Just Flight & Just Trains blogs

Well it’s been a while since I did a ‘non product’ blog and passed more of my thoughts about how wonderful life is/is not to all my readers… so here they are!

First of all the years most critical news, no not the credit crunch, banks going bust, recession, job losses, currency dives and so on, no it’s my domestic appliance situation. Well it’s been fairly quiet over the last few months but my three year old fridge freezer did die (name and shame the make; ‘Beko’) loosing many, many £ pounds of frozen food, but still no need to worry eh? All insured so a new fridge freezer will be sorted and we can claim off the house insurance for the ruined food. Well don’t be stupid Scotty. Turns out the fridge freezer is beyond economical repair as it had a leak in an area that cannot be accessed, the stupid ‘repairer’s’ (not sure that is the right title as they did not) took nearly 10 days to tell me this as they turned up to look at it 5 days after we called then and then without the right equipment to test is properly “I did not bring that equipment as we only have one in the company and somebody else was using it today and I doubted that I would need it” (utter anchors!), so they had to come back when they had the right equipment only to confirm it was broken I rung up the appliance insurer and told them it was a write off and they offered my either my premiums paid so far this year £26.00 (wow!) or a voucher for £65.00 to get off the cost of a new one at Comet stores (more wow!). Somewhere my recollections of receiving up to 85% the cost of a new one seems to have gone missing.. So both officially useless offers really as to buy an equivalent new one is about £350.00. So, anyway ‘Fanny’ our old fridge freezer (‘Fanny the fridge’) (about 8 years old) that we had put in the garden when the new one arrived was given a wash and clean and is now in use whilst the 3 year old Beko has gone for recycling - so who are the winners here then? Well Beko as they had my money for a fridge only lasted for 3 years and British Gas who had my money for insurance that was pretty useless when it was time to claim (anything new there then?). Not sure what the moral of that story is as if it had been repairable then the insurance would have paid for it to be repaired, but as it was a write off the insurance proved to be fairly useless. Any other DA news? Well had a false alarm last week when the wife said the tumble drier had stopped working, but after I asked her to check it was turned on at the wall that was fixed Otherwise all is well apart from the boiler which is rumbling and getting more expensively nosier by the day - that will be a few grand when that needs changing..

So what else has been going on? Well buying from a local store can sometimes be a lot cheaper than the supermarket. I like sprouts. Yes! I know piles of people don’t but I do, but I only want about 6-8 with my Sunday dinner so I can either waste my money in Tesco’s for the sum of about £1.00 and get about 20 sprouts or buy the actual number I need from the local green grocer for around £0.14 Pence… no brainer that one..

I have never known in my 35 (cough…) short years on this planet so much bad news about everything… nearly everything I see, hear or read is gloom and it’s going to get worse before it gets better any time soon apparently. I think a lot of this is self-fulfilling in that one bit of bad news causes another bit of bad news until we all disappear up our own bad news pipes. I wonder how this would have been a few years ago before 24/7 news/communications and the Internet? I know the gloom is worrying and depressing me and I am sure a few other people around the world, but anyway the ‘good news’ is that at least we have Christmas coming up, only 60 shopping days to go! and already for the last two weeks and probably more, the shops have their Christmas wares on sale along with the *ollocks type of rubbish about making this “the best Christmas ever” who the hell are they trying to fool? Did we all come down in the last rain shower? Get real retailers! Times are hard and (apparently) are going to get harder still before they get better, so how about some genuine effort to help us all though this near unprecedented crisis and out the other side instead of this public facing head in the sand idiot rubbish that you think we will believe?

So now I have cheered you all up don’t forget to get your Easter eggs now as it’s only around 5 months to Easter but the stores will no doubt have the eggs on sale on Boxing day, or if I was at all a bit cynical I would say on Christmas day. Retail you are as transparent as a glass window, perhaps if you treated your customers with a bit more respect and intelligence then the world could be a better place.

PS I am looking forward to receiving my share certificates from all the banks I now part own as a shareholder since part of my ever growing tax burden (and while my soap box is under my feet, the tax office has a fair share of incompetents, well mine has), has been used to bail out all these Bankers and what real ‘Bankers’ they really have turned out to be - talk about a necessary evil or what? Irresponsible lending and greed is leading to the worst downturn, or as a US government spokesman said “a downward climb” (What the!?? He must be in retailing), the world has seen for many decades and we are paying them our money to keep them in business – perverse and to be honest not really acceptable. I was amused (not in the funny way) to read a full page advert in the “Times” newspaper about 10 days ago from UBS, a big Swiss bank basically saying how secure they were and how it was a place to trust and place your money and yet the very next, (very next!) day in the news they were receiving money from the Swiss authorities to help them out! How can they run an advert like that and then the next day the real situation is revealed? Integrity, trust honesty, all the kinds of word that we used to apply to banks, now sadly that myth has been well and truly blown. Lending money to piles of people who they reckon cannot actually pay it back and then hey! All of a sudden they find pout that those people can’t pay the money back when its time! Rocket science? Not not really, more like culpable greedy recklesness. These banks have so much trust, honesty and integrity that they won’t even lend to each other in case each other goes bust! Amazing! Then again thinking about it banks are in retailing as well and very lucky they are because they must be one of the only businesses in the world that has almost a cast iron guarantee that they will not be allowed to go out of business, well nearly..

We are in an ever changing world – enjoy the ride, it’s the only one you will have…

’till the next time,

Keep safe

Scotty.