The grumpy thread

25,074 · January 30

Frigging Royal Fail!

I bought a new Ethernet cable off eBay for my PlayStation a few weeks back. Payed extra to get it 24hr post. It didn’t turn up. Reported it to eBay after the last expected delivery day, as usual. Seller then decides to put the tracking details up which show it delivered. So I look at the tracking on Royal Mail website - sure enough, delivered, with a lovely little photo of my parcel and some other cunts front door! Ah well, delivered is delivered right!? Who cares where to.

Then today. I have a parcel due to arrive (different courier) so I’m waiting in for that anyway. So I had two parcels to post that I’d sold on eBay so I used Royal Mail’s online service to book and pay for the postage and have them collect the two parcels… as they offer to do it.
No sign of the postie all day! Then I get two emails saying ‘we’ve successfully completed your collection’… errr. No. I have the parcels here on the side board next to the front door!
Try the online tracking just out of interest and the bloody tracking has somehow started progressing despite the parcels still being in my hand! How!? Surely they need to scan the barcodes on the parcels when they get collected for that to happen?

Whats happening with Royal Mail. At my old house they were absolutely brilliant but here it’s absolutely shit.

1,228 · January 30

Royal mail! Yeah, so in the news it said they're only going to do deliveries every other day, particularly for second class?

I must be missing something. It's been like that round here for the last 3 years.

10,651 · January 30

Usual Thursday evening at art club down in hartlepool

got a lift there off one of my mates

he fell over and fucked his shoulder so I had to drive us back in his car

74 plate Hyundai Tucson

One of these but black

fuck me what a nannying car

manoeuvring out the parking space it did an emergency stop and beeped at me, cos it was a tight spot and I had to get close to the car in front at 1mph to get out

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

oh yes, I dared to venture to 31mph

beep every time a speed limit changed

beep every road sign it saw

braking for me at random

swerving towards parked cars when I was passing on the centre line

i mean, it looks great and drives really nicely

nah I can’t be done with moderns

stupid acceleration too

throttle on or off

im glad I don’t have a car like that

oh yes, it cost £48k

19,197 · January 30

3 hours ago, danthecapriman said:

Frigging Royal Fail!

I bought a new Ethernet cable off eBay for my PlayStation a few weeks back. Payed extra to get it 24hr post. It didn’t turn up. Reported it to eBay after the last expected delivery day, as usual. Seller then decides to put the tracking details up which show it delivered. So I look at the tracking on Royal Mail website - sure enough, delivered, with a lovely little photo of my parcel and some other cunts front door! Ah well, delivered is delivered right!? Who cares where to.

Then today. I have a parcel due to arrive (different courier) so I’m waiting in for that anyway. So I had two parcels to post that I’d sold on eBay so I used Royal Mail’s online service to book and pay for the postage and have them collect the two parcels… as they offer to do it.
No sign of the postie all day! Then I get two emails saying ‘we’ve successfully completed your collection’… errr. No. I have the parcels here on the side board next to the front door!
Try the online tracking just out of interest and the bloody tracking has somehow started progressing despite the parcels still being in my hand! How!? Surely they need to scan the barcodes on the parcels when they get collected for that to happen?

Whats happening with Royal Mail. At my old house they were absolutely brilliant but here it’s absolutely shit.

I can't really explain any of that, especially the pick up. As you say, we have to scan the packets when we pick them up. It's beyond me.

As for the rest of it, it's all part of the race to the bottom I'm afraid. We now have a two tier workforce. Anybody taken on in the last year or two is on less money, longer hours and worse conditions (like no paid breaks). What they are getting paid isn't much more than minimum wage (the minimum wage keeps going up faster than our own pay rises).

Then the way we do things was changed quite dramatically around the same time. Most deliveries in our office were shared vans. So two people working together from one van. They would take everything for their area from letters to the biggest packets. Now we have DPRs, dedicated parcel routes. They take all the bigger packets but just do packets and nothing else. But that didn't make the shared van duties easier because they made them all longer to make up for doing less packets.

Anyway most of these new starters are the guys doing the DPRs. And they have no incentive to do the job any better than any of the other couriers because they are on basically the same terms.

When I started 34 years ago it was seen as a career. There were plenty of old boys there who had never done anything else. Some had started as telegram boys! Nobody comes into it now thinking of it as anything other than a stop gap until something better comes along so they have no reason to care. The staff turnover at the lower end is huge.

This is the future. I've got around ten years until retirement so I'm just going to stay and watch the company fall apart around me.

16,686 · January 30

No words..

4,788 · January 30

Common practice everywhere now.

25,074 · January 30

13 hours ago, Yoss said:

I can't really explain any of that, especially the pick up. As you say, we have to scan the packets when we pick them up. It's beyond me.

As for the rest of it, it's all part of the race to the bottom I'm afraid. We now have a two tier workforce. Anybody taken on in the last year or two is on less money, longer hours and worse conditions (like no paid breaks). What they are getting paid isn't much more than minimum wage (the minimum wage keeps going up faster than our own pay rises).

Then the way we do things was changed quite dramatically around the same time. Most deliveries in our office were shared vans. So two people working together from one van. They would take everything for their area from letters to the biggest packets. Now we have DPRs, dedicated parcel routes. They take all the bigger packets but just do packets and nothing else. But that didn't make the shared van duties easier because they made them all longer to make up for doing less packets.

Anyway most of these new starters are the guys doing the DPRs. And they have no incentive to do the job any better than any of the other couriers because they are on basically the same terms.

When I started 34 years ago it was seen as a career. There were plenty of old boys there who had never done anything else. Some had started as telegram boys! Nobody comes into it now thinking of it as anything other than a stop gap until something better comes along so they have no reason to care. The staff turnover at the lower end is huge.

This is the future. I've got around ten years until retirement so I'm just going to stay and watch the company fall apart around me.

Shit! I didn’t know things had got so bad at Royal Mail. Although most big companies are like it now. Squeeze as much as possible out of everyone and everything in exchange for as little as they can get away with.

The pick up thing is bizarre. I used to get on well with our old postie back when I was in Waterlooville and she showed me the little scanner thingy one day and how it all worked, sure enough when she scanned the label on the parcel shortly after an email came through to say it had been collected. Then when the parcel goes through various other parts of its journey and gets scanned again, that’s when the tracking details update through to delivery.
Im not sure how the system has managed to do what it has here though. How can it begin tracking when it hasn’t been scanned!? Even weirder is it’s doing it on two separate parcels!
I do have a theory, though obviously it’s nothing more. That maybe the postie had some labels in the van (although I’d specified they didn’t need them as I print my own) and they couldn’t be bothered to collect so scanned the spare labels in the van.
It does seem very slack here. Back in Waterlooville it was really good, couldn’t really fault it. Here I’ve had the above two problems and a big parcel with loads of Xmas presents inside for family up north disappeared without trace at Coleford depot. They collected it, the tracking started and got to Coleford depot then just stopped and the parcel never arrived. Tracking never updated again and so far over a month later they haven’t found it or updated us on our complaint and compensation claim for it.
The complaint and claim I made for the Ethernet cable that was delivered to the wrong address has gone unanswered now for going on a week.

Still, hopefully tomorrow I can get the two parcels to the Coleford depot and actually get them into the system on their way. I shan’t bother arguing or saying anything though, it’s not the person at the offices fault and as long as they get posted I don’t care at this point.

3,300 · January 31

Many many of these selfish fuckrrs seen regularly.

7,013 · January 31

Got a lot of love for the nhs but their pants are shit! I'll spare you all a pic of me in them though will add revealing and itchy!

The socks are cosy in comparison.

39,628 · January 31

If January could just stop kicking us all in the balls, that'd be great.

This'll teach me for going up to the dump, where screws and nails frolic with wild abandon across the tarmac and no-one ever sweeps up.

The spare, which was supposedly repaired a month or two ago after a puncture in identical circumstances, is also not holding air - it's every bit as soft as the one I took off, and of course didn't realise until after I'd swapped them over. Used my daft little Draper compressor to at least get enough pressure in it to drive on.

Booked in for two new tyres (and tracking) on Monday, since apparently fast-fit places don't keep tyres in stock anymore, they just hold them all in a central warehouse. And don't do Saturdays.

Marvellous.

11,355 · January 31

2 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

Booked in for two new tyres (and tracking) on Monday, since apparently fast-fit places don't keep tyres in stock anymore, they just hold them all in a central warehouse.

You're better off at an independent. The prices are the same, anyway. They'll have stock of most popular sizes. And normally you just turn up and wait in the queue.

39,628 · January 31

10 minutes ago, artdjones said:

You're better off at an independent. The prices are the same, anyway. They'll have stock of most popular sizes. And normally you just turn up and wait in the queue.

It is an independent:

https://www.magowantyres.co.uk/

There aren't any chains locally at all anymore; I'd have to travel about fifteen miles over to the far side of Belfast if I wanted to go to a branch of Kwik Fit (and I don't).

I used to use ATS but they pulled out of Northern Ireland about twenty years ago.

Despite saying they do same day fitting, the only tyres Magowan's could offer me today were a pair of HiFlys which would need brought down from their other branch at Mallusk, and after lots of fun* with a set of cheapie Stomils some years back, I find I don't much care for budget ditchfinders.

Davantis ordered.

7,069 · January 31

11 hours ago, danthecapriman said:

Shit! I didn’t know things had got so bad at Royal Mail. Although Maoist big companies are like it now. Squeeze as much as possible out of everyone and everything in exchange for as little as they can get away with.

I feel ignorant, but that doesn't seem very Maoist (at least in theory) to me. Wasn't it to do with the industrialisation of rural working class people?

11,355 · January 31

2 minutes ago, Datsuncog said:

It is an independent:

https://www.magowantyres.co.uk/

There aren't any chains locally at all anymore; I'd have to travel about fifteen miles over to the far side of Belfast if I wanted to go to Kwik Fit (and I don't).

Despite saying they do same day fitting, the only tyres they could offer me today were a pair of HiFlys which would need brought down from their other branch at Mallusk, and after lots of fun* with a set of cheapie Stomils some years back, I find I don't much care for budget ditchfinders.

Pretty poor service. All the ones around here keep good stocks. If I was desperate there's a tyre dealer about 12 miles away who's also a wholesalers. They have a gigantic shed absolutely stuffed with every conceivable size by the roadside miles from any village. It's bad that you can't get a common size in what seems to be a pretty urban environment.

11,355 · January 31

3 minutes ago, horriblemercedes said:

I feel ignorant, but that doesn't seem very Maoist (at least in theory) to me. Wasn't it to do with the industrialisation of rural working class people?

I think it's predictive text mangling the word most. Although the companies he's describing seem to be run on a similarly productive basis to Maoism during the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

25,074 · January 31

29 minutes ago, horriblemercedes said:

I feel ignorant, but that doesn't seem very Maoist (at least in theory) to me. Wasn't it to do with the industrialisation of rural working class people?

I have to admit, I read that and was wondering wtf you were going on about. Then I read my own post and realised that somehow my iPad has somehow changed the word ‘most’ for ‘Maoist’!😆

Ive edited the post now to say ‘most’.

Which leads me on to another grump.
iPad’s. Why is the predictive text thing so shit!? I’m not sure you can turn it off either?

1,228 · January 31

Try going into a specialist tyre place and asking about 10 inch tyres.

They look at you like your brain fell down the back of your neck🤦

52,835 · January 31

Fucking cars. Ungrateful bastards. Why can't they just WORK?

20,964 · January 31

On 30/01/2025 at 07:50, UltraWomble said:

Waste of time it appears

Maybe not....

14,318 · January 31

Fuck.

Cunting wank fucking bastard prick shit dickhead bawbag wank fuck.

That is all.

7,494 · January 31

You can get a replacement cheap enough on ebay, if you look in my thread where I changed the aux tensioner on my Pug partner, it gives a good technique for shifting shit like this.

59,485 · January 31

Couldn't you just hammer a smaller soc... Oh, right.

7,802 · January 31

Nut chewing thingies?

21,417 · January 31

23 hours ago, maxxo said:

Usual Thursday evening at art club down in hartlepool

got a lift there off one of my mates

he fell over and fucked his shoulder so I had to drive us back in his car

74 plate Hyundai Tucson

One of these but black

fuck me what a nannying car

manoeuvring out the parking space it did an emergency stop and beeped at me, cos it was a tight spot and I had to get close to the car in front at 1mph to get out

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

oh yes, I dared to venture to 31mph

beep every time a speed limit changed

beep every road sign it saw

braking for me at random

swerving towards parked cars when I was passing on the centre line

i mean, it looks great and drives really nicely

nah I can’t be done with moderns

stupid acceleration too

throttle on or off

im glad I don’t have a car like that

oh yes, it cost £48k

You not should complain about such things. I did about the hire car I had in The Netherlands and some @@@@@@ on here castigated me because they think different to me about the nanny ~~state~~ car.

3,609 · January 31

23 hours ago, Yoss said:

I can't really explain any of that, especially the pick up. As you say, we have to scan the packets when we pick them up. It's beyond me.

As for the rest of it, it's all part of the race to the bottom I'm afraid. We now have a two tier workforce. Anybody taken on in the last year or two is on less money, longer hours and worse conditions (like no paid breaks). What they are getting paid isn't much more than minimum wage (the minimum wage keeps going up faster than our own pay rises).

Then the way we do things was changed quite dramatically around the same time. Most deliveries in our office were shared vans. So two people working together from one van. They would take everything for their area from letters to the biggest packets. Now we have DPRs, dedicated parcel routes. They take all the bigger packets but just do packets and nothing else. But that didn't make the shared van duties easier because they made them all longer to make up for doing less packets.

Anyway most of these new starters are the guys doing the DPRs. And they have no incentive to do the job any better than any of the other couriers because they are on basically the same terms.

When I started 34 years ago it was seen as a career. There were plenty of old boys there who had never done anything else. Some had started as telegram boys! Nobody comes into it now thinking of it as anything other than a stop gap until something better comes along so they have no reason to care. The staff turnover at the lower end is huge.

This is the future. I've got around ten years until retirement so I'm just going to stay and watch the company fall apart around me.

Privatisation of public services has been a disaster. Fact. See my post on the 'Red Robbo' thread for when I worked for RM in the 80s for when things started to be ruined.

I am sick of rich bastards getting even richer from fucking my country over. From education to the postal service to the water from my fucking taps, some rich bastard is trying to chisel more money out of the public sector.

I am sick of it, and will also be glad to retire.

25,373 · January 31

1 hour ago, EyesWeldedShut said:

Nut chewing thingies?

Ouch.

😳

14,318 · Saturday at 11:11

14 hours ago, EyesWeldedShut said:

Nut chewing thingies?

These work well but unfortunately I've dug myself a hole.

I welded a nut on to the bolt head. This worked well, except in the process of loosening it somehow sheared off part of the bolt that also somehow is staying captive and spinning.

In the photo below I welded to the ring that surrounds the key face. From all the old bolts I have, and from the photos, that looks like part of the actual bolt body but apparently isn't.

So now I have a welded blob that just spins. It's not one of those rotating collar designs, the outer is definitely designed to be solid, so I have no idea how this is possible.

Fucking dogshit design. I'd rather have all my wheels nicked than deal with this.

3,018 · Saturday at 11:45

On 30/01/2025 at 21:25, maxxo said:

Usual Thursday evening at art club down in hartlepool

got a lift there off one of my mates

he fell over and fucked his shoulder so I had to drive us back in his car

74 plate Hyundai Tucson

One of these but black

fuck me what a nannying car

manoeuvring out the parking space it did an emergency stop and beeped at me, cos it was a tight spot and I had to get close to the car in front at 1mph to get out

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

oh yes, I dared to venture to 31mph

beep every time a speed limit changed

beep every road sign it saw

braking for me at random

swerving towards parked cars when I was passing on the centre line

i mean, it looks great and drives really nicely

nah I can’t be done with moderns

stupid acceleration too

throttle on or off

im glad I don’t have a car like that

oh yes, it cost £48k

This seems to be a problem with most cars from about 2020 onwards, even cheaper stuff.

We briefly had a 22-plate Hyundai Kona in 2023. We only got it because the other half wanted a newer car, but she drove it once and refused to drive it again after the numerous random emergency stops it kept performing. It also tried to steer itself into parked cars if you crossed the white line on the centre of the road.

Such a stressful car to drive, and the driver aids were more likely to cause an accident than prevent one.

I ended up selling it via Motorway within a couple of months.

14,318 · Saturday at 11:57

A good strong coffee and some anger has got me in a slightly better position by knocking that collar and welds off.

19,197 · Saturday at 12:36

1 hour ago, juular said:

These work well but unfortunately I've dug myself a hole.

I welded a nut on to the bolt head. This worked well, except in the process of loosening it somehow sheared off part of the bolt that also somehow is staying captive and spinning.

In the photo below I welded to the ring that surrounds the key face. From all the old bolts I have, and from the photos, that looks like part of the actual bolt body but apparently isn't.

So now I have a welded blob that just spins. It's not one of those rotating collar designs, the outer is definitely designed to be solid, so I have no idea how this is possible.

Fucking dogshit design. I'd rather have all my wheels nicked than deal with this.

I have thrown all my locking wheel nuts away (apart from the Up! but we've only had it three weeks, give me time). They are more trouble than they are worth. They hark back to a time when alloy wheels were an expensive novelty. But now pretty much everything but the base models have them, I just don't see the point. When was the last time you saw a car with its wheels nicked?

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