Chris Dowding - writer

Dublin Bus' night service is called Nitelink, and is put on for the partygoes who stay out till very, very late (Friday and Saturday are the big nights to go out in Dublin, but Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are pretty busy as well). While Dubliners may complain about late buses and awful service from the drivers, it's good to see that Dublin Bus' advertisers have a sense of humour. Their Nitelink buses have allegedly been running amusing campaigns like these for the last two or three years. In a way, the advertising campaign is a brilliant way of saving money. Why put on more services or friendly drivers, when a good advertisement might keep the passengers from thinking about how late they are? Sadly though, it's clear that Dublin Bus remains the inefficient hopeless service that it was when I lived there in 2002. See this blog (April 2008) from a passenger: "This morning i was getting on a 145 in stillorgan. The bus in question didnt even have 1 ...

When my company moved to our new office (Christmas 2007), I rang the phone company, ‘Telstra’, to get our phone lines moved from the old office to the new one. The phone lines changed over on the right day, apparently without any problems. Four months later, we realised that some of the bills hadn’t shown up. After hunting around, we found that some of the bills had gone to the old office. Others had been sent to a director’s home address. He rang Telstra. The male assistant immediately noticed we had money outstanding on our account. ‘I can’t do anything with your account until you pay the outstanding bills.’ ‘The reason we haven’t paid them is because you’ve been sending them to the wrong address. That’s why I’m calling.’ ‘Well, it must be some problem with the account address,’ replied the assistant. ‘Yes. [That’s what I just said.] We sent Telstra a letter two months ago, advising you of this information. We asked you to update your records so that the accounts would be billed to t...