Could it happen today?

Driving back from the dump yesterday ('tis a glamourous life indeed) I tuned into the local radio station - original 106 - which if nothing else is a brave attempt to provide an alternative to the homogenised, safe pap that constitutes local radio today (see posts passim). As good fortune would have it they were playing a Rolling Stones song, but not for them the normal Jumping Jack Flash/Satisfaction/Start Me Up safe bets. Nope, they were playing the classic Stones blues-fest that is Little Red Rooster. The song just oozed sleaze and atmosphere. In fact I was momentarily transported to a seedy little blues bar in the Deep South as it played.

This sort of music can only be played live in a small, smoke filled, crowded bar, with people standing shoulder to shoulder or sitting too many at tiny little tables with a stage only a few feet away where you can talk to the band between numbers. It's the implicit sleaze that makes it work, the feeling of being somewhere underground, somewhere that's bad for you yet has that irresistible pull and most of all is bursting with atmosphere.

Today, non-smoking pubs and bars may have all the advantages of being cleaner, healthier places to eat and drink, but they lack soul, spirit and atmosphere. They will never be able to create an atmosphere whereby a band can play Little Red Rooster and make it feel like something that moves the soul.

Later, Grocerjack

The Magic of The Internet

Internet shopping has transformed the way we buy everything from food to electrical goods to second hand stuff to illegal stuff. It's driven down prices and forced the incumbent high street retailers to up their game. No question, it's really delivered value and choice.

Or has it?

Last week, in a couple of disastrous months the cherry on the icing on the cake was the diagnosis that our less than 4 year old dishwasher had suffered a massive internal failure and that repair was out of the question. That's the society we live in now. We throw things away and don't get them repaired because the items are so bloody cheap that the time and materials required to fix them would be more than buying something new. It's a different economic model to the everything that went before.

The first thing I did was use Google to search for some decent sites that would sell me a 60cm semi-integrated dishwasher on-line. The results of the search are a strange mixture of "shopping intelligence" sites and on-line retailers with names like Appliance City, Appliance Planet and Appliance Universe. Some well known names appear their as well, such as John Lewis, B&Q (Appliance Warehouse!), Boots, Tesco's and Sainsbury's. I tend to use either Ciao or Kelkoo as my intelligence sites to get the lowest price available, and so after doing some research I came up with the perfect model by German giants Bosch. I ordered one on-line from Sussex Appliances Online and duly gave my credit card details over and printed my receipt. Within 10 minutes a very jolly chap rang to thank me for the order but also to inform me that they didn't actually carry any stock and that Bosch had none of that model in the UK. None were expected until mid to late December. Hmmm....Christmas with nigh on 20 people for dinner and NO dishwasher? Not fucking likely. I thanked him and searched again. This time Empire Direct came up with the goods. A day later I get a phone call telling me the same thing. Order attempt number 2 cancelled then. Never mind, I'll try Appliance City, again no luck. I gave up on Bosch at that point.

Some more research followed and I decided on a Smeg (titter ye not!) model. Good reputation I thought and a good price with a lot if funky (I guess) features for a dishwasher. I ordered one through B&Q Appliance Warehouse from their website repleat with a background indicating a yawning great carbuncle of a warehouse somewhere...a white goods heaven in their eyes no doubt. Within30 minutes back came the call.....that's on back order with the manufacturer and might not be available until mid to late December. By now I'm getting a bit agitated....I have up to £400 to spend and no one wants to take the money in fair exchange, within a reasonable time frame, for a dishwasher to help spare the growing pile of plates and the arguments between me, Hellsbells, Kid and Pie.

I then order from Boot Kitchen Appliances. This seems to go well until the dreaded phone call from a nice Northern girl called Kerry (Katona...moonlighting from Iceland and being a professional mum?). Yep, you've guessed it...no can do Jack. To be fair to Kerry she was armed with some alternatives that were in stock from Electrolux, but they were dearer and the details were confusing and didn't quite ring true (no cutlery basket? surely not...) but at least she tried. I asked her to ring Smeg and get an answer as to when they'd be in the UK so i could decide whether to chance delivery before Christmas. The lovely Kerry agreed and said she'd call me on Tuesday.

After that call I decided to call Sainsbury's Kitchen Appliances before ordering to check if they had any stock ......an attempt to be proactive at last. A very nice northern girl called Kerry answered the phone and.........do you see what's happened here? Kerry works for Boots and Sainsburys! And probably all of the others I tried to order from. It didn't take long to see what had happened here...all of the top searches from Google and within Kelkoo and Ciao are for household name companies who back off the supply of the appliance to a company called DRL Ltd. DRL operate a fuck off great big warehouse in Bolton and supply that service to the names you and I know. They also supply the "sales" and "customer support" staff who with chameleon like stealth can change their employer to whoever they want depending on what number you ring. So, if B&Q ain't got it, then Boots won't. Neither will Sainsbury's, nor Tesco's probably.

You think you're being provided with choice, when in fact your new vaccum cleaner or washing machine is all coming from Bolton.

And the lovely Kerry will be whoever you want her to be.

There are other choices of course, but look into the T's and C's and you'll discover that quite a few are fronts for a single out of sight operating company. Trade Appliances Ltd operate under 5 or 6 different names so that depending on which search engine you use they increase the chance you'll use one of the front flash named gateways to get to them. If this was the world of TV, there'd be scandal in the tabloids at such a .....well "con" is too strong a word....but it is a smoke and mirrors device to deceive the ordinary punter.

Kerry did ring me back, and very sweetly said that Smeg had changed the code of the product and it was in stock. It's due next Friday, thank fuck. Unless of course , and knowing my luck, they've shipped the wrong thing and the code was right!

Later, ConsumerChamp Jack.

Ooops

I forgot my Friday Crap Jokes

Boxers don't have sex before a fight. Know why that is?
They don't fancy each other.

I hate those emails where they try to sell you penis enhancers. I got 10 just the other day.
Eight of them from my girlfriend.
It's the two from my mum that really hurt.

The dodo died. Then Dodi died, Di died and Dando died... Dido must be shitting herself.

My parents are from East London which means they're incredibly hard, but I was never smacked as a child ... well maybe one or two grams to get me to sleep at night...

The doorbell and when I answered there was a 6ft beetle there. it smacked me in the mouth and called me a wanker.
Apparently there's a nasty bug going round.

Groaning, Grocerjack

Everything is Fucked

Nothing ever rocks and nothing ever rolls and Nothing’s ever worth the cost!

So said former fat bastard Meat Loaf on his epic ditty, Bat Out Of Hell. I struggled with that lyric for a while but now I think I know what he was getting at. The truth is that anything gadget-like or labour saving that you buy provides a mere few minutes of unbridled joy before it gets discarded through boredom, or no-one uses it, or because the damn thing doesn’t quite do everything it promised, or is too hard to use, or you decide that it’s raison d’etre was never something you really needed anyway. One thing for sure, it’ll break down and your hard earned cash might as well have been shoved in the washing machine until it becomes a pulpy unusable mush.

Why am I even discussing this? Well, it seems to me that fate is playing some cruel tricks on me at the moment. In the last 2 months, precisely 5 months after converting from my comparatively cheap interest only mortgage to a hideously expensive repayment one, we have seen mechanical failure on household appliances ona an unprecedented scale, forcing me to uncover capital investment funds in order to keep the operational business of daily life on track.

1.) The vacuum cleaner packed up earlier this year. After 4 years of tackling the crap left behind by Kid and Pie, plus all the other members of the Brood, it decided it wanted to die and hence committed vacuum cleaner suicide. Of course, to me it was just fucked. We got by because we either didn’t bother cleaning the carpet or borrowed and hid LittleSis’s cleaner. It was no good, she found it and she demanded it back and we ended buying a new one – cost £130

2.) The Fan Oven enter the world of The Fucked when it decided to finally give up, extending cooking times for oven chips (as an example) from 20 minutes (crispy) out to a week or so. Replaced – cost £400 plus £50 for the install.

3.) The Shower – the only one in the house is in the en-suite and is a gravity fed shower. It’s had the cartridge replaced once about 3 years ago but this time it’s gone and I couldn’t face just a refurbished one. It gets used around 4 times a day and so like anything that heavily used it also became fucked. New integral power shower purchased – cost £275 plus somewhere in the region of £180 for the plumber to install and cable it up. Plus a new one in the main bathroom for Kid and Pie to abuse to their hearts content.

4.) The Shower Cubicle for fucks sake – the “bi-fold” door is held together in the middle by two plastic lugs secured to one half of the door with a screw and the other by virtue of the lug being inserted into the tubular spine. Yep, one broke a few weeks back and now the others gone. Can you buy a new door on it’s own? Yeah…..you guessed it….can you fuck! Unless the superglue works then that’s another £300 needed, plus the cost of install unless it’s so fucking ridiculously easy even a DIY fuckwit like me can do it.

5.) The final insult? I fucking hope so. Yesterday HellsBells came back from lunch to find the dishwasher still going. It had been put on a wash cycle by me at 07:00. She discovered it at 4 in the afternoon. Now, I all in favour of dedication to the task…but 9 hours to wash one load…and still it was going. Yep, it’s fucked and to add insult to injury we have a “semi-integrated” one…..functionally the same as a normal free standing one, but apparently the biggest difference between them is…the fucking cost. Another £350 for me to find.

I am almost scared to go home in case the front door falls off it’s fucking hinges.

Have a good weekend, Later Grocerjack

Bad ratio

What arslikhan goody-two-shoes fool determined that 5 days at work and 2 for rest was a good ratio.

Wouldn't 4 days at work, 3 days off have been a fairer ratio?

Here-in starts a campaign. 3 Day weekends for all, except for lousy benefit sponging loafers who live off my taxes. They should be forced into community work like cleaning street, painting houses or tidying up parks.

Rant over.

Later, Grocerjack

The Ministry of Crap Design

Yes, the Ministry of Crap Design is alive and kicking in Jack's world. Two examples hit me today. The first relates to a new power shower I'm having fitted to replace the old gravity fed mixer one that shuffled off the the shower heaven in the sky under the duress of 4 showers a day since Kid and Pie discovered the delights of showering instead of bathing.

To put the new one one I had to remove some tiles from MY FULLY TILED bathroom. i'd hoped they might come off in one piece, but no, the tiler was a real fucking professional and these were tiled for life. Hence from 12 only 3 survived. What's this got to do with the Ministry? Well, the tiles I removed were a nice 8" by 6" (" = inches in case anyone under 25 is reading). However since they were attached it seems a new law prohibiting the sale of this size has been passed. Now you can get 10x8, 6x6, 4x4, 8x4,6x4, 12x10, 12x8 and any other combination...except for the apparently unconstitutional 8x6. Marvellous. Thanks to this I've had to buy some at 6x6 which of course means I needed a tile cutter because it doesn't fill the same rectangle and my ham-fisted DIY capabilities will stretched to the full. Life really is just a fucking trial isn't it?

The second example is from a bed we had arranged to be collected by, get this....a Rag and Bone man. Yes, they do still exist. He will collect your rubbish and tale it away for nothing! Free! Fuck All! Zilch. In this day and age in a culture of disposability this is a bloody godsend.

He duly arrived and I decided to help him dismantle this old metal bunk bed. Of course The Ministry had been involved at it's construction, which means that they got rid of those stupid old "screws" and replaced them with bolts that can only undone with a fucking Allen key? What a shit invention that is anyway! I hate the bastard bloody things. Awakward, ineffective, slow and cruel to fingers. If it had been held together with screws then me and my electric screwdriver would have had the thing dismantled in 5 minutes, but no, because it was Allen keys it took 2 of us over a fucking hour to dismantle the thing. Luckily, R&B Man still took it for nothing, which was nice as he'd lost an hour and a bit of his day.

I hate designers, they just don't think about anyone but themselves and their inflated ego's.

Later, Grocerjack

Cornucopia

Just a few comments before a weekend of Guinness, Golf and Cycling. And who knows, with any luck I might even get a bit of rest. I believe that there is rest for the wicked you see.

World of Sport

Fernando Alonso moves away from McLaren and Lewis Carl Hamilton (anagram….Car Wealth? Millions) decides that he’s too popular to live in the UK. When I was a kid we called this “car racing” and in those days it was all about dashing, devil-may-care heroes laying their lives on the line in the pursuit of sheer speed and the glory of being the champion driver. Nowadays it’s a dull procession of overpaid pampered primadonna’s in a “sport” ruled by the richest teams who can simply buy the best or develop the best, and governed by a corrupt body of stuffy old farts that are completely out of touch with the fan base and the soul of the sport.

Much like football I suppose.

Celebrity Special

Richard and Judy are quitting their Channel 4 TV show and I think the world of daytime TV will a poorer place for this. I know he can be an irritating and arrogant know all, but there are times when he has handled sensitive subjects with real sensitivity. Judy has always seemed to show great respect for people and admiration for what they have to say. I can’t help but like them. Their original show, This Morning, changed the face of morning daytime TV by creating a successful and popular magazine format and has consistently beaten any opposition from the Beeb or anyone else. It’s a testament to what they created that Phil Schofield and the gorgeous (my guilty secret) Fern Britton have continued that success by imposing their own personalities without really changing the format. Call me a cynic, but Richard has stuck with Judy through a time in her life when ill-health has ravaged her looks and figure, and occasionally her mood. In the shallow world of the TV celeb it’s obvious he would have been presented with plenty of “away-days” but, as far as we know, he has never been tempted.

Or never been caught.

Travel News

A new car share starts for me on Monday, taking it to 3 of us. The previous one collapsed when the closet sharer gradually decided to go his own way. Frankly he’d been pissing me and The Happy Hammer off for months by continually turning up hideously late and not apologising. He even recruited 2 other young blokes from the area into his team in what now looks like a blatant attempt to create a break away car share.

Or maybe it’s to share some George Michael moments.

Crime Shock

The Met are guilty! Apparently. In a time of heightened stress and fear we all know they fucked up when they shot the illegal Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles De Menezes, and no matter what his status he did not deserve to die. Especially at the hands of an apparently trigger happy bunch of gung-ho coppers. But the truth is they acted in haste and by mistake, a tragic and terrible mistake. But, the fact is shit happens and I’m unconvinced that the police are guilty of anything other than a horrendous error of judgement. A little known fact is that to date their have been 10,000 incidents to which armed police have been called, and guns have been used (firearms discharged in copper-speak) on just 3 occasions. It’s hardly the sign of a police force making its own law is it?

Sir Ian Blair is being pressured to resign, but I’m not sure this is deserved or serves any purpose other than to deliver yet another political scalp and lose more hard earned experience. In fact where this whole culture of resignation came from is the detestable tabloid press and their insatiable hunger for stories to sell newsprint and to show off their political clout. Why not give someone the chance to remedy the error of their ways, to put right what was wrong? What happened to the culture of forgiveness and redemption our so called Christian society was built on?

Friday Rubbish Jokes

Q. What tells you a spider is modern?

A. It has a web-site (groan)

Batman came up[ to me the other day and he hit me over the head with a Ming Vase and he went “T’Pau!!”
I said, don’t you mean “Kapow!”
And he said “No, I’ve got China in my hand”

I was reading this book the other day called The History of Glue. I couldn’t put it down.

I fancied a game of darts with my mate. he said "Nearest the bull goes first"

He went "Baa" and I went "Moo". He said "Your closest"

And finally

I've no problem with buying tampons, after all I'm a modern man.

But apparently they're not a real present.

have a good weekend

Later, Grocerjack