Tag Archives: rip off

Planned Obsolescence or Rip Off?

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When I arrived at work this morning the alarm wasn’t set. We had trouble setting it a couple of days ago, and two weeks ago we had to leave it off all night as it wouldn’t set. Once is Ok, but when it starts happening like this you need to get it fixed, even if the call out is £75., and even if it was serviced just a couple of months ago.

I upset the technician who came to service it when he asked to borrow a brush – I told him at the price he was costing he should have his own brush (What’s it going to cost? £1.50?) He muttered something, so I pointed out that when I have my car serviced I don’t have to take a bag of spanners to the garage with me.

The man who called this morning blinded us with scientific gobbledygook about timing, and how we may be slower now than when it was originally set up. This is clearly tosh, as both my workmate and the boss, don’t hang about when it comes to closing up. I’m getting slower but don’t have any problems – apart from senior moments and forgetting the code.

Dwarf Iris

He then looked at the hard drive on the camera system. We had been leaving that as it didn’t seem like value for money just to call someone out to fix one thing. First he switched it off and switched it on again. Oh yes, £75 and that’s what you get. Then he told us that it had died and we needed a new one. We’ve only had it about four years and all it does is sit there and record on a continuing basis. It seems like we’ve fallen victim to a carefully managed scheme to milk us of our hard-earned profits. Or Planned Obsolescence, if you prefer a term that doesn’t accuse big business of ripping us off. Although I’m not sure why you would want a term that doesn’t big business of ripping us off, because that is what is happening. What with annual fees,call out charges, servicing and shoddy parts it would be cheaper to have a team of warrior monks on constant call to defend our property, while teams of their more peaceful brethren record our daily doings on vellum.

It turns out that the average hard disc drive lasts 3-4 years. You can see that space travel is going to be a problem. It’s OK nipping across to Mars, about seven years, but a quick jaunt to Proxima Centauri b is going to take 75,000 years, and I’m not sure how you are going to launch a space ship big enough to contain all those replacement disc drives. That’s an aspect of interstellar travel they never seem to discuss.

Lesser Celandine

Car Insurance Time Again

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Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the little man comes up against the gargantuan greed of the insurance companies.

I had a letter last week. The premium for this year is several hundred pounds up on last year, despite the fact that I have hardly been anywhere in 2020. It is, however, still about £100 cheaper than the year before.

I went on the Swinton site, as I’ve used them as brokers for years, but the drop down menus didn’t work and I couldn’t get into my account. Life is too short to waste time on recalcitrant technology. If you can’t keep your site working you don’t get the business.

I went to ‘Go Compare’. I put a lot of details in. In fact, I could probably describe myself as a writer of biography after all the personal detail I put in. Then I came to a question about how much my last claim cost. Regular readers may recall that I had a rather annoying accident a couple of years ago. How am I supposed to know how much it cost? I pressed the “i” in the circle and it suggested ringing the insurance company. Yes, that seems a worthwhile use of my time.

So I went on ‘Compare the Market’. More biography. More stupid questions. More reminders not to tell lies. Finally, having finished the forms I pressed the button.

They came up with 78 possibilities. The cheapest one was a company called “Go, Skippy!” It was cheap, but the name is not inspiring and the excess is monstrous. It’s also owned by Arron Banks, and as I don’t want to fund his political donations I am glad to give it a miss.

For just over a hundred pounds more I have a choice of two well-known names – Churchill and Liverpool Victoria. Churchill always did well for me until they started racking the prices up, and LV offered a slightly better policy for £5 less. I was tempted by Churchill because they had always offered a great service, but they had ripped me off in the end, so I went for LV.

So, today, for me, the clear winners were ‘Compare the Market’ and Liverpool Victoria. It saved me £360 on the cost quoted by Swinton and Aviva so, irritating as it was, I just had a profitable hour at the computer.

Me, moaning about computers and photographing birds

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It’s been a strange Sunday. Julia’s laptop has been playing up and refusing to connect to the internet so we went to the computer shop where they told us it would cost £60 to have it sent away, after which they would tell us how much it would cost before we could get it back. Forgive my cynicism but that seems to me to be a good description of how kidnappers operate.

That’s how I ended up looking round Curry’s/PC World looking at new laptops.

It’s also how I ended up sitting in the car whimpering. It’s been an expensive couple of weeks, and the process of spending money

I’m sure it must be possible, bearing in mind the advance of technology and the economics of mass production, to build an acceptable laptop for around £150. We don’t need a terrabyte of memory or the ability to use huge amounts of graphics. We just want to write emails. surf the net and brighten up a few photos.

That’s before I even start on the evils of the new way of selling Microsoft Office. If you own a copy and haven’t replaced your computer in the last few years you’re in for a surprise. You don’t own it now, you just rent it for a year at a time. When your subscription expires you don’t have access to Office.

That’s like buying a car and only renting the ignition key.

After that I had to go to the park and photograph birds.

Dunnock
Arnot Hill Park, Arnold
Wren
Female Blackbird
Grey Squirrel
Arnot Hill Park, Arnold