“Appropriately” on the Blog Action Day about the environment, now also E.ON, who provide me with electricity, too (and, after all, have not raised their tariffs this year), announced increases by an average of about 10% (in Bavaria).
Well, I (and many others, I’m sure) will stress comparison sites such as Verivox now…
Maybe an eco tariff won’t be bad, there seem to be some which are relatively low. (Yes, environmental protection that costs nothing or little is still the most successful kind…)
So it is possible! At least sometimes.
Yesterday on the ICE train between Würzburg and Ingolstadt (all translations by me): “[…] Our train is currently 9 minutes late. [… connections …] We apologize” – without “thank you for your understanding.” Apparently not all of them are as arrogant and resistant to learning. (If Tchibo is doing that better by now, too?)
(And most of that delay was regained: the +9 became +1 in Ingolstadt, so I could easily catch my RE connection.)
Alas, only sometimes:
On the outbound journey on Friday, the ICE stopped right after Nürnberg due to construction work: two short announcements “…delayed by … minutes. We thank you for your understanding.” Later, longer announcements “[…] currently … minutes delayed. We apologize. […connections…] We thank you for your understanding.”
If one of the conductors/attendants had shown up in my compartment, I had notified him/her of this “unfortunate choice of words” – no-one came, though. Needless to say that the final +15 got me a stay of nearly two hours in Würzburg. Well, Würzburg is a nice town, as well…
The German version of a “TV Licencing agency”, called GEZ, wants to stop akademie.de using colloquial short names for the TV fees and other related things and force them to use long beaurocratic vocabulary – by legal means, because the colloquial names would only be used to “cause a bad image for the GEZ.”
I can’t really translate the whole thing, but it’s, in my opinion, rather causing the opposite…
…or what else is the result if – as reported e.g. on on Spiegel Online (German), but that’s apparently not an isolated case – you have a flat rate for your iPhone and receive an 80-page printed bill in which every single call, every single SMS and every single data transfer are listed, even though they are included in the flat rate and thus billed with $0.00?
And that with all the environmental-frendliness that Apple and AT&T like to emphasize…
No, I’m not referring to the oh so important polls in this blog, 
but to a bulk mail I got today, “The big EU states mineral oil survey” – as if they were really interested in the people’s opinion. Addresses with date of birdth and especially “Kaffeefahrten” as trip prize, that is what counts for these dubious crooks, and they are doing that with letterbox companies (this time Gewinnzentrale, Postfach 1129, 49430 Neuenkirchen) for quite some time, unfortunately… 
(Update:) The AK Tirol had also warned and has been confirmed.
Unfortunately, also this time there will be enough unsuspecting naïves participating to be financially worthwhile for the organizers…
31 Dec 07: Now they’re trying that with an “energy survey”…
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