That second move was a bit of a hassle, so I've never bothered to move it since. At some point the Midland Bank became HSBC, but apart from issuing me with a different cheque book, it's all been much of a muchness.... except of course that account now handles a bit more money.

I've got other bank accounts now, of course. I've got a savings account, a cash ISA, some assorted building society accounts and investments, a joint account with my wife... that kind of stuff.... but essentially the account that used to hold my pocket money is now the same account that receives my salary every month, and it's the account I use on a day-to-day basis. HSBC have always kind of abstractly annoyed me (why advertise yourself as the world's local bank if you then charge me for taking money out of an HSBC branch in any other country but Britain? How exactly is your international presence helping me?) The interest rates are derisory and the service pretty poor and I keep meaning to move... I really do...but I never quite get around to it. It's clearly less hassle to stay put than to move.

Until, that is, the bank lost my mortgage payment.

With the help and sage guidance of LB, we shifted our mortgage in January into one of those offset things. This meant that I now needed to set up a standing order payment from my current account so that it now went into a savings account offset against the mortgage. Fair enough. I set that up so that the first payment would go out on 8th February. I did this over the internet, as usual, and once it was set up, I didn't give it a second thought.

A couple of weeks after the first payment was supposed to have been made, C. started chasing me to set up the mortgage payment as it hadn't arrived in the account. I checked my current account, and was a little dismayed to see that the payment had certainly been deducted from my account on time...... but clearly hadn't arrived. And so began the dismal process of trying to find out where my money had gone.

The HSBC call centre is in India. Now, I have absolutely no problem at all with call centres that are based in India or indeed anywhere else outside of the UK (and in fact, I find the adverts for banks in this country - I'm looking at you NatWest - that make snide, racist remarks about foreign call centres to be insulting. There are crap call centres in the UK too, you know). What I do have a problem with is call centres that are utterly unable or unwilling to help the poor customers who ring through needing some help or guidance. For about a month, all I could get out of the HSBC call centre was the news that they could confirm, in fact, that the money had left my account. This much I knew. What they could not or would not confirm for me was where exactly this money had gone. I received no fewer than two letters confirming the departure of this money from my account on the 8th February. The letters were identical in every respect, except for the small detail that they each listed a different destination account. Now, in my books, as soon as a bank confirms that the same payment has gone to two different places, THEY LOSE. Not according to the bank. Both destination accounts belonged to me (one was the mortgage account that I had originally set up to receive the money and the other was the offset savings account attached to the mortgage account), neither account had received the money. HSBC didn't seem to care, all they cared about was that the money had left my account. They didn't care where it had gone, and they cared even less about what I thought about that.

I waved the banking code at them, telling them that it was the responsibility of the sending bank to account for the money, but it made no difference. I was given some vague assurances that they would put a trace on the transfer, but I was rather afraid that all this would mean would be a third letter telling me that the money had left my current account. In the end, I rang them up to complain. It's another option off those endless telephone systems, and this time I pressed it. It sent my call to the same place, and I dealt with a person. She was clearly working in the same department as everyone else, she was equally unable to help and, crucially, she told me that I couldn't actually complain.

"What do you mean I can't complain? Why not?"
"Because we're investigating the payment at the moment."
"And I can't complain until that's complete?"
"No. You can't complain until that process has finished."
"But I want to complain about everything that's happened up to this point"
"You can't"
".....!"

It turned out that I could actually pop into a branch and complain if I really wanted.

So I did.

I spoke to the manager of my local branch here. It didn't really help: she was actually a little bit terse with me, and although she logged my grievances again, when I asked her if that meant my complaint was now in the system, she said,

"Oh, we don't like to call them complaints."

What? Like a train isn't late until it's more than an hour late, a complaint isn't a complaint until a certain amount of time has passed or a certain amount of money has been lost?

"Ah, but standing order payments aren't like Direct Debit payments. They don't have the same kind of guarantees from the bank once you set them up."
"So even if I set up a payment and enter all of the correct bank account information, if the money gets lost, it's not your fault?"
"That's right. We've got a customer who lost £20,000 like that!"

Is that supposed to be of comfort to me? I'm sure she's wrong too. Surely it's not true that the bank has no responsibility for my money under those circumstances?

Anyway. C. had actually discovered where the money had got to by this point - the bank had managed to transfer it to our joint account. I decided not to tell HSBC, but to see if they found the money on their own.

I got another call a few days later. They were now able to tell me that the money had gone to the joint account. Apparently this was obvious from my account records, although not so obvious that any of their employees had thought to mention it to me at any point.
"You must have entered those account details when you set up the payment"
"Well, I didn't."
"You must have."
"Alright, if I did, then how come you sent me a letter confirming you'd made the payment to my mortgage account? You can only have known about that account if I'd entered the details on a standing order."
"You must have mentioned it on a phone call to us"
"I didn't"
"You must have."
"Do you have call records?"
"Yes."
"I want you to dig up the record of the call where I gave you those bank details."
"We can do that."
"And I also want to know why it's taken you two months to tell me where this money has gone, only for you now to tell me that it's as clear as day on my records that I entered the details of my joint account."
"We're sorry for the inconvenience. We may be able to give you £20 of compensation for that"
"Good. You do that."

...and so on.

HSBC simply will not admit that they got things wrong. I suppose the most important thing here is that I have found the money, but it has taught me several crucial lessons about HSBC: that they do not care about me as a customer; that they did not care where my money had gone, only that they had paid it out of my current account; that they will not admit fault; that they do not equip their call centre staff to help customers who ring them asking for anything more complicated than a balance; that I really need to change banks.

It's taken me 25 years, but I've finally got over the inertia that has seen me keep my main bank account with HSBC. As soon as I get my compensation from them, I'm closing my account and taking all my business somewhere else. C. has already done the same (and let's face it, her business is worth a lot more than mine). Fuck them.

If it helps, I'll return the dictionary too.

Wankers.

The morale of this story? DON'T BANK WITH HSBC.

D'you hear me google? HSBC ARE INCOMPETENT. HSBC HATE CUSTOMERS.

End of rant. It's a long and boring story, I know, but if it's any consolation to those of you who have made it this far.... I feel a little bit better now.