Blue Witch

The Friday Question supplemental. On Saturday.

McDonald's served 1,300,000,000 customers in the UK last year, 100,000,000 more than in 2010.

The company attributed the rise in diner numbers to longer opening hours and, "...winning over budget-conscious families and commuters looking for a cheap coffee" and that, "...consumers have embraced fast food during the economic downturn."

On average each Briton ate 21 times at a McDonald's in 2011, these figures suggest.

Who's eating mine?

The Friday Question

Do you know your National Insurance Number (social security number for those not in the UK) off by heart?

Higher order money-saving tips (those money-saving TV programmes will catch up with me one day...)

Why do companies use ink that fades on sales receipts?

Are they in cahoots with the companies that offer extended warranties (free or otherwise) that require original receipts ("no photocopies allowed") for any claim?

And/or with insurance companies who require proof of ownership of everything (no matter how small) for all claims these days?

An acquaintance just phoned to ask my advice: a tree fell on their shed in the recent gales, causing over £6,000 of damage to various garden tools, bicycles, and garden items. The insurance company has rejected the major part of the claim (for a ride-on mower) as the original receipt is now illegible after a couple of years. Worse still, they use cash to pay for things rather than credit cards (so that's at least 1% of their annual spending that they don't get returned to them), so don't even have a credit card bill as alternative proof of purchase (as I had to resort to, for my extended warranty by paying with credit card claim, from the credit card company, on my 20 month old camera recently - oh how good it felt to get something back from them for a change).

I always photocopy receipts for large items, in case of fading, then staple both the copy and the original inside the front cover of the manual and file it away. If it's an electrical item (most large purchases tend to be) I also put a label on the plug with the date of purchase and number of years warranty. Time goes on so quickly and it's easier to look at the plug date rather than hunt for the manual and purchase receipt if something goes wrong. We can then easily make a quick decision about claim, repair, or replace.

But, I think I'm also going to start a book of larger purchases as an all-in-one-place record. I might do it chronologically, or I might do it room by room. Columns for item, price paid, place purchased, type of payment. I might even put the receipt number on it, if it has one. Mummy Mr BW has just such a book; she's had it since she got married (I think), and it makes fascinating reading. The old tips are the best.

More and more I like paper records (got to fill all that space created by my ongoing decluttering exercise, after all - stop sighing Mr BW ;)). But, for those who like computer-based systems, a spreadsheet with attached receipt scans would work too I suppose. Provided the data isn't on the PC/laptop that gets nicked or burnt if the worst comes to the worst, so that one needs the data to make an insurance claim...

Thought for the day

We would be happier with what we have if we weren't so unhappy about what we don't have.

- Frank A. Clark

Wailing

I love slow news days. It gives the breath of life to non-stories, or stupid stories.

But, today's offering from BBC Breakfast is sadly worrying.

Those mumsies who prefer the internet to their babies frequent 'mumsnet' ("The reason my referral rate for delayed speech and language development has risen every year for the past ten years," according to a very experienced Senior Speech and Language Therapist of my acquaintance) have decided that it isn't fair that LOCOG decree that every child going to the Olympics must have its own ticket and therefore seat. "What," they hormonally scream in a sleep-deprived manner, "happens to the family who got tickets and then mummy got pregnant? They're not allowed to take in babes in arms!" (And I fully expect there to be a "It's against the human rights of babies, we're going to challenge that in the European Court!" line to be added to their complaint if LOCOG don't change its mind (unless Dave gets his way today)).

A jolly good thing. A huge event in potentially hot sun is not the place to take any child under the age of probably five or six, and only then if they could be relied on to be seen and not heard. Well, OK, they can cheer, but only when it's appropriate.

Imagine that you'd paid £100 for a ticket. Would you like to sit next to someone with just one seat, but also one baby, one changing bag, one pushchair, and assorted other paraphernalia? No, me neither. I don't know about Ban the Bomb: Ban the Baby, from events like that. It's just selfish to want to take babies and toddlers to such an event. Selfish both from the point of view of the other spectators, and from that of the children themselves.

And if 'babes in arms' do end up being allowed to attend, let's not resort to buying them a cutesy cuddly fluffy mascot toy in an attempt to stop their WWWWWAAAAAHHHHHing.

Despite the supply contract being given to a UK firm, they're actually being made in China. In factories with the same lack of regard for workers as the i-Factory, where workers recently had to resort to threatening mass suicide in an attempt to get what they'd previously been promised (on which subject, great article here about why it's never worth fighting with fanboys).

I guess Apple fanaticism is a bit like baby fanaticism. You tend not to want either until you have one, and then you can somehow selfishly overlook the deleterious effects that their creation and maintenance have on other people.

Flying on

Mr BW has kindly restored colour harmony to The Inner Coven with a second coat of specially-mixed paint over the offending off-tone hue. Or maybe that should be off-hue tone. A shady subject. The fact that paint-mixing centres have the technology to recreate almost any shade of yesteryear suggests to me that I am not the only one who is set in my colours.

Paint fumes are one of the myriad of chemically things that badly affect me, and, despite windows being opened (thank goodness for the ongoing mild winter) I'm coughing, sore-throated, and tight-chested.

We nearly had another disaster on this decluttering project when the new made-to-measure vertical blind slats turned out to be a few millimetres too long. The drop of that window is 98.4cm, and blinds are made 1cm shorter than the provided drop measurement, which can only be given to the nearest centimetre. Given that the bathroom blind ordered form the same company turned out to be 2cm shorter than ideal, I thought that giving 99cm as the drop would work perfectly. Wrong.

Luckily, removal of the clip-on / clip-off bracket and drilling a couple of holes through the metal top-rail solved the problem and the blind is now the exact perfect length.

Changing the subject, I know enough people who work within the public sector to know that there is little (if any) "joined-up-thinking" between departments. I've heard it mentioned several times in recent weeks on various radio and TV programmes - including by senior governmint ministers.

Something I've never understood, when travelling by air, is how about half the people on any plane originating form Gatwick, Heathrow or Stansted have had to travel down from the north. If you chat to people around you, or are like me and can't block out conversations around you, however much you might like to, they complain bitterly about their many-houred onward travel before they get home. It amazes me how many people get off long-haul flights and then drive themselves (and often family members) home up northwards motorways for many hours. Do-able if you've flown business or first class and had some sleep, but, who sleeps in economy? Major safety implications there.

Why then, are we talking about airports in the Thames Estuary as an alternative to increasing runway numbers at the London airports? Why do we need to increase airport capacity in the south-east?

Why not increase airport capacity in other areas?

This would stop many people having to spend many hours travelling south before flying, and increase the options for people from other areas: with HS2 recently given the green light, phase one, between London and Birmingham, should be running by 2026, and that will be followed by a second phase of the Y-shaped route reaching Manchester and Leeds by about 2033.

Airport expansion at regional airports would give *huge* boosts to northern economies: jobs, housing, community support services (infrastructure, health, education, retail etc etc), and improved international transport options would make relocating from the over-crowded south-east to run-down areas of the north (with cheaper property and labour costs) much more attractive to large global companies.

Currently, 74% of all visitor arrivals in the UK are at London airports. I cannot imagine that all of those 74% want to arrive in the London area, or could not more conveniently arrive in other places.

Is there something I'm missing here?

Or is this idea just too obvious for successive governmints to have considered? Another example of the lack of joined-up thinking between departments of the public sector that I mentioned above? Perhaps it's been considered and I've missed it?

I'd love to see some figures about UK town of origin of air travel compared to airport travelled from, to support my suggestion, but, despite having been stopped and asked this on several occasions at airports, I can't find the data.

I can sing a rainbow

The trouble with being a colour-freak is that you only like certain colour combinations.

You frequently inwardly shudder while admiring others' work. Particularly the Patchy Ladies, who I'm convinced haven't ever had a lesson in colour theory between them. Beautiful work, but a tone out here, a hue out there, and a better colour that could have been used somewhere else, to better effect. "Oh that's beautiful, look at the precision of your points!" comes out of my mouth, while, "Oh gawd, *why* did you have to use that shade of pink with that shade of green, and *why* introduce a pastel colour for the border, it just doesn't work..." goes through my mind.

You haven't yet made a mistake in choosing the colours to paint the walls of your interiors... and you have an elephant memory for the colours you used last time you redecorated. Because you are a sad person, and don't want to change them when you redecorate.

Except that, when Cognitive Decline™ strikes, you don't remember quite as well as you used to.

And you only remember when Mr BW has spent half of the afternoon painting half of the extremely weird-shaped ceiling of your Inner Coven (think dormer roof, and a truncated opposite roof slant, and add a few twists and turns).

Natural Linen is NOT Natural Hessian.

Bugger.

Given that the new made-to-measure blind (Honey I Shrunk the Curtains which should have been dry cleaned but got put in the washing machine - they were 16) was chosen with Natural Linen in mind, and that you are a colour freak, there could be a problem brewing.

Tomorrow's light will tell... I love Mr BW lots, and I really don't want to make him extra work, but I can't cope with colours not being just right.

The Friday Question

"Why do children tell so many lies these days BW?" asked the mother of a child I once taught, when I bumped into her in town the other day. Said child was now a lanky spotty teenager and, she said, if she managed to extract a grunt from him it was usually a half-truth, if not a downright lie.

"It's because the world we live in is full of lies and deception, so they haven't internalised the concepts of reality, let alone truth," I replied.

I didn't say what I was thinking: that if she'd spent more time doing things with him and his sister rather than touting them around various activities, and then letting them "flop and chill" on electronic toys to "recover", then she might not be having quite the problem she was now. This was the child who was playing Grand Theft Auto into the early hours at 9 years old after all.

She looked puzzled. I explained how today's world bombards us with advertisments, and enticements to spend spend spend and consume consume consume. Advertisments and enticements carrying dubious claims and promises that marketing departments have spent hours concocting. A world which often substantiates its claims with statistics that are completely convincing to those with limited grasp of numbers and no background in research (Null hypothesis? Probability level? Sample size and selection? What are those?).

I thought again of this conversation this morning when I surveyed the contents of my salespeople's inbox. I sort incoming mail into about 20 different mail boxes, otherwise I would be overwhelmed. Occasionally I glance at the contents of the largest box - stuff sent by hopeful companies I've bought from previously (I use a dedicated email address for online purchases so that unwanted follow-ups can be filtered).

We have had many calls over the last few weeks asking when we will be having our Winter Sale. As many of you will know, it finished on 12th December 2011.

So, we have decided to have another online opportunity for UK b33keepers to purchase our sale h1ve parts, frames, foundation and some accessories. The Sale will begin at 10.00am on Saturday 28th January and finish at 5.00pm on Tuesday 31st January.

We've had such a fantastic response to our winter offer of 10% off all fabrics that we've decided to extend the sale by another ten days, and to offer 15% off!

We've accidentally overstocked on [brand name] paints, and have decided to let you benefit from our mistake - buy three get one free! This generous offer won't be around for long, so order now while stocks last!

Nothing like pretending that you're acting out of the goodness of your commercial heart, rather than desperation in a bleak market, is there?

What other examples of this sort of thing have you spotted?

Two slices of bread and a packet of crisps please

In the National Railway Museum in York (which we visited back in November) there is a wonderful collection of old railway posters, official pamphlets and publicity material.

All available as someone kept them when others wanted to throw them out. And yes, that might be a reference to the decluttering in The Inner Coven. Which now contains half the paper it did a week or so ago. Lots of things that others may have enjoyed in the future are now on their way to pulping. Still, I can't be the world's curator. Or so I keep telling myself. I've found that it's easier just to put something in the recycling bag (itself an empty hen food bag) rather than to start looking through it.

As one of the first commercial (shop) sandwich makers in the UK (what a claim to fame... I've mentioned before that I had a job when a university student making sandwiches for M&S at Oxford Circus at the time the company were just beginning to experiment with the concept), this amused me:

How to make the perfect BW (oops) BR sandwich:

Is anyone else amused by the descriptions on packets of purchased sandwiches these days? Not being able to eat bread (and being frugal at heart), I don't ever buy sandwiches, but I do look at the packaging sometimes, just to giggle at the flowery redundant consumeristic language.

Consumer Witch strikes again

Main landline: Rring rrring *displays 0800- number*

BW: [Thinks]: Ah, a cold caller, lovely, I could do with some fun *stirs chilli for dinner and pops it into the bottom of the Aga before picking up the phone just before the answerphone does*

BW: [slowly, in best phone voice] Hello, Blue Witch speaking.

Main landline: [pauses, clicks] Err, hello, this is Paul calling for, erm, erm, Mrs BW, can I speak to Mrs BW?

BW: You are, as I said quite clearly when I picked up the phone, but you wouldn't have heard that as you're in a call centre which is running auto-calling. A call centre which clearly doesn't adhere to the code of practice of the Telephone Preference Scheme as you've called me.

Paul: I'm calling from [name of The Coven electricity supplier].

BW: Yes, and I've told your people before that I don't take sales calls. Moreover, if you are calling on this number you have also broken the Data Protection Act as I only ever give this number to utility companies when there is a problem with my service, and then only as a contact for that occasion only. I always make that very clear. This number should not be on your database. And you should not be calling it.

Paul: Anyways, I'm calling to tell you about our superb offer on landline prices.

BW: Do you have learning difficulties?

Paul: Erm... no... erm... why?

BW: Because a lifetime of working with people who have tells me that they tend not to always understand what I say very well, but, as you assure me that you haven't, then I'll have to assume you deliberately failed to hear what I said.

Paul: Oh... but this is a really good deal, it's so good that I've even switched to it myself.

BW: Trust me, it isn't a good deal. And if you really have switched to it, then you could have been wrong in your answer to my previous question.

Paul: Pardon?

BW: Both my landlines are on the best possible deal: pay for line rental a year ahead, and then only use over-ride call providers (at 5p per landline call) for calls.

Paul: How much is that then?

BW: £120 for the BT one, £114 for the TalkTalk one. Each saves around half its cost per year by you paying up front.

Paul: Wow, that's way better than our offer!

BW: As I said at the outset. Now, off you go, and do do your research before believing what's written on your carefully-prepared by your scum-bag marketing department script in future.

Paul: Oh god, I've only just changed and I think it was a two year contract!

BW: And can you go on conning other people now? I couldn't...

Paul: I hate this bloody job!

*******************************

And, further to one of the comments under my last post, Verity clearly has developed Witchy Powers: Radio 4 at 12.30pm today - a half-hour Face the Facts programme about crime on cruise ships. Scary listening. I had no idea.

Thanks too for the ideas for the Nice Ladies Show Exhibit. We managed to come up with two excellent ways of staging, one for each theme, but couldn't come up with good-enough connected ideas for the items required, so I suspect I've got 30-odd more hours than I expected this summer. Excellent.

No Wikipedia today, thanks to the nutters in America. Hard to believe that Wikipedia hasn't been with us for more than... what, eight, nine years? I can't remember, and it's not around to ask! Yes, yes, other sources are available (and there are ways around, if you can be bothered to fiddle, or use a mobile device, but...

The internet is threatened so the people who control the presentation of information take action by blacking out? I'm not quite sure about that. Some internety companies are just too powerful now. And will get more powerful the more the social media bods give away their personal information. I doubt that was what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented it.

Monday Monday

Anyone for a cruise? Lots going cheap I understand...

Personally I can't think of anything worse than being locked in a closed environment with thousands of other people, with bright lights and extraneous noise, fed over-rich food and made to sit on tables with other people, at set times, and forced to buy over-priced alcohol, and give tips irrespective of standard of service, having to change outfits several times a day and wear a dress (and make up) for dinner, and only being allowed ashore in commercial meccas where consumerism is the god. I think I would rather spend two weeks in a prison than on a cruise ship.

Something that came up today amazed me... how would you multipy a number by 4? For example (as the method might vary according to the number), 64, or 224? No right and wrong answers, I'm just interested.

And finally, what will the world be like in 100 years time? Depressing reading. Please stop breeding folks. It always amuses me that some of the people I know who claim to be greenest have more than the replacement number of children for themselves.