I hope it’s not a sign of things to come, but I had a dusting of snow on the car this morning as I went to my first lesson. Still, at least the wind’s dropped. It was bitterly cold last night with that howling gale and temperatures close to zero.
Category - General
Normally, I avoid shopping in places like Morrisons and Asda during the day because of the queues. A drawback to this is the stock on the shelves – it’s common to find fresh stuff and bread sold out in Morrisons and even in Asda (which claims to be open 24 hours). By 9pm there will be plenty of empty shelves.
Unfortunately, both stores gradually close down their checkouts as the day progresses, so there are still queues to contend with, and when you’ve got a loaf of bread and a handful of other items it’s no fun being behind even one person with a full trolley (or items of clothing), let alone two or three of them at the only operating checkout.
The self-checkout is a relatively new feature of many large stores, and I try to use those whenever I can. But like most things in life, other people ruin the fun of them. I think I’m going to start a campaign for there to be a minimum IQ and minimum/maximum age range for those using them.
I was in Morrisons this afternoon. There were huge queues at all of the main checkouts, and seven people at the two self-checkouts (only one of which was in operation). I stood in the self-checkout queue and quickly realised nothing was happening. This is because Morrisons in Clifton has a special procedure for the self-checkouts, and a very special class of customer (most only have one helix in their DNA) using them. It works like this.
There is a member of staff whose duty it is to stand by the checkouts, because it is rare for any customer to be able to process their entire basket without setting off the amber or red warning light at least once. Therefore, the member of staff will be nowhere to be seen when there is a queue of people waiting, and will be doing something in those mysterious wooden drawers where the expensive stuff (and computer games) are locked up to prevent theft.
Certainly in Clifton, the average user of the self-checkout will have one or more bottles of spirits, and since these items are both security tagged and require authorisation the presence of the staff member is essential. Even though the member of staff can see clearly that every customer in the queue has spirits in their hands, this will not stop them from sauntering away and ignoring the immediate red light for several minutes. And they won’t – under any circumstances – hurry, or use commonsense in anticipating the red light being triggered. Furthermore, only the member of staff who is assigned to the machine can deal with any problems (as I discovered a few weeks ago). Oh, and another feature of the self-checkout is that anyone under the age of 30 waiting in line will continue to do their shopping while standing there – it’s funny how there is always something they desperately need within a 5 metre radius.
Morrisons’ self-checkout hardware and software appear to be early beta. The machines spend more time crashed than up and running. On top of that, about 20% of all stock requires authorisation. Having used Asda’s and Tesco’s machines I’m fully aware of the huge differences in reliability. For a start off, if you move your bag or any of the items in it (and the Morrisons machines have stupidly uneven collection areas), the equipment triggers an amber or red light which cannot be cleared except by a member of staff. Asda and Tesco machines are able to reset themselves (or let you continue scanning) as long as the item isn’t actually removed. Asda and Tesco also have a much stricter policy regarding staff attendance.
Back to my experience this afternoon. The female customer at the only working machine had obviously done something to it. There was no member of staff to be seen for at least two minutes, and when she finally arrived she had to attend to this customer for a further minute or so. After farting about for several more minutes, paying by credit card (of course) and farting about some more, this idiot customer left and was followed by two neanderthals. They triggered the red light immediately (or it came on in protest at who was in front of it, I don’t know for sure) and stood looking with open mouths across the hall for the idiot who should have been in attendance already. She arrived after a couple of minutes, sorted the problem, and the two neanderthals proceeded to pay (by credit card). They were followed by an old couple. By now, the red light and alarm bells in my head were going off, because there was no way in hell these two were going to be able to manage unaided, and I noticed they had unbagged fruit and veg in their basket, which would mean interacting with several screens on the machine, and we all know that old people and computers don’t mix. So I switched to a normal checkout.
I must stress again that this is Clifton. So once the woman with the enormous trolley’s stuff had been scanned by the checkout girl, and after the customer had packed all her carrier bags, only then did she fumble for her purse in order to pay… you guessed it: by credit card. Oh, and she also wanted cashback (another thing that should be banned – use the bloody ATM outside if you want money).
All this while I was watching the old couple. They didn’t manage to scan/weigh a single item as it was obvious they hadn’t got a clue how to use the machine. They had to wait for the idiot member of staff to come back yet again – and by the time I walked out the staff member was actually scanning items for them.
And they call it the “express checkout”.
This story has been doing the rounds today. It tells how a child, aged 2, was accidentally served with whisky instead of fruit juice in a restaurant.
If you read the story, you are forced to conclude that his mother was in “a panic and rage”, was “crying”, and the toddler was in an alcohol-induced coma and had to be rushed to hospital because his life was at risk, and is apparently now “recovering at home”. You are left with the impression that he’d been served neat whisky in a shot glass, and that the restaurant staff couldn’t care less!
It’s now important to read between the lines, referring to the photo of him drinking the whisky.
The drink is in a tumbler, filled to the brim. Even if it was a double – as his mother claimed, without proof – it was watered down to about the same volume as a can of drink (say, around 330ml). He had apparently taken “ten sips” of this diluted mix, which couldn’t have amounted to more than a quarter of the whole drink – probably much less. He’d get a bigger hit from a dose of Calpol!
I’m sorry, but the one thing that this story proves is that children shouldn’t be allowed in bloody restaurants in the first place. Then innocent mistakes a like this wouldn’t have to be turned into dramas by attention-seeking parents.
It reminds me of an incident when I was at school. The lab technician – who, looking back, must have been 17 or thereabouts – was boasting to my biology class how he’d made a teacher drunk by dropping a thimbleful of pure ethanol into her coffee. He was under the mistaken impression that pure alcohol is orders of magnitude more concentrated than when it is in, say, a pint of beer.
In actual fact, a pint of typical-strength beer contains around 20ml of alcohol – probably at least FOUR thimblefuls. So the juvenile lab technician was talking crap.
I would doubt that an infant taking a few sips of an alcoholic drink would be intoxicated to the degree that is suggested in the various versions of the story.
(Another reason I know this is that when I was four, I got drunk after stealing four bottles of milk stout from my grandma. I got what I later – many years later – discovered to be “a hangover”. From the age of four up until I was 17 I didn’t touch a single drop of alcohol as a direct result of this, and even when I started I had to force myself because I didn’t like it! It took about six years before I could drink neat beer instead of shandy or a lager-top, and I still detest spirits in all forms).
You’ve got to see this. Received today via the contact form:
To: Webmaster
From:
Your A Massive Dick
yourintrouble@gmail.com
Message:
dude. Keep this website sup and im gonna take your server down.everything you post about is insanely stupid. You have no idea about fore sight and progress. you only seem to be bothered about how quickly you can get to you sad life meetings. the roadworks you moan about are necessary – and the fact you name and shame drivers like your some sort of god of the road is ridiculous. you are what’s wrong with Nottingham. Not road works, or water works. or anything that real works have to content with to make out city a better place.
I will take your website down if it’s up in a month. If you pay for hosting on a bandwidth basis you should seriously start to worry.
As I am an exert I will explain how this works. I will continually send requests to your server, not only blocking other peoples access but costing you alot of money sending me the webpage over and over again. I believe you are such an idiot you will not have any idea how to stop this.
People don’t like dicks. So I’m gonna take one out of action.
Sent from (ip address): 87.224.118.130 (87-224-118-130.spitfireuk.net)
Location: East Grinstead, GB
Date/Time: 12 October, 2012 12:42 pm
Coming from (referer): https://www.diaryofanadi.co.uk/?page_id=1444
Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4
I’ve left all the spelling and grammar (or lack of, shall we say) exactly as it appeared. I stepped in something which can’t use apostrophes properly, and I appear to be having trouble scraping it off my shoe!
Suffice to say, I’ve forwarded the email to all the necessary authorities on the off chance that this specimen of dog turd’s “exertism” (his spelling, of course, not mine) is anyway even close to what he incoherently claims.
Oh, and my server host advises me that my bandwidth is unlimited so just to ignore it. They said they will pursue vigorously any illegal activity. I wonder if our “exert” spammer and scammer will understand this? Probably not.
Advice to anyone out there who receives anything like this in their inbox: take them head-on, and don’t worry. Their ability to spell and utilise even basic grammar is a reflection of the size of their brains. Filthy little scammers – with the distinct likelihood in this case that the prick involved is also a driving instructor who doesn’t like what I write (that’s quite shocking, really, isn’t it?).
So, if you’re in East Grinstead (or anywhere near) and you communicate with a driving instructor about taking lessons, keep an eye out for that ip address and hosting service. If you see a match, run a mile, because you’re dealing with a criminal.
Some people ask the stupidest questions! (old, dead link)
That article refers to electric cars in 1900 constituting 34% of all cars on the roads (in Boston, Chicago, and New York), and then asks why it is less than 1% in the present day.
The reasons are simple:
- ridiculously low range
- lack of charging points
- lengthy charging times
- huge expense
When an electric car can do 500 miles on a full charge, be “refuelled” in as many places as there are gas stations at the present time, cost the same as a normal car, and take a minimum 75% charge in less than 5 minutes, then they will become acceptable.
In the meantime, having a maximum range of about 80 miles, with charging points being rarer than hens teeth, and a 75% charge (i.e. maximum 60 miles range) taking half an hour (12 hours if you want to “fill it up”), and costing 2-3 times the price of a normal vehicle, electric cars will remain the preferred choice of the over-earning plonker with more money than sense who doesn’t really need a car at all.
When I was out on lessons today I noticed that “they” – whoever that is – have dug a hole in the middle of Pennyfoot Street, and they weren’t working on it! Both sides were reduced to a single lane.
Huntingdon Street heading south was also down to one lane – but I think this may have been just a Sunday thing (though they chose to do it on the busiest Sunday of the year, with the Goose Fair and all that).
Anyone who has been caught in the gridlock I mentioned recently had better prepare for absolute chaos tomorrow (Monday) if this isn’t sorted out tonight! If you are trying to avoid the single lane on Mansfield Road (which tails back through the city as far back as West Bridgford), Pennyfoot Street is one possible escape route. But not if its down to a single lane.
Nottingham City Council have got to be doing this deliberately – and if it’s not deliberate then it is just utter incompetence.
I’ve written before about how I hate waiting in any restaurant or fast food joint at the best of times. So, another establishment has been added to my mental list of places I will never go in again.
A few weeks ago I had a late lesson and I was hungry, so I decided to nip into a chip shop and get some chips. The place I chose was The Tandoori Star in Sneinton because of its “fish and chips” sign outside.
As I walked in I realised it wasn’t a traditional chippie and fully expected to get those frozen fries that a lot of these newer cheap-and-cheerful curry and pizza places often do. I also wasn’t surprised by the apparent indifference with which the one person serving (out of about six in the shop) dealt with me and charged me £1 in advance – only to tell me the chips would be “about 4-5 minutes”.
If I’d have known that before, I would have changed my mind there and then. I was in a hurry… but 4-5 minutes would still give me more than 15 minutes to drive a quarter of a mile to my next pupil, so I said “OK”.
It took “4-5 minutes” for the guy serving to even go and fetch a bag of chips from the freezer, and at least another two for him to put four handfuls into the fryer. Then it took a good six minutes to cook them, a further four for him to scoop them out and put them in the warming compartment. It was like watching paint dry.
During all this time he was assembling kebabs for the small handful of people who came in. But the last straw came when the little kid who’d been shouting and talking with all the staff turned out to be a customer and the serving guy said to him “do you want vinegar on these?”
I’d been standing there for nearly 20 minutes at this point. I just turned round and walked out.
So, my advice to anyone in the area is do not use the Tandoori Star in Sneinton. Life’s too short to even consider putting up with such crap service..
Update: February 2020 – take a look here (Clifton Bridge closed).
Update: If you want to know what the problem was on 21 November 2012, take a look here.
The simple answer is: because the Nottingham City Council is the biggest bunch of pillocks on the planet. Let’s explain that in a little more detail.
Gas Main Replacement
Standard Health & Safety procedure dictates that no work is allowed within 3 hours of sunrise or sunset, or at weekends. Outside of these times, workers are expected to stand around playing with their mobile phones or reading newspapers in their vans. Regulations also stipulate that any activity within 0.5km of a road requires half of it blocking off and 3 or 4-way traffic lights installing. These lights should be programmed to freeze at least once during out-of-hours periods. The Work Fairy will come along from time to time and make sure just enough gets done to make some progress.
Electric Cable Replacement
Morgan Sindall is apparently contracted to do something with the underground electricity cables, and again this work has been authorised to commence all at once in various locations around Nottingham, and at the exact same time as all the other works. The sign says these works are scheduled to last for two whole weeks.
Severn Trent Water
A typical Severn Trent project involves someone (like me) seeing a leak and reporting it. The Report-a-Leak hotline will behave as if it doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and will not have a clue what location you are trying to identify unless you can give them a house number, postcode, and the inside leg measurement of the bloke who lives there (which isn’t easy when you merely drove past it and saw water running along the road). The leak will then persist for up to several months until either a) enough people have reported it, or b) a chasm opens up and it becomes serious enough for people to take more notice of it. Then, within an hour, the road will be cordoned off and 3 or 4-way lights installed for up to 7 days while the now huge problem is fixed.
Water pipes seem to have a tendency to be situated right in the middle of the road – and even if they’re not, you can bet that the actual leak will be. This ensures that any work involves major disruption.
(Seriously, I’ve reported two leaks, but I will never do it again.)
NET and The Tram Extension
The tram system is obviously green and eco-friendly, and while the NET workers are tearing up greenbelt land and digging up roads in their eco-friendly way, it is essential that they do so for as long as possible (12 months is cited on most signs around the city) and cause tens of thousands of motorists to sit stationary with their engines running every weekday between about 3.00 in the afternoon and 8.00 in the evening.
Assorted Other Problems
While the above works are taking place, Nottingham City Council (and, surprisingly, the police) will have decided that the city “can cope” and will, for example, allow things like the Nottingham Marathon with its associated road closures to go ahead on the same day (and at a similar time) to Nottingham Forest’s home match against Derby County at the City Ground. And also commencing the same day will be a week’s worth of road closures associated with the massive Goose Fair. Oh, and on one day this week there was apparently a big trial on at the Crown Court which required half the Nottingham police force armed with machine guns to be in attendance (according to a pupil of mine).
I have seen the following roadworks in progress just today(5th October):
- Clifton – top end of Farnborough Road, 3-way lights due to tram works
- Porchester Road – traffic lights for gas main works
- Carlton – road closures, one-way systems, and 4-way traffic lights for gas main works
- Sherwood – on Mansfield Road out of the city, 3-way lights for electricity main works and down to a single lane.
- Arnold Lane – near the church, 3-way traffic lights for gas main works
- Keyworth – Nottingham Road near the Indian restaurant, Severn Trent encampment and traffic lights.
- University Boulevard – single lane outbound and intermittently single lane inbound due to tram works.
- Beeston – traffic lights on Middle Street due to tram works.
- Ruddington Lane – now closed for 6 months due to tram works.
- Middle Hill – in City Centre, now closed due to tram works.
I know that there are plenty more around, but these alone enable us to answer the question about why Nottingham is gridlocked.
The recent work in Sherwood is causing traffic to back up from early afternoon all the way back into the city centre via Huntingdon Street, and down London Road towards West Bridgford. People seeking alternative routes are therefore blocking other roads as they’re hindered by the roadworks in other places. All of this is on top of the usual congestion along routes out of the city.
Those Sherwood works are the straw that broke the camel’s back. There is literally no viable alternative route past this gridlock… and it’s all thanks to those halfwits in the City Council.
I saw a comment recently where a right-on Thatcherite was questioning another person’s comment about how much of the current financial troubles were the fault of the Libcon coalition.
I have to laugh.
The current Mickey Mouse government has spent the last 2 years blaming the last Labour government for everything – even though the recession is a global phenomenon! What’s more frightening is that there are jackasses out there who believe it!
I suppose wasting £40 million of tax-payers’ money on the most corrupt franchise assessment of all time – the West Coast mainline deal – is also down to Labour. And I wonder who will have to pay for that through further “austerity measures”?
Sad to see this on a newsflash this afternoon. Singing legend, Andy Williams, has died at the age of 84 after a battle with cancer.
I didn’t realise that he provided backing vocals for Bing Crosby’s Swingin’ on a Star – which dates from as far back as 1944! Blimey, that’s not long after my dad was born!
It’s funny that I know a lot of these old songs and artistes, which date from way before my birth. I remember listening to them on the radio when I was young. But when I talk to pupils on lessons, many these days don’t seem to know anything from before they were born.
It’s all a bit sad, really.