Being ripped off

I was online today looking for a couple of new memory cards for one of my digital cameras and found some 1GB card on amazon.co.uk for sale at £1.99, although 1GB was smaller than I was looking for it was cheaper to by 4 x 1GB cards than it was to buy 2 x 2GB (2gb cards £14.99). So I duly ordered 4 x 1GB cards, entered all my details, then as I was about to order I noticed the price was wrong, £26.00!!!!! On closer inspection they were charging £4.51 per card postage and packaging. The card in question are only small (1" x 3/4"), I would agree to £5, but £18 for all four, "Amazon you are extracting the urine" suffice to say I cancelled the order.

Earlier in the day I had been looking at a friends laptop, it would not boot up. The end result was the hard disk was broken. It is not a major job to change a laptop hard drive (7 screw) so I went on line to get an idea of price so I could pass on the information. I found the same replacement hard disk priced between £30 and £90, why? I guess the answer is because they can.........

Finally the biggest rip off of the lot is me (us) the British tax payer is the MP's expenses. While the media may be hyping it to the rafter and pushing the boundaries between truth and sensationalism, but as the old saying goes, there is no smoke without fire. If I had falsified my expenses for work I would expect to loose my job, but hey if you are an MP just say sorry it was a mistake, I forgot I had finished paying my mortgage and that I was also claiming expenses on it and they get to keep there job. The whole of the British government has sunk to a new low, the whole lot should be dissolved and start again. Maybe when we vote at the next election those standing for office should publish their expenses first and then take an oath of honesty and truthfulness, it is no more than we ask those foreign immigrant to do when they want to become British citizens.

Old farts pointless ramblings

I realised that I have been writing this for a week now and still don't seem to have any theme.........unless you can call pointless rambling a theme??

Not had any comments from the outside world so it look like the wife was right when she asked me if there was any point talking to myself. Mind you this is the first time I have ever done anything remotely like keeping a diary (well that how I view a blog in some ways) so it will be interesting to read back and look at what I have written in the future.

Well my days today was pretty rubbish, had to drive 140 miles to a meeting (on a Friday I ask you), a meeting that I asked for 3 weeks ago and was told it was not needed, to discuss things I brought up 3 weeks ago and were dismissed as not necessary, only this time the meeting was asked for by a sales rep and this time I asked the same question (to the sales rep) that were asked of me three weeks ago and he gave same answers I gave three weeks ago and they were accepted. Then after the meeting I had the joys of a 3hr 20min drive home on a Friday night, normally the same drive takes 2hr 30 minute on any other night of the week.

Not got much planned for this weekend, weather a bits wet. Sons birthday on Monday so probably look for a couple of small pressies for him tomorrow (already sorted his main pressies) while he is not around (he going out with grandma). Need to sort some pictures out for my web sites and look at sorting out the rebuilds that I keep meaning to do. Also got a friends laptop to sort out, you know the sort of thing, it was working last night but this morning it won't start oh and I don't have the CD for it. Sunday, might take the camera out, just depends on the weather.

Things we take for granted

Couple of months ago my car went in for its regularly service which also included new front brake pads and discs (done some 60K mile in 18 months). Earlier this week I noticed a large nail in the rear passenger side tyre. This afternoon I managed to get the car to the local tyre depot to have it looked at.

I thought the nail was actually in the safest place in the tyre, the shoulder (where the side wall meets the flat of the thread) but according to the technician it was the worst place as it is the one place they can not repair the tyre. The technician squirted the nail with a soapy liquid and then start to pull the nail out of the tyre, soon the tail tail sign on small bubbles around the stem of the nail was visible, this meant a new tyre (good job its a company car). I was instructed to back into one of the repair bays and give the tyre fitter the special wheel nut key (swnk) for the locking wheel nuts. Apparently these swnk is unique to the locking wheel bolt on my car so there no chance of getting another one of the shelf.

I open the gloves box which is the normal place for the swnk but it was not there, so I checked the passenger door pocket, drivers door pocket, rear storage lockers, under front seat draws, in fact I stripped the dam car down and it was not any where in the car. Casting my mind back and the last people to use it was the local garage who done the front brakes a couple of months ago. So I phoned the garage and explained the situation to the service desk guy, who asked if I had checked in the.................yes I have checked everywhere (I said before he could finish). He dug out the service records and there was no note on the record about the swnk (why would there be??) so he went of to speak to the fitter (can you remember what you did at work 2 months ago??) and no he did not have it.

By now I had been at the tyre depot an hour, this was supposed to be a 20 minute job and I needed it done as I was off on an early morning trip up country tomorrow. So I explained to the service reception guy it needed to be sorted and sorted now. He agreed to send the technician out to the tyre depot. When the technician arrived he went through the car checking every where, he could not find the swnk anywhere. He returned to his car and comes back with a handful of swnk, "I picked these up off the benches in the workshop" he said, he then proceed to check each one on my locking wheel bolts. Thankfully the third one he tried fitted my wheel bolt and we could now remove the wheel. As the swnk and locking wheel bolts are unique set then that must have been the one from my car.

I never gave it a thought to check that the swnk was in the car after the service, I just assumed that it had been put back in the glove box. It is little things like that that we take for granted. But when things like the swnk go missing it can really mess your day up. Fortunately I only lost 2 hours in the end, can you imagine the problems I would of had, had my tyre gone flat on the motorway up country, it would have been a nightmare involving having the car recovered and hire vehicle to get home.

Job search, how things have changed

The last time I looked for a job, it was a case of looking in the local paper and the job center. If you were a skilled person you could use one of those new fangled employment agency places.

If I go back to my last year of school and Mr Hoy our career teacher, in those days application letters were formal affair sent in the post to your prospective employer with a stamped addressed envelope enclosed if you wanted a reply. I particularly remember Mr Hoy telling the class that if an application letter was not written with a fountain pen then a certain employer would throw the letter in the bin regardless of your qualifications.

Now a days you must have a CV, in my early days in was an application letter to introduce yourself and if your application letter got you to the next stage it was then a large application form. But now the CV has taken over, it is submitted with all letters of application it has to be submitted to job web sites and employment agency before they will even show an interest in you.

Today the greater percentage of jobs are now advertised via job web site with the job advert coming from employment agencies. Jobs are no longer regularly advertised in the local paper. I can't comment on the current trend with job centers as I have not been in one for years but I hope the little female Hitler who always seemed to be on my case when I last went in there is no longer there.

One thing that has not changed is the job interview, but even now these have changed, with informal phone interviews now being part of the application process for some companies. Talking of interview, I do raise a wry smile for the Pepsi advert on TV at the moment, (won't bore you with the details but you can see it here) just wonder if anybody has tried it yet.

The reason I am talking employment agencies and job applications is that I am wondering if I should look for another job, while I enjoy my job I am being treated like s**t. But I go back to my question in my first blogg should I wait to be pushed or jump and loose what redundancy I would be entitled to??

Until the next blog good night

One down two to go..........

Trip to head office this week............

I quite enjoy the early morning drives, its just getting out of bed which is the problem. When I left at 5-50am the sun was out but it was lovely and cool, so cool in fact that I had to turn the car heater on. But these bright summer morning must wake everybody up early as there is a noticeable higher level of traffic on the roads at this time in the morning during the summer compared to those cold damp December mornings.

Also more noticeable at this time of the morning is the road kill, two dead deer at two separate locations this morning and one very large pool of blood (well the stain on the road from the pool of blood), no body just a very large red patch on the concrete dual carriageway(A419).

On a more pleasant note the sunrises can be very nice as well, I have done a couple of very early morning drives and have watched the sun rise from the first ray of light breaking through the sky on the horizon. Some of the sites off my fellow travelers can be interesting. I expect to see at least one white van man drinking his morning coffee from one of those silver insulated mugs. There will be the BMW\AUDI\Lexus driver in the outside lane on his mobile gesticulating to the person on the other end of the phone. The women checking her makeup in the mirror, the guy on the push bike who certainly has the morning after the night before look and finally there the one who is still a sleep and drives accordingly.

Well I have another early morning so I am having another early night so that I don't fit into any of the catergories I mentioned above.

Opps I missed a day

I never blogged on Saturday is that allowed??

Well the weather forecast from Friday for Saturday was correct, the wind was in the right direction, westerly - ish. Managed to get out early to do the shopping then back home to load the car and get to the park around mid day. In fact we timed it right as the Kite Surf training schools were just packing up. Unfortunately the wind was up and down like a yo-yo for the first few hours, 0mph to 15mph and back again every few minutes, not much fun. Around three o'clock the wind came in at a steady strenght but it was still blustery.

With the wind it became cold so after packing up and heading home we decided that we would give the BBQ a miss and cook the food on the cooker\grill.

Had the joys on an Indian call centre last night, our broadband was down when we came back home so I left it a while, then tried some of the trick I knew to try and bring it back to life but nothing worked. In the end I called tech support and after the nice English lady gave me directions on the telephone menu system I ended up in an Indian call centre. Well the lady was obviously reading from a script based on a single windows PC (I have 6 computers, a mix of windows and Linux running behind a firewall). Well it was going no where my network was working perfectly all the tests I tried showed my network was ok. The Set Top Box (I'm on cable and have cable TV as well) was displaying an error on the connection to the Internet, this was of no interest to the lady in India, in the end I gave up and put the phone down. Funny 10 minutes later my Internet came back to life!!

Had a long lay in this morning even by my weekend standards, something to do with going to sleep close to 2-00am. Had to go to the Hampshire branch of the company I work for to collect something I need for tomorrow. So we came back via the New Forest and spent a couple of hours wandering around the wood (and mud) taking photographs.

It was quite cool in the trees and quite muddy (not as bad as last week when I left my shoe in the mud and got my feet covered in mud!).

I enjoy going out to the New Forest keep trying to find corners of it I have not been to (there a lot of them at the moment). This was another one of those places, in fact I am even sure where we were (the we being the wife and I) except that it was not far off the main A337 and brought us out in Burley when we left. I timed my return home just right to collect our son from neighbours at the time I said we would be back, well that was until we decided to stop and get fuel ready for my trip to head office tomorrow, 25 minute after arriving on the forecourt we left, just very busy with two of the six pumps out of action, it also happens to be one of the cheapest petrol stations in the area (and it is not a supermarket petrol station).

Well I have to be up early for my 300 mile round trip tomorrow so I going to have an early night.