Posts by CrazyOldCatMan 6355 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
from the USA and I have to pay VAT on shipping. Que?
If it's not clearly marked as a gift (or regular clothing) then it'll attract import tax. I've ordered NFL clothing from the US that, because it's labelled as "sports wear" means I have to pay 20% VAT before I can collect it since it's counted as promotional material rather than regular clothing.
Service in France isn't universally bad
One time in central France we (4 bikers - two British, two Dutch) decided to stop off at a little restaurant in the middle of grape-picking country and have lunch..
They clearly were not used to tourists but adapted quickly - the chef came out to shake us all by the hand and cooked us their special while only charging us for the 19-franc[1] standard..
The biggest issue was trying to persuade them that no, we didn't need 1/2-litre of wine each since wine+fast riding on twisty roads[2] are really, really not a good combination..
[1] It was a fair while ago. The meal was pretty damn fantastic - a pork, garlic and mushroom thingly. Ver' ver' nice. And I speak as someone that doesn't particularly like garlic[3]
[2] Especially given their habit of scattering a deep bed of gravel over recently-resurfaced roads..
[3] Except in Chinese or Indian cooking where it's not the major flavour (unless you cook garlic chicken..)
fail to understand the devastation that it can cause
We've had years of the (usually very reliable) central heating/hot water controllers blowing. I think I've replaced them about 5 times in the 20+ years we've been there.
Two years back, we had an extra spur added to power an outside all-weater double socket (on its own RCD and a switch) which involved having the fuse box replaced as the original 1997-vintage one was no longer compliant with the electrical codes.
The sparky went slightly pale when he took the lid off the box.. Apparently, the original person that had fitted it hadn't been particularly scrupulous about how well they linked to wires to the fuse box and at least one of the bare cable-ends wasn't securely fastened into the back of the fuse.
We haven't had any electrical oddities since.
(Unlike the water - you can't use the main bathroom hand taps at the same time as our en-suite taps otherwise all the happens in the en-suite is that no water comes out and air gets sucked into the pipework, creating a bubble that blocks any more water coming out.. The only way to get rid of the bubble is to put your hand over the mixer outflow and turn both taps on. After a while, you'll hear loud bubbling from the header tank and the bubbles are forced out by the hot water going the wrong way up the cold water pipes. At which point, everything starts working again).
You never know what dumbfuckery will occur until you look for it
During the renovation on the house my wife inherited we discovered that randomly scattered throughout the house there were still short lengths of lead water pipes.. It looks like whoever did the original conversion to copper had just ignored areas that were hard to get to..
Fortunately, the renovation has involved pretty much gutting the interior and starting again so we were able to get it all removed.
Npower tried that one on me
SW Water tried to convince my wife that the house she inherited from her gran didn't have, and never had, a water supply.. Since it had been there since about 1901 and had had a water supply for all of that period (and SW Water is the the successor company for the previous water utility and had all their records it was a bit puzzling. In the end, it turned out that they were looking for water meter records and, not finding them, assumed that the house didn't exist. Since the purpose of her call was to get a water meter fitted a certain lack of thought seems to have occurred)
(And since they have outsourced their surveyer duties to an external company that doesn't appear to have access to any of the water company records the surveyer visit (for which she had to pay) was functionally useless since he couldn't even find the stopcock let alone anywhere to put a water meter. She finally persuded them to send one of their own staff who, in short order, found both the stopcock[1] and arranged for a water meter to be fitted[2].
[1] In the pavement below the house, down about 30m of very steep slope.
[2] Which will save us (and the next tenant) a good deal of money since SW Water are charging about £1000/year on the basis that there isn't a water meter and thus they can't measure water usage. So they estimate. Since their estimate was what they would charge for a 4-bed house with full occupancy and this is an unoccupied 2-bed house undergoing renovation we thought that was a tad excessive.
fined for not carrying a dog poo bag
We use ASDA nappy bags (35p for 300 bags) - each of my jeans appears to have a handful of them in the back left-hand side pocket..
And there's a pile of them by the washing machine where they get put if I forget to remove them before putting the jeans in the bin for washing..
those motorcyclists wear bike race outfit, which is absolutely idiotic
Ah yes - the weekend 'racers' wobbling round corners on their carefully-polished racing style bikes with their immaculate 'racing' leather knockoffs complete with the hump between the shoulders.
We used to point at them and laugh. And then show them how to ride properly.
would have had a go at me for their own bad cycling
Like the 30-something idiot that screamed abuse at me for daring to suggest that him riding on the pavement when there's a perfectly good (and empty) road next to the pavement wasn't a clever idea. Why adults think that cycling along the pavement (and where I live the roads are rarely busy except at the height of rush hour) is a good thing I'll never understand. Kids - yes. I can understand that since they won't have developed any roadcraft and won't necessarily have the skills or experience to handle traffic. But functional adults don't have any excuse.
Since I had two dogs on leads with me at the time (one pretty elderly with not much vision left) I was more concerned that he would run one of them over and hurt them. I'm pretty much a pacifist but one of the things that might breach that is people deliberately (or ignorantly) hurting an animal or child that trusts us to protect them.
Most businesses hated tapes
With good reason. They are time-consuming and pretty unreliable (even doing trial restores every couple of months won't catch all the bad tapes) and are generally a pain in the backside.
Hands up all those that have had a critical restore fail (or take far, far longer than it should) because the one tape that holds the most recent version of $DEAD_FILE is corrupted or otherwise unreadable?
[Hand up].
dogs and cats living together
Such a thing is considered quite normal in my family. Does that make us agents of unstoppable chaos[1] and evil[2]?
[1] Have you met my wife? If this were pathfinder, her alignment would best be described as chaotic good..
[2] Senior female cat wishes me to point out that she's not pure evil, she's just misunderstood.
Just give them to the neighbour's cat
Cats, being sensible creatures, won't touch beans with (someone elses') bargepole.
Of course, cats being cats will refuse to act as expected and love baked beans. And, when you buy several cases in order to feed them will refuse to eat them.
Because they can.
who rear-ended the highly visible tow truck was also not paying proper attention to the road and surroundings.
Likewise the muppet who ran into a Police Range Rover parked in the emergency lane at the top of a motorway slip road (there had been a crash in the slip lane which had resulted in a queue - muppet decided that he'd circumvent the queue by zooming up the emergency lane and failed to notice the police range rover [with all the disco lights running] at the end of the slip lane..)
His car got gone over with a fine tooth comb post crash and the laundry list of offences was fairly long. Including driving without tax and insurance, driving while his licence was suspended and a whole slew of Construction and Use failures..
I vaguely recall that he did time for the crash because it was such a blatant failure, especially when added to all the other charges.
I've been in a car crash
Likewise (in fact a few in the 35+ years of having a full licence, none of which have been over 20mph) - one of which wasn't actually my fault..
(Saw that there appeared to be a large number of stopped cars in front of me, put the brakes on to no effect and slid gracefully into the back of an existing pileup. A diesel tanker coming out of a petrol station had managed to leave a big slick all along the (wet) main road and, it being a very grey winters day, said slick wasn't very visible. Resulted in the writeoff of my then car (Peugeot 309) because the car behind me hit us at an angle and twisted the sub-frame. She also tried to claim that she had stopped in time and that we had "bounced back into her". Given that physics doesn't work that way, the whole thing was resolved to be a 50:50 accident. There were 20+ cars involved - presumably the first car tried to stop and their tyres only started to bite once they hit clean tarmac and then the following cars added to the pileup.)
I've had a couple of bike crashes too - none of which involved anyone else and all were at low speed on slippery surfaces (the last one involved black ice).
I can remember the events of all of them.
...to 'fix' a car roof that had been shat on?
Having had some drunken muppets decide that our Morris Minor would be fun to climb onto (and slide off) I can confirm that fixing the resultant dents and paintwork damage could well go into a 4-figure sum - especially as it's something that most garages would subcontract out to a specialist and not do themselves.
And that's on a car that actually has a significant thickness of metal in the bodywork - I'd hate to think of the damage that an average 'adult' male would do climbing onto the roof of a Jazz (which isn't one of the more sturdy cars out there!).
"If it's big and painted grey (or black with periscopes), you get out of its way."
Much like the rule for flying microlight aircraft anywhere near RAF Lynham used to be "Don't".[1]. Because a Herc won't even notice the small bump as you get smeared all over its fuselage..
[1] Legally - don't go under 1000ft over Lyneham or over 1000ft over Swindon/North Wilts. In practice however, this translates as "don't fly near Lynham". Obviously, that rule may have changed now that Lyneham isn't an active airbase any more.
I would find that they probably do sell them
If you define hybrids as elecric cars then, yes they do. In fact, I drove to work this morning in one..
I suspect that, like most Japanese car manufacturers, they'll be more keen to move into the hydrogen car market than the pure electric car market.
Trust the Computer
Everything else is just Paranoia!
(Best played after a quantity[1] of alcohol and/or smoking unapproved[2] substances..)
[1] Somewhere between "no effect at all" and "can't feel my feet". Quantites may vary.
[2] But if caught using in the student union you'd be most likely to be let off as long as the staff member gets a bit..
I refuse to confirm my details with them when they call me unexpectedly
I once had a cold-caller from the bank get very aggressive with me on the phone when I wouldn't confirm my identity. She didn't seem to understand that I'd never heard from her before, didn't know her and (since her number was withheld) no way of validating who she was so why should I give her my private information?
I suspect that she was on a quota and I was messing her completion rate. And my level of caringness and sympathy was somewhat adjacent to zero.
people swap desks or PCs and don't tell the IT department is huge
Which is why we have spot audits every year. Most of what we find is "oh yeah - they left 6 months ago and had a better laptop than me so I took it".
And (often) if you check whether the leavers account is still enabled it often is - because their manager hasn't bothered to tell us that they've left.
shipped over via transport plane from the US to the UK
When I worked at an embedded OS provider (later bought by Intel) we had a moment of absurdity like that - we were moving to a swanky new office, custom fitted out for us. The eejit CEO (in the US) decided that the look and feel of the office was so important that *all* the office equipment and fittings should be the same worldwide and hence, our new office, was to have all the stuff needed to make cubicles should be shipped over from the US.
One of the desirable outcomes of the move was that all the power and connectivity requirements was to be built into the cubicle basebands. Unfortunately, the stuff shipped over from the US was to US power and electrical spec and would have been illegal to install in the UK.. And they had forgotten the tick the ethernet requirement as well. So we had a shiny new office in the corporate colours with ethernet and power cables lying around and visible. And the furniture cost about 4x what it would have cost to buy the stuff locally - even if we specified the correct corporate colours.
Said CEO got ejected fairly shortly after by the founders of the company who came back to lead it up until it was aquired by Intel. They reckoned that he'd cost the company several hundred million dollars by his decisions.
surely if the ip is a spam link then you should block traffic both ways?
Nope - not unless you have outgoing blocklist checks and hardly anyone does that (it's quite an overhead in the process and the ISPs would have to deal with their own angry customers rather than being able to say "not us guv - it was them wot done it").
Those machines could be upgraded to the newer OS
Tell that to t'wife's iPad 2 - I think it's stuck at iOS 7 (or 8 - can't remember). At some point I'll bite the bullet and get her a newer one.
She only really uses it to listen to podcasts (wild stuff like The Archers compilation) so Urgency == "Minimal".
My car won't be getting any software updates
Wy wife's car barely has electrics, let alone electronics[1]..
radio: AM/FM and nothing
Eee - radio - luxury! (Mind you, the Morris Minor is so noisy you probably wouldn't hear it unless you turned it up loud).
[1] She got me to fit an alarm to it at one point - the car's anti-technology field rejected the alarm after about a week - first one died in a shower of sparks, the second one started going off at random intervals and got removed. I suspect that (despite having a sort-of modern alternator fitted) that the electricity supplied isn't particularly stable or smooth.. When the car has Lucas-supplied wiring fitted in 1966 that wouldn't be a surprise!
The tech in that car was not impressive
A lot of the 'premium' German car brands seem have a very basic base spec with everything extra being a paid option - completely un-alike the Japanese/Korean method (lots of equipment as standard but also some premium upgrades available). They also don't tend to be terribly progressive in their technical choices (and don't have their previously-famed build quality and reliability either).
I've never bought a BMW/Audi/VW and probably never will.
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