Who moved my cheese? No, I mean, Who changed my coffee?

My e-mail to Cafédirect:

Hello.

I'd like to ask whether any changes have been made to the Cafédirect blend when you rebranded it from 5065 to Classic. To my palate it does not taste as good any more. Indeed, I am unable to finish a cup, it's that unappealing. And not only that, it is not as attractive in the cup anymore, looking like a cheap greasy-spoon-cafe type of coffee, leaving a nasty film around the cup's rim.

I have been drinking Cafédirect since way back before it was rebranded as 5065, so I think I have a good grasp on the way it should look and taste. On that note, why rebrand it anyway? The new look is very bland and generic and caused much confusion to both myself and the supermarket staff when I was trying to buy my usual jar.

I look forward to hearing from you on the points raised here.

Yours disappointedly on several counts.

Their reply:

Dear _____,

Thank you for your email. We greatly value consumer feedback. As part of our continuing improvement programme we have improved the flavour of the freeze dried coffee to make it more similar to ground and 5065 has been replaced by Classic Blend. The residue you have found around your cup is a sign of the coffee's quality. We will not be reintroducing 5065.

You may like to try our new Intense or Special Selection freeze dried coffees. I am sorry you do not like Classic Blend and I will pass your comments on to my Brand manager.

Thank you for supporting us from our beginnings; I hope you will continue to and that one of our new coffees is to your liking.

Kind Regards.

Conclusion:

Despite having been told by Sainsbury's that these two coffees are one and the same, patently this is not the case. The coffee I have enjoyed for the best part of 10 years is no more. I rue this day. What cunt made this decision? And why the fuck was I not consulted? The swines.

Update on being banned

So, I thought I'd have another go at getting Such As They Are accepted by BlogExplosion yesterday afternoon. I entered all the details again and hit Submit, or whatever.

Then, when I turned on my mail this morning, I find that it's been accepted. Nothing about objectionable content, even though I hadn't changed anything.

Clearly there are several people responsible for accepting/declining applicants, each applying the letter of the law in different ways.

For example, their ground rules state that excessive profanity is not acceptable, although occasional use is okay. I'm sure I fall into the "excessive profanity" camp. And that's fine by me and most of my readers, I think. Context is everything. Take the words "fuck" and "cunt", say. I use both of these liberally, but I hope in a non-offensive and sometimes humorous way. I mostly don't actually intend to offend, believe it or not.

I use those words as a little bit of colour in my posts. Nine times out of ten, I could remove them with no detrimental effect on my message, but I like them. They are words that were suitable for great English authors through the centuries, so why not a piss-poor blog addict like yours truly?

These words are part of my heritage, and I'll be damned if I'll let some blog-hits-exchange site tell me how many cunts I can use. The swines.

The times have changed, and now so have I

Well, eventually I went and done it. Finally, today, this twenty-sixth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, the Blogger Machines allowed me to switch to New Blogger.

Is it better? Is it worse? Time will tell, but I too have been blighted by the alteration of commenters' names to simply "anonymous" in many places. Will this ever be fixed? Will it not? Time will tell.

Oh Blogger Machines, why don't you get things right before making people shift over? Isn't that what Beta testing is all about? The swines.

World news: Russia

Italian news website Repubblica.it has great pics from the pig olympics held in Moscow. This is one of the shots; how cute is that little fella?

Wife has gone all Babe on me again and feels bad about the bacon in the fridge...