What gets my Goat? (Work in Progress ...)

Everyone has their own pet hates, so I thought I'd start listing mine here for posterity - I'll keep adding them as they occur but, for a start, these make me GGRRRR!:

Real Estate Agents sign boards that damage property or aren't properly removed:

What blatant disregard for their clients' properties when the monkeys they employ to put up their signs go about nailing boards onto fencing or, even worse, into the mortar of brick walls?  You can't see it in the pic, but this particular example was on a main supporting post and there was a sufficient gap to have used plastic cables. Don't even get me started on bricks ... how best to de-stabilise a wall? - give it a few good whacks with a hammer!

Walk up any high street and look at the frontage of shops - property boards are normally placed above the shop signage.  Now look at how many bits of timber have been left up there, often just painted over with the re-vamp, despite the fact that the agents' signs have long been removed?

So, not only vandals but visual polluters ...

Half-arsed Pooper Scoopers:

I don't know if it's just a London phenomena, but I often see dog poop bags littered in the strangest of places rather than placed in the designated bins.  I can't understand how you can be socially conscious enough to pick up after your dog but cause another environmental eyesore by then leaving the bag and its contents lying in the gutter, wedged in shrubs, hanging off fences ... and even at the very base of the dog waste bin you've taken the bother to walk to.

Guys on noisy little scooters who think they're Hell's Angels:

We've all heard them, boy racers getting off by revving up their little 50cc pathetic excuses for 'motorbikes' in underground car parks to amplify the sound or buzzing along with their annoying ring-ding-dings like agitated mosquitoes.  As a motorcycle purist who's ridden 'real' bikes I may be a bit biased but, seriously, have some dignity instead of drawing attention to your impotence.

Groups of girls who shriek when greeting:

'Nuff said ... we've all seen them (well, heard them first).  Unfortunately it's not just a phenomena left at the school gates.

COMING SOON:

- Sticky labels: Particularly the highly adhesive ones that leave residue or obscure wording on CD covers.

- Car dealership stickers on rear windscreens: Obscure your view, never attractive and you're a mug to give them free advertising long after you've bought the car.

- Speed bumps: Manufacturers spend a fortune on developing a smoother ride and the local council put these monstrosities in to damage your suspension and wheel alignment.

(Not) Box Clever

A lesson in how to do business inefficiently ...

This morning Mr Courier delivered this:

Even the cat was 'excited'

(Helped to demonstrate size perspective, anyhow)

We were expecting a couple of deliveries for exchanged Christmas presents (boots for my son in a smaller size, a dress for my wife - also smaller, happily!), but why was this so light?  Opening the box initially revealed nothing except seemingly a lot of giant bubble wrap:

But what lay beneath?

Wait ... all that to send this?:

It was a pack of decorations from Tesco to replace ones that had been sent incorrectly in the first place.  The first lot had arrived with two similar sized products, but in the same sized box - which already had us angered at the time by the environmental wastage (Amazon are also guilty of this).

* * * * *

So, let's also look at the transaction from an economical perspective and you might get some clues as to why Tesco's profits and market share have been on the slide ...

- The item itself cost £7.99, to help you calculate the likely profit margin.

- The postage we paid on the original item was part of a £3.95 minimum (albeit sent with two other items), so this would have been incurred by Tesco themselves for the re-despatch.

- In the event, the goods that arrived were the same as the first lot.  The problem was in the product description, so they've incurred the additional postage cost as a result of someone's original input error.

- Not only have their resource costs doubled as a result of having to re-process this item, but they also had to pay the person in the call centre who arranged for the second despatch and someone else will presumably have to go in and alter the product description - if they can even bother to try to prevent an expensive recurrence.

- They could clearly have saved on packaging costs (but it's the waste and impact on the planet's resources that upsets us the most).

- They told us to keep the item sent to us in error, which is possibly enough on its own to go into negative profit on this transaction.

* * * * *

Now, we could go back to them and repeat the whole fiasco over again but we can make do with the items we've been sent - and we'd rather save another tree from being sacrificed as a result of corporate incompetency.

I'm posting links to this on Twitter, Facebook and to Tesco themselves - possibly BBC Watchdog - and would urge you to take similar action the next time a delivery contains more air than substance.

But at least the cat's happy!