Off Topic What grinds your gears

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Here's a true story...I ran an old fashioned hardware/DIY shop for 30 years. Sourced all my stock myself and built up contacts over a number of years. I was a one man band, just me, with help a couple of afternoons from an old guy. Over the years I made contact with a couple of local paint suppliers in Hull, I'd buy all their dinted tins, wrongly labeled and end of line coloured paints etc, anything they wanted cleared out of their warehouses. I'm not talking huge quantities, some weeks they had none to sell me, some weeks they had loads. I bought it cheap and sold it cheap. Went on for years, nice arrangement all round until one day both suppliers embarrassingly turned me away. Seems B@Q had contacted them both and threatened to stop placing paint orders through them if they continued supplying me.
Just before that I received a call from a buyer for B@Q asking where I was getting my wooden handled metal coal shovels from. Mine were under £3, theirs were nearly a tenner. I was buying them direct from a small firm in Sheffield who I'd dealt with from day one in business, 30 years, they made them themselves and I went personally and collected them. I refused to divulge my source. and even offered to supply B@Q with them, which went down like a lead balloon. That's what small businesses are up against.
Its not so very long ago when there was a hardware shop on virtually every high street in the city. Bet you could count them on the fingers of one hand today, and above it one of the reasons.
@sidenote. Read last night that an unemployed family with six kids receive and extra £14k a year after yesterdays budget because of the ending of the two child cap.

 

So... 15000 annually

20 mile range = circa 750 recharges or 2.05 full recharges per day. that doesnt include when its dark, freezing (defrosting) and god forbid putting your heater on which will reduce range and increase recharging exponentially.

Lets hope there are chargers at every 20 miles on every road network in the country then. Oh and if you use them you're getting bum ****ed there too.

We're getting taxed on fuel that you do use and fuel that you don't.

Yorkshire Bank Customer Service strikes again.

 

So you think…

 

It's a few years since I bought a new car but squirreled away in the very small print of the handbook was a bit about the car recording data and that data could be retrieved by relevant authorities should the need arise

 

What about if you're driving abroad?

 

How they gonna track it? MOTs

 

Dodgy MOT's r us.... 'ok you car passed no problem... ' would you like the standard service £45 or the Gold Service £90 where we reduce your mileage in the system by 10k...

 

Majority of cars with a GPS keep records of driving data, which is pretty much all from 2012/2013 (not sure how long back for though).

The UK police have even used boot opening time data taken from a car (range rover, I think) to correlate with the GPS to prove in a court of law that someone took a crossbow out at the specific address to murder someone