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ColinW

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  1. Sainsburys sell some decent ones. They are only £3 for two packets of two, at that price it's not worth making them! I like the tuna with lime and coriander ones.
  2. The worst thing about Halfords are the prices. My local motor factors is half the price. A battery I bought for my Volvo cost less than the one my mum bought from Halfords for her metro. It's twice the size and a proper named brand. Same thing with bulbs, oil, wiper blades etc.
  3. When the extension leads at work were PAT tested almost every one of them failed. The problem was that the resistance of the earth conductor to ground was too high. The only extension leads more than three metres long that passed the test were the ones we'd made ourselves out of really heavy cable.
  4. I think one or two people missed the point I will try to be less subtle in future I was walking the dog one day when I heard a car screaming down the road behind me. I didn't turn round because that is normal on my road. Luckily for them they managed to screech it down to 30mph just in time for the speed camera as I was walking past it. I looked up then to see that it was a Police car. No blue lights, no siren. Above the law indeed.
  5. It's about time the police stamped out so called "joy riding". There will be no joy for the poor person (or organization) who owns this Volkswagen Golf R. That's a £32,000 car wrecked just so some idiot could feel a tingle in his undersized genitals
  6. That's why I said it would be a different matter for someone with a family to support. It doesn't cost £600 a month for a single room round here, that would get you a nice three or four bed semi! When I was her age I shared a house with three other like minded yobs. Best time of my life! Most students have no idea about the real world. I work at a university and until recently we had a Forensic Science degree course. This was popular (more students doing that than doing electrical engineering!) because it looks great on CSI and NCIS. The trouble is that there are probably only half a dozen real forensic scientists in the whole country! I bet nobody who graduated from that course ever got the job they wanted. That's not the university's fault. They are a business these days and sell whatever courses put bums on seats. The government couldn't care less. It keeps kids off the dole and it costs them very little now there are no grants to pay.
  7. I'm sorry, but I haven't really got any sympathy for the girl in the article. She's 22 and presumably single. If she took a minimum wage job for 40 hours a week she'd be on £243 a week. That is more than enough to keep her going until she finds a job she considers suitable. Why should the taxpayer subsidize her? It would be different if she had a family to support and had been made redundant, but it seems like she's never done a day's work in her life. (No, being a student isn't work. I know, I used to be one!) There ARE minimum wage jobs around. I live in Merseyside, which is supposed to be the worst place in the country to find work, and yet my 23 year old daughter has never had a single day out of work since she left school at 16. She seems to be able to pack a job in and find another with an ease I could never dream of under Thatcher. She has plenty of choice words to describe the student temps who she sometimes has to manage!
  8. I said back in August that it was blatantly obvious that they seemed to be fast tracking the illegal immigrant student queue when I went through Manchester Airport. It seems I was absolutely right. There are two obvious reasons for this. 1. It looks really bad to have a mile long queue of illegals (which is of course why you aren't allowed to take pictures at "immigration control"!) 2. Delaying the genuine taxpaying UK citizens is designed to make us think we are more secure. It is all about "appearing" to be taking steps to improve security. It has nothing to do with genuinely improving it. This is the reason they started waving them through http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT5KLDGbWGo
  9. Corgi guys have set foot in my house once in twenty years. They came in to fit a new meter. They won't be coming in again after I found that they'd left the meter hanging on the gas pipes and the mounting bracket lying in the bottom of the cupboard. If they can't be bothered to do something that simple properly then they certainly won't be touching my lovely antique boiler! Back on thread. People will soon have to have been employed for two years before they can claim unfair dismissal. I think that should be enough for even the most Dickensian employer to decide whether someone is worth the risk of allowing to cross the protected threshold. At the end of the day this is about UNFAIR dismissal. You can still sack people for being useless or bone idle and if you've allowed them to be like that for two years, what is another month or so to go through the correct procedures? Not many people would defend the "right" of an employer to sack a woman for getting pregnant or sack a man for having a nervous breakdown. Those are the kind of people who stand to lose out if Cameron gets his way.
  10. Barry, either he was a very slow decorator or you are a very unobservant manager, because to make an unfair dismissal claim an employee needs to have 12 month's continuous service.
  11. Is David Cameron suffering from some sort of Irony Impairment Disorder? I have to ask having read about his idea that it should be made easier to sack workers who are not performing well by removing any right to claim unfair dismissal. If anyone is underperforming, it is the chinless old Etonian and his posh mates. It takes a particular kind of incompetence to have huge and still rising unemployment, massive inflation and no interest on our savings all at the same time. Monday's three line whip said a lot about his confidence in his own performance. He daren't even give his own party a free vote, let alone the whole country!
  12. If I filled the tank on my Volvo I bet I wouldn't get much change from £100 NOW! The future is not electric vehicles. Batteries are just not an adequately dense store of energy and never will be. The future is liquid hydrogen, produced by electricity from nuclear power stations. Knowing the tories those will be French nuclear power stations, because to build our own would require a huge amount of public spending. I don't think even Cameron would be stupid enough to hand that job to private enterprise! It is possible to generate electricity from the car's stored hydrogen using a fuel cell and then drive electric motors, but since it drives internal combustion engines perfectly well and that's what we all like, then that is the way things will go, even though it probably isn't as efficient (electric motors don't run when you are stuck in a traffic jam).
  13. More likely they realize that the European Parliament is a rich vein of cash to get their snouts into once we kick them out. Even a complete failure like Neil Kinnock seems to be able to get rich there.
  14. Take bank accounts for an example. In the good old days you put your money in the bank. They made their money by lending your money to other people and charging them interest. That was as complicated as it got. They provided you with a service of having somewhere safe to stash your wages, having a cheque book, having a branch where you could pay in or withdraw money and a manager who would possibly know you personally and deal with any problems. All that is gone now. Barclays for example have five different current account "products" (and that doesn't include student accounts etc). These products are basically the basic bank account service with all sorts of silly extras "bolted on", all with one thing in common, a monthly charge. I'm sure the main idea behind this (after all, who the hell wants mobile phone insurance and RAC cover tacked onto a bank account FFS) is to soften us all up to the idea that we should be paying for the privilege of putting our money in their bank. There is never any mention of the fact that we are basically giving them an interest free loan to finance their business. Or that all the real services they used to provide have now disappeared. I don't need this carefully researched, designed and no doubt focus grouped bit of nonsense it doesn't improve my banking service in any way, but like every other silly little graphic that appears on every piece of paper this bank (and every other one) produce and every web page they use it will have cost money, probably a quite ridiculous amount too going by other well publicized examples, money that they take off me. I think the main reason for this switch from providing services to selling products is that people who provide a service are servants. Big business men don't like that idea, it somehow puts the customer in command. Am I the only one who gets angry when an ATM machine tells me "We are unable to deal with your request..." It's not the fact that the thing has no money in that annoys me so much, it's the fact that they regard my ORDER as a request! The bank thinks we should be coming cap in hand to get our own money out of a damned machine!
  15. I was watching a useless wally from Ofgem, now that is an organization that is a complete waste of time, on breakfast TV this morning describing electricity and gas suppliers providing us with "products". It occurred to me that "product" now seems to be euphemism for "rip off". At least it is when it is used by companies that provide services. Just so they know: Electricity supply is not a product, it is a service. Gas supply is not a product, it is a service. Water and drainage supplies are not products, they are services. My bank account is not a product, it is a service, as is a mortgage. A telephone network is not a product, it is a service. Refuse collection is not a product, it is a service. When a bank sells "business advice" before agreeing a loan is neither a product nor a service. Wrapping a service in a load of bullcrap marketing material designed to maximise company profits does NOT make it into any more of a product, however much money is diverted from actually providing the service.
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