What makes you grin? Antidote to grumpy thread

[808 Estate]

[808 Estate]

[High Jetter]

2 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Popped into Halfords (!) this evening to get a rear wiper blade for my Focus.. I've previously upgraded it with a Volvo C30 arm because the standard Ford one is small and coverage is shite, and I couldn't get a decent arm/blade combo that actually applied enough pressure to the screen after trying about 4 different types. 

Fitted a C30 arm and it works a treat, it covers significantly more of the rear screen and clears it well. A very worthwhile upgrade 

But now came the time to get a new blade for it. 

Instead of trying to explain "Volvo C30" to the factors when they INSIST on a reg number, it was only going to end up with me receiving about 5 wrong blades anyway, I thought I'd pop into Halfords and see what I could find on the shelf. 

Indeed I found a match, so took it to the till. 

Immediately got pounced upon: "can I interest you in fitting?" 

No thank you, [amusingly I was in my workwear so a bit of common sense would have dictated I'm handy with things like fitting wipers 😂] 

He was clearly a bit miffed that I'd declined his service so conversation as follows:

Him - "What car are you buying it for?" 

Me - "It's to go on my 06 Focus, I've previously fitted a Volvo C30 wiper arm to it."

He trots off to the wiper blade area without me asking, and comes back with another blade which he's decided is suitable based on the info I've given him about the car (2006 Focus) 

Now there's a bit of backwards and forwards because he's telling me the blade I've picked up isn't compatible with a 2006 Focus so it won't fit... I try to explain that a Focus wiper blade isn't going to fit because the arm has been replaced... 

He's still not having any of it and suggests once again that I pay the £6 extra to have it fitted so that they can make sure I'm buying the correct wiper blade. 

I've told him that I've already gone on their website, searched for a rear wiper for a Volvo C30, matched it with the one attached to my "upgraded arm" so I'm already satisfied with the original one that I've picked up off the shelf 

At last he allows me to buy the original blade that I selected. 

Of course he takes great pleasure in saying "no returns on this once you've opened it and realized its the wrong one" 

Now that's annoyed me a bit. So I thought I'd play a game. I've paid for it, then gone outside, removed the blade from the car and brought it back in, opening the box of the new one to show him that they are both alike. 

I've rejoined the queue for the till, visibly clutching the old and new blade. He's clocked me holding both blades. He greets me with a smug grin, but before he had a chance to put me in my place I've demonstrated the fact that the old and new blades are identical, but thanks all the same for all the effort he's gone to in order for me to buy the right one 😂

He wasn't happy 😂

Why go there, tho?

[RoverFolkUs]

8 hours ago, High Jetter said:

Why go there, tho?

Convenience. Price as well, I suppose. 

[Bfg]

59 minutes ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Convenience. Price as well, I suppose. 

😄 😄 😄

[Six-cylinder]

[Datsuncog]

3 hours ago, RoverFolkUs said:

Convenience. Price as well, I suppose. 

My local motor factor shuts up shop at 4pm each day, and the last time I went there looking for a pair of wiper blades they wanted £35 off me.

Yeah, no.

Having spent many years working for Halfords, and with no love whatsoever for them, I can see why still being open in the late afternoon/ early evening and having a Trade Card discount is enough of a draw. Hell, I still use them sometimes, for the same reasons.

That said, a significant subset of customers were quite strange, and having people buy completely the wrong part, against all advice from staff, and then stomp back in to the store in a strop demanding a full refund was, sadly, not uncommon.

I did the returns/ write-offs in my store, and the number of perfectly good items wrecked by horny-handed customers trying to force-fit wildly unsuitable items was considerable. 

The whole 'We'll Fit It!' thing was a joke though. As I recall that only came in after Halfords was bought by a private equity group who aimed to squeeze every last drop of value out of the company; prior to that we were always happy to sling in a battery or a bulb for nothing if someone asked us to.

Had it only been priced at a pound a go or something, then I imagine it might have been a popular enough measure - but charging a fiver to fit a £2 bulb was a trifle optimistic in 2006, so hardly anybody ever took us up on it (apart from Mégane II owners, who seemed more than happy to pay to watch us lacerating ourselves while trying to swap their painfully inaccessible headlight bulbs).

There were also some rather ambitious weekly conversion targets for each store - so if you sold, say, 100 sets of wipers in a week, then you would have been expected to put 33 wiper fitting codes though the till in that week. Same with batteries, same with bulbs. If you didn't meet your target, then the area manager would give you a bollocking, and a couple of weeks not meeting your 'Fit' targets meant that the store would likely lose out on the quarterly bonus.  Which was why we were instructed to push the fitting service quite robustly at every opportunity. 

I imagine a similar process still stands. Although, in the spirit of 'work smarter, not harder', we soon developed some workarounds...

[EyesWeldedShut]

Driving along today and found two of these 'shy' buggers having a WWF bout in the middle of the road. Stopped and had a Mexican standoff with them for about twenty seconds, then they legged it. 
Blurry snip from my AliExpress dashcam video below - Mk 1 eyeball was much, much better.
I'm dead chuffed.

[MikeR]

sort of well placed adverts on Face ache ...

[Matty]

22 hours ago, EyesWeldedShut said:

Dunnocks

Nah they're teacakes bud!

[EyesWeldedShut]

5 minutes ago, Matty said:

Nah they're teacakes bud!

I'd sooner have a Caramel Log myself  

[richardmorris]

[hairnet]

Mates are biking in croatia and the balkans down to northen greece

Sent these

[hairnet]

@PhilA

What do you recommend from here

[hairnet]

More toot from somewhere hot

[PhilA]

47 minutes ago, hairnet said:

@PhilA

What do you recommend from here

3 piece tenders with red beans and mashed potatoes w/gravy. And an apple pie.

 

Phil

[Datsuncog]

Wot no spinach?

[grizz]

Yup

 

They are out there. 

[Mally]

My granddaughter has been on an outward bound type thing with school. Aged 10. There's a bit of water involved.

A boy in the group is splashing water on a girl who is fully dressed. Girl asks him to please stop. He won't. She asks again politely.

He splashes again saying 'it's only water it will dry.   Adding, and anyway your Mum's a fat slag, who can't fit through a doorway!

The girl smacks him in the mouth and knocks his tooth out.

Head teacher  watching from a distance. Immediately comes out with. Well done xxxx for defending yourself.

Edit,

I've just been told the lad did slap her face twice just before she hit him,. So perfectly justified.

[Wibble]

54 minutes ago, Mally said:

My granddaughter has been on an outward bound type thing with school. Aged 10. There's a bit of water involved.

A boy in the group is splashing water on a girl who is fully dressed. Girl asks him to please stop. He won't. She asks again politely.

He splashes again saying 'it's only water it will dry.   Adding, and anyway your Mum's a fat slag, who can't fit through a doorway!

The girl smacks him in the mouth and knocks his tooth out.

Head teacher  watching from a distance. Immediately comes out with. Well done xxxx for defending yourself.

I wish there were more head teachers like that!

[LightBulbFun]

I am not sure which thread this technically goes into, but since it has very much made me grin im lobbing it in this one  

 

so I have had for a good few years now a nifty little clamp-meter Uni-T 210E, I picked this up because for a £40 clamp meter it was/is pretty well featured and the major appeal for me was the fact it had a 2A range, most clamp meters are designed for high amperage 10's or 100's of amps and it could also read DC amps, this is what made it quite popular with people in general, people trying to find that pesky battery drain on their car etc, but for me it was the low current ranges  so I could messure the current of lightbulb circuits without having to splice into things

seen here measuring the arc current of a 16W 2D fluorescent tube 

 

but unfortunately a fair while back I discovered that my meter on the current range, tends to under-read by an amount, and this was quite annoying because it was a very handy meter otherwise, to a degree I had an idea how much it under-read by using another known good meter to compare with so I was able to mentally offset the given value to get the actual value, but I really would of liked for it to just be accurate and so I dont have to mental maths every time I want to measure the current of a lightbulb

so eventually in the last couple days, I decided to finally sit down and see if I could do anything to calibrate it, and it turns out the Uni-T 210E because of its popularity with the electronics hobby scene has been quite throughly dug into, and not only have they figured out how the calibration works etc, but also how to adjust the general factory default settings on the meter and even unlock a bit more resolution, and this is what makes me grin, because its sold as a 2000 count meter, but thats just an artificial lock, the chipset inside these meters is good for up to 6000 counts or 9999 counts in the case newer ones like mine, and they figured out how to remove this soft 2000 count lock , all the factory meter setting and calibration data is stored on a EEPROM, so of course I immediately went about giving this it a bash, I dug out my CH341A EEPROM programmer, ordered a chip clip from Amazon (because I messed up my old one long ago), hooked it all up

fired up the suitably dodgy looking EEPROM Programmer reading-writing software in my totally legit  copy of windows 7 Virtual machine

and what do you know it worked! I was able to dump the EEPROM and load into a handy editor someone made, https://adlerweb.github.io/UT210E-Calculator/ tweak things as I wanted them and flash it back to the EEPROM  

 

so what this means in practice is I gain quite a bit of extra resolution, for example here is my meter (as you can tell by the worn rotary switch I have used this quite a bit!) measuring mains voltage from the wall, 235V as you can see

but now with the extra counts unlocked, I get an extra digit of resolution  as you can see, I can read mains voltage down to to the 100 millivolt rage 238.2V, previously it would get to 200.0V then switch to the next range up and as above you would lose the last digit but now thats no more  

this also works on the current ranges, so for example if the 2A current range previously if I went above 2.000A I would have to switch to the 20A range and lose resolution, now the 2A range is good for up to 9.999A  which will prove very handy for monitor discharge lamps as they run up and warm up etc over time

and of course finally going back round the original reason I started this endeavour is it means I can actually now adjust the calibration values and make the meter read more accurately on the previously out current ranges (for example going back to the very first picture, that 16W 2D lamp is actually running at 200mA not 182mA as the meter says it is) so I look forward to doing that (I have not done it right away yet because it involves a bit of work, I have to take ideally lots of readings going up in steps with a known good meter and then figure out what my correction value is, if a known good meter is reading 2A and the 210E is reading 1.8A then I know I need to correct for 0.2A etc 

there is a much more detailed video here for those who are into this sort of thing like I am  

https://github.com/bdlow/UT210E/blob/master/README.md

so yeah I am very pleased with discovering this and being able to successfully do it myself as it means I can finally actually use the meter as a current meter, it always annoyed me how close but so far it was, so very handy but ugh it was inaccurate, now I can fix that and really have a handy meter without fear of inaccuracy  

[hairnet]

Lol that england are in antigua fir the cricket 

Its raining harder there than here lmao

[hairnet]

Not looking good for the cricket as tms are replaying previous games

[LightBulbFun]

On 12/06/2024 at 21:03, RoverFolkUs said:

Instead of trying to explain "Volvo C30" to the factors when they INSIST on a reg number, it was only going to end up with me receiving about 5 wrong blades anyway,
----
[amusingly I was in my workwear so a bit of common sense would have dictated I'm handy with things like fitting wipers 😂] 

[lesapandre]

4 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

Yes and they probably list three completely different types for ' that year'.

😂

[hairnet]

@Saabnut

Nearly

[grizz]

I remember this. 

[Matty]

Saw this and couldn't resist cos I knew it'd make him laugh

(I'm 43 my dad's a bit older 🤣)

[horriblemercedes]

🥳

[iainrcz]

Our green waste bin arrived today.

We ordered it in March.

Apparently our local council send them on a 3 month jolly around the world before they start their life of servitude.

Ours particularly enjoyed its week in a yurt in Finland.

I'm now going to cram as much rotten grass in it as I can.