General - Diary Of An ADI

Cleaners Earn More!

22/03/2012

I just noticed a Google ad which said “don’t become a driving instructor – cleaners earn more”.

It was selling cleaning franchises.

Let’s hope that every moronic driving instructor out there who is cutting their prices because they were too greedy to start on a franchise themselves, and who don’t have any work as a result realises this. That they’re further down the ladder than cleaners.

Hopefully, this will even sink into the thick skulls of those who try to justify their stupidity, and who think being a cheapo is clever.

Better yet, bugger off from this industry and go and bring the cleaning franchise one to its knees with your unique business skills!

On the other hand, let’s be brutally honest about this. There is absolutely no reason why a driving instructor should consider himself any better than a cleaner. It’s the fact that so many do – considering themselves above the police, doctors, nurses, and other medical professional – which makes the whole price-cutting saga such a sorry mess. It’s often the ones who think they’re so good who are most deeply involved in the practice.

They simply can’t see that being busy isn’t the same as making a decent wage – and that that’s the best outcome they can hope for!

PediPaws Nail Trimmer

21/03/2012

DOAADI

Funny, General

Article updated as a result of a run of hits recently.

This cracked me up! They say ‘nail trimmer’ – it’s more of a ‘claw grinder’ for pets.

Pedipaws Nail Trimmer Just now (back in 2009, actually) on TV there was one of those adverts from JML Direct advertising PediPaws (it’s now been taken down and pedi-paws no longer features on their site) – a tool for trimming your pet’s claws. It seems to consist of a grinding wheel on a spinning shaft (it looks a lot like my Dremel multi-tool), and you push your pet’s toes through a small hole and the grinding wheel files their claws down. You can see the video on their site if you click the link above.

The best bit is where they are showing an owner trimming their cat’s claws. The cat is sitting there all contented, thinking “why is that camera pointed at me?” as the loving owner manipulates the PediPaws unit (obviously, you’ll have to take my word for it since the videos are no longer available to marvel at).

There is clearly no sound other than the voiceover – but it must be fairly obvious the device isn’t turned on during the demonstration with the cat behaving so nonchalantly.

Every cat I have ever owned was telepathic – you just had to think about spraying them with flea powder, or taking them to the vets, or giving them a tablet, and they would tear off their outer fur coat and become Super Cat . Not the good Super Cat either, but the evil one – after Lex Luthor had made him hold some dodgy Kryptonite !

The noise alone would throw a cat into full-on Freddie Krueger mode in an instant. It would have done with any of mine (mind you, one of them was always half way there at the best of times).

When giving my cats tablets I had to wear leather gardening gloves – after the first time I tried it without, and nearly needed a blood transfusion. It was the same when spraying them for fleas – the hiss of the can created a Nightmare On My Street!.

And I had to use all kinds of tricks to get them to the vet, otherwise I wouldn’t see them for two weeks after they went into hiding.

So I find it hard to imagine that putting a high-speed rotary tool anywhere near any animal – let alone a cat – is going to result in anything other than serious injury to the owner. If the cat is tolerant enough to let you shove its foot into this tool, it sure as hell won’t be when it feels contact being made!

Incidentally, JML Direct (and its partner stores) are selling this thing for £24.99. It costs £4.99 from this online store (Key Fitness ) – this one seems to have gone, too!

Anyway, I think this must STILL rate as Stupidest Product Idea Ever – way above the nose hair trimmer (what’s wrong with pulling them out? It’s way more effective). Which made me think: imagine a nose or ear hair trimmer for pets… But I bet the Poodle, Cairn and Yorkshire Terrier, and Jack Russell owners out there would all be queuing in Wilkos tomorrow if they made one!

EDIT 24/12/2009: Wow! At the rate this one is getting hits, we could have a new champion post (beating the Man Has Pine Tree Growing In Lung story). I can see a lot of Yorkshire Terriers and other Fidos with a PediPaw in their Christmas stocking tomorrow morning (and yes, people DO put up stockings for their pets).

EDIT 21/3/2012: This article is getting a few hits again, so I’ve updated it. Amazon does it for £3.30, even though JML and that other place have given it up. Read some of the reviews (all spellings and pet names for real):

…then tried it on my dog who hated the noise, went bizerk…

…my dog is a staff & is not taken aback by much but even he refused to even enter the same room with it at first few times of use…

…plus my dogs where so scarred of it and i would not try it near the cat…

…She doesn’t seem bothered with the sound or vibration of it but as soon as you insert a claw into it she freaks out. Have not been able to trim her claws at all…

…my dog wasn’t too keen so took time getting him used to it but I think that was more because of the noise it made…

…Dog hates it…

…Noodle wasnt too happy at first…

…Dog did not like it at first but I amsure he will get used to it the more it is used. I think it is the vibration not the noise that put him off…

…It took a couple of goes for my dogs to accept it…

…extremely fiddly with small claws especially when she was riggling around to avoid having it done…

I told you! Even the ones who say it works seem to have little regard for whether their animals like it or not.

100-Year Old Still Driving

09/03/2012

DOAADI

ADI, General, News

You can look at this story from two sides. One side – the cosy, mumsy side – makes you think “ahhh! That’s sweet”.

The other side – the one involving cold logic – makes you say “but she’s 100 years old!”

The lady in question, Susie Dixon, never had to take a driving test. Back when she was a girl there was no such thing as the driving test. But that’s not really relevant. Neither is the fact that she has never had an accident in all her time on the road.

The simple fact is, she’s a 100-year old person who, it can be guaranteed, will never be a 150-year old person. No matter how healthy she is for a 100-year old, she could just die or have her health deteriorate at any time, just like that. That starts to become a significant risk above 60 years, and it gets worse the older you get.

Miss Dixon has been given another 3 years before she needs another health check-up.

The way her family gush over how she can still remember things from when they were kids hints strongly at there being certain “little old lady” traits that aren’t being mentioned.

One son said: “She is fantastic for her age”.

Yes. She is certainly in a tiny, tiny minority. Most people her age cannot drive safely. No mention is made of how she drives – other than that she’s never had an accident.

Autoglass Job Losses – 2012 Update

07/03/2012

DOAADI

General, News

This is an old story. As of December 2014 I cannot find any further updates, although the story is currently receiving quite a few hits.

Last year, Autoglass announced that it was shedding 400 jobs. A reader also furnished me with some additional information.

It has been very quiet in the intervening 9 months, but the dramatic increase in the numbers of people finding the blog on terms involving “Autoglass” made me suspect something was afoot. And here is the ~~news story that proves it~~ (link now dead).

It’s worth a reminder that Autoglass announced last June that it was to shed 10% (400) of its workforce because people apparently were driving more carefully and not breaking as many windscreens.

This latest story says that Autoglass is beginning a “consultation period” with staff after announcing a reduction in contact centres and branches. These closures have apparently been briefed to staff as “operational changes” (that gives me flashbacks again to when I worked in the rat race). I like how it says this is to “improve efficiency” – last year, it was because no one was breaking windscreens!

In short, Autoglass has got to make people redundant because it is losing money – you can’t dress it up any more than that.

Another surprise is that whereas the original story mentioned 400 jobs, this latest one involves 52 call centre staff and the closure of 16 branches, involving a further 500 staff. That second figure was not provided by the official Autoglass spokeswoman, but “a source”.

So, not 400 but over 550 staff look set to lose their jobs.

To be honest, when you read this latest story, it bears almost no resemblance to the one from last summer. It’s hard to believe the redundancies are part of the same issue.

Good luck to all those involved.

Useless And Inaccurate Award

07/03/2012

DOAADI

ADI, General, News

I don’t want to take too much away from the driving school involved, but I find it hard to believe that a small firm in Bristol can be reliably considered as “third best driving school in the UK”.

Apparently, “tens of thousands” of people voted across the country (which has a population of 62 million), so even if those tens of thousands amounted to 99,999, they still only represent 0.16% of the population. I suspect we’re talking about the lower “tens” here, even so.

These opinion-based polls are notoriously unreliable and horrendously misleading – every year, the media ask people to vote for the Best Band Ever In All Recorded History, and you can guarantee that the worst pop and rap claptrap from the previous year comes up trumps. That’s purely down to the kind of people who vote.

Good luck to the school involved. It’s a nice certificate to have.

But I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on “third best in the UK”. That’s absolute nonsense, and would require every learner in the country from the last 5 years to vote for it to be even close to having any validity.

It’ll be interesting to see if any of the other local amateur newspapers jump on the first and second placed driving schools when they find out who they are.

Maintaining A Car On A Budget

07/03/2012

DOAADI

General

Tips for running your car on a budget

You could make running your car more cost-effective by:

Always staying within the speed limit. Along with making you a safe(r), law-abiding citizen (and reducing the likelihood of you getting a speeding ticket!), this good driving habit could seriously help you reduce the amount of fuel you use.
Getting rid of any unnecessary clutter in your car, whether that means ditching that never-used roof rack or taking heavy items out of the boot. This will stop your engine having to do more work – which means you shouldn’t have to refill your tank so often.
Maintaining your car well and getting it serviced on a regular basis. You could save a lot more than you think (in petrol and repairs) by keeping your car in good working condition – checking the tyre pressure, keeping the brake fluid topped up, keeping an eye on your engine, etc.
Not using the air conditioning too frequently, as it will add to your petrol consumption and lead to increased running costs. How often would opening the window have much the same effect as turning on the AC?
Making a note of the cheapest petrol stations in your local area – and stopping at them when you drive past, rather than going out just to fill up.

If you’re regularly struggling to afford all your monthly costs, and you’re repaying unsecured debts, you could have an underlying debt problem that needs to be sorted out – in which case taking steps like these might well not be enough to sort your finances out.

Getting professional debt advice could point you in the direction of the debt help you need – you may be recommended a debt management plan or another debt solution that could help you solve your debt problem.

Unpleasant Flashbacks!

02/03/2012

DOAADI

Funny, General

Brrrrrr! That was nasty! Someone found the blog on the search term “daily team meeting diary”, and I broke out into a cold sweat! Meetings, bloody meetings! And daily ones!

Daily team meetings – one of the reasons why we’re in a recession. People wasting their time on pointless get-togethers in the mistaken belief that it in any way improves productivity.

A daily meeting is bad enough. Add the word “team” and it becomes a hundred times worse. And when some comedian wants to spend money on a physical diary to plan the bloody things, you realise that the company in question hasn’t got a hope in hell of surviving long.

For one thing, why would you want a diary for something that happens every day? OK, the people who go for these things are probably too stupid even to remember a daily appointment, but you can see the problem.

But going one step further, can you imagine the wasted time involved each day if they’re going so far as to have a written agenda for each one, and someone apparently has to write down what they need to cover at the following day’s meeting, as well as do the minutes for the previous one?

Assuming they haven’t got a secretary recruited for the specific purpose of managing daily meetings (which would be a ridiculous waste of manpower), the ones they do have will be complaining like mad about having to administer the minutes, the agendas, and all the inevitable changes you get even for an ad hoc meeting, let alone a frequent one, with the corrections, discussions, and arguments they create. And that will be on top of the secretary’s normal workload.

The usual extra activity that results from any meeting is bad enough – they typically involve new ideas and changes of direction – but having this happen on a daily basis automatically means whatever was discussed and agreed the day before is frequently going to have been totally pointless. And if there is no change of direction, why have the meeting?

How can anyone remain in business by being so stupid?

Mind you, having slept on on it, I thought of a few other things. You see, people ARE that stupid – too stupid to realise that a simple page-a-day diary is all they would need if they really MUST have a special diary for daily team meetings. Then it occurred to me that page-a-day diaries are only available in A4 and A5 sizes, and that there must be a huge potential market out there for A3 and larger sizes.

What a fantastic entrepreneurial business idea: A0-sized Daily Team Meeting Diaries.

There are people out there who would wet themselves to get one!

Some People

24/02/2012

DOAADI

ADI, General, Training

Someone found the blog on the following search term:

bsm late or acromas or goodsell or saga or aa or complaint or driving or lesson or instructor or cancelled or theory or franchise or passed or failed or pupil or car –brick –waka –mining –benilde –exhaust –bmw –blind

You have to try not to laugh sometimes. They actually typed all that into a search engine – they seem to have a big axe to grind, but on a very badly worn grinding wheel! A search term like that is almost like not using any search criteria at all – it’ll throw up a zillion results, 99.9% of which are absolutely irrelevant (as the attempts to remove certain hits would confirm).

Let’s assume that the earlier chapters of the term are what the person was interested in – something to do with a driving instructor from the AA or BSM turning up late.

First things first. Forget any idea you might have about suing them for millions. It isn’t going to happen.

Next, you need to understand how driving instructors work. Every single instructor out there (well, except for a handful who work for specialised companies who deal with expensive lessons to people who can afford them) is self-employed. That means that if you get a bad one, there’s almost just as much chance of him being with Red, the AA, BSM, or any other large school as there is of him being with a smaller school or operating on his own.

I say “almost”, because there is a slight likelihood that the one from a big school will – on average – be more reliable than one of the lesser ones. The reason is the brand name, and the degree to which the school in question wants to protect it. Still not convinced?

OK. Every instructor has to make money, and to do that they need pupils to teach. Those with a franchise are almost always there because they can’t generate the work themselves, and they rely on the school to get them that work. Assuming that this arrangement works, the instructor will not want to get on the wrong side of his franchiser – who might kick him out if he upsets customers. So there is a general tendency for any behaviour likely to cause upset not to happen.

On the other hand, instructors who charge stupid prices and who force pupils to stay with them by making stupid “10 lessons for £99” offers, which only apply if you stay for your entire course, can afford to be a little less customer friendly. And since they will be earning less to start with with these daft offers and low regular prices, they may well upset pupils without being aware of it by not teaching them quickly enough for the pupil’s liking. So there is a general tendency for unhappy pupils to be greater in this group.

Note I said “general tendency”.

Now, let’s cut through the crap and try to help people who are anally retentive enough to type huge search terms like the one above, with a view to being able to retire on the outcome of what they might have in mind… here are some simple things you could try

If you are unhappy with your instructor, just change them
If it’s with a large school, ask them for a different instructor
If you’re pissed off with the school, go for a different one
Complain directly to the school if you have a grievance
Concentrate on learning to drive, not complaining
Don’t spend so much time watching daytime TV and formulating opinions about companies based on only two or three cases
If you’re a parent, try butting out unless you understand the mechanics involved, have a genuine problem, and can separate fact from fiction when your little darling drops a comment
Remember the saying “six of one, half a dozen of the other” – the pupil isn’t always unblemished when it comes to lesson mix-ups

It’s really that simple. Just change instructors and stop moaning!

Some years ago, I had a pupil who was extremely unreliable. She simply couldn’t afford her lessons, and she was honest about it. In return, I was absolutely tolerant to her numerous last minute cancellations. This is not a word of a lie, but she cancelled in excess of 10 lessons less than 24 hours before she was supposed to have them, and other lesson reorganisations ran into similar figures. I even gave her a free 2 hour lesson on one occasion when she accompanied me on my Check Test. I estimate that she cost me more than £500 overall. You could say that I was crazy to carry on with her, but I did.

Then, one day, she sent me yet another text cancelling her lesson at the last minute (on the day it was supposed to be, as I remember). I was used to this and merely saw the first line of the message flashed up on my phone. I made the mistake of not reading the rest, which turned out to be an essay and a half. Right at the bottom it said “can you do a lesson at 11 on Thursday?”

Now, bearing in mind that I didn’t reply, I didn’t turn up at 11 on Thursday. But she thought I was going to.

When I realised what had happened, I apologised profusely and explained, but she didn’t reply. I then found out from another pupil that she was going around saying I was “unreliable”. I’d never turned up late or missed a lesson that we’d arranged, and yet she’d missed dozens. If I worked for a large school, and she was interviewed on daytime TV, you can imagine how it would look, But it was just lies.

Mind you, as I’ve said before, driving instructors are often not the brightest sparks in the fire, and some may well give grounds for a genuine complaint. But these are the exception rather than the rule.

So, one more time: if you aren’t happy with your instructor, just change them and get on with your life.

And if you really feel the need to create a stink about whatever it is that’s bugging you… you might just need to get a life!

Mazuma Mobile II

13/02/2012

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, General

Another absolutely perfect transaction using Mazuma Mobile! I first used them when I upgraded my phone to the HTC Desire back in 2010.

I’ve just upgraded to the HTC Sensation XE, and upon checking I saw my old Desire was worth £73… here’s the timeline of events:

I “sold” it online Thursday 9th
I got the packaging on Friday 10th
I sent it off Friday early afternoon
Payment has gone into my bank this lunchtime (Monday 13th)!

Mazuma’s service is incredible – if you have an old mobile phone to sell following an upgrade they’ve got to be the No.1 Choice. The prices they offer are great – but the speed of the transaction is just unbeatable.

Winter Tyres – 2012 Episode

05/02/2012

DOAADI

ADI, Bad Drivers, General

The debate about winter tyres is hotting up again, as it does every year.

The amusing thing is that everyone pontificating about them seems to forget the extremely mild weather we’ve had all winter, and the fact that winter tyres really only have benefits that outweigh any drawbacks below 7°C. So between October (the date all the experts reckon they should go on) last year and now, there have been approximately 7 days during which they may technically have been an advantage, and only ONE day so far where they would definitely have been so.

Even today the temperature has been up at around 5°C, in spite of all that snow last night.

The other thing I’m hearing now is that apparently, anyone who doesn’t have winter tyres fitted is a danger on the roads! This is just another attempt to bolster an argument which doesn’t really have a right and a wrong side in this country. But driving instructors are very monochromatic when it comes to their beliefs.

Ask an ADI a question, and he can only answer based on his own experiences – but he will consider those experiences to be fact, and will be unable to grasp the fact that others have totally different experiences, all of which add together to make an overall picture.

So, I guess that all those 4x4s, top marque cars, and “experts” that insist on overtaking at a greater speed, cutting in, and giving their winter tyres a good old work out in poor driving conditions are something we should all be grateful for. That’s what’s being implied.

The fact of the matter is that without years of driving experience on snow and using winter tyres – something none of these “experts” has – there is one thing they are all completely oblivious, yet completely beholden, to. What?

A false sense of security.

And that puts everyone on the roads – whether they’ve got winter tyres or not – at risk.

You don’t have to have winter tyres. In some cases, in some areas, at some times, some people might benefit from them. But that doesn’t mean everyone will.

However, like I said. The fact that others have alternative experiences? A very difficult concept for many of these people.

Category - General

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