Sensible in principle.

I love to give positive feedback. All too often we are miserably and predictably disappointed by customer service experiences. For that reason, I am always happy to write about the better experiences and to promote the businesses that offer them.

I bought a crappy multi-card memory reader for my laptop. Increasingly these days, I find myself dealing with a mindboggling array of memory cards for an even more mindbogglingly array of devices around the house. It seemed sensible therefore that I might have a device that I could just plug them into without having to have a host of adapters and cables and software in order to read the information contained amongst them.

I've been using the reader for a while and now I find that it has caused physical damage to a memory card for my camera.... first it buckled the little plastic teeth that separate the gold contacts..... next the teeth fell out..... next the whole card kind of split in two.

It's a Staples branded card... I don't have a receipt and I don't know when I bought it.... How sensible then that they should choose to replace the memory card for me free of charge under the warranty, simply because it's a Staples branded item!!

It's far too sensible and simple.



I won't pretend to be any good at that exposure, aperture, and any of that other photographing jazz-a-ma-tazz, so most of these sort of things are experiments that go right or wrong.... this one's almost there. Bonfire night at the Jack o' Mitre, Scammonden 2008. They tell me the three days of fog that we've endured may end tomorrow in sunshine!!

Bleeding hands....

A weekend of pain, and no pleasure - A rare experience for me.

I assembled the new Ikea (hack, cough, spit, and other tourettes sounds) desk, and drawer unit (which incidentally was of the lowest possible quality, was cracked, split and generally poor - but I would not dare to venture back there to have another day stolen from me whilst trying to get a replacement panel).

I got out my new (from Staples - whose failure to carry any decent desks in the first place, which resulted in my miserable trip to Ikea on Saturday) office chair, and began the assembly. It was a tricky job with silly "allen key" bolts. Approximately four bolts from completion, one of them refused to go in. I tugged a little bit too hard, and "ping" - the thermometer reached the top like you've seen in so many Tom and Jerry cartoons before, and the glass shattered, pouring molten lava everywhere, as the bolt sheered clean in two.

A nice shiny silver peg was left laughing at me, embedded in the base of the chair, with no way in and no way out. Of course, it had taken me so long to assemble all this two-bit furniture, that the shop was closed and there was nothing I could do.

My office would not be complete on Saturday.

For light relief (I can look back and laugh now) I decided it might be a better to idea to tackle the shelves that needed attention. All I needed to do, was to take some old warped wooden shelving off its original angle brackets, and apply the new wood to the brackets. Simple??

Well, the brackets wouldn't come out of the slots in the rails. There was three years worth of dust and cat hair on the shelves. The screws which held the brackets and wood together had all been inserted with a seemingly diamond tipped screwdriver that had ripped the heads of the screws into perfect circles, thus rendering them impossible to remove. The brackets were bent and twisted.

It took effing ages, but I finally got it all done.

I've been putting screws in and out, and twisting allen key bolts, and bending metal and wood into unnatural shapes with my bare hands for the best part of a day, and the fingertips are transformed into pieces of tenderised veal.

My hands are the tools of my trade - blisters DO NOT make for good typing!!

Short blog!!