The grumpy thread

[scorchio69]

Continuing to endure the wife’s lease deal Nissan Ariya, aside from giving me chronic back pain the range hit in the cold is just a pain in the ring ( around 100 miles less and it’s not even sub zero today )especially when you have to visit the in-laws in the central belt, supposed “fast charging “ in the new Dundee hub that frankly isn’t whilst looking around seeing the other EV drivers sitting in their cars looking just as miserable.

Wife has already said they car stick their EV,s up their ring and it will be her last.

[Zelandeth]

I am continuing to be increasingly convinced that the best type of neighbour situation is where your nearest one is >5 miles away.

One of ours (rental, seems to change hands about every six months) has finally, after nearly three years finally trimmed a hedge which was sufficiently overgrown that you had to walk into the road to get around it.  Great!

Unfortunately, they've just dumped all the cuttings on the ground around our hedging rather than take it away.  Not so great.  So I'll be paying to get that cleared up then I guess.

[myglaren]

Shove it onto their drive.

[Metal Guru]

Just posted the Xmas cards. Only trouble is, there were about 12 without stamps sandwiched  between three in top with left over stamps from last year and some prepaid business envelopes on the bottom.

My wife wrote them, stacked them like that and just asked me to post them ffs!

Just emailed everyone to tell them not to pay. 

[Zelandeth]

2 hours ago, myglaren said:

Shove it onto their drive.

They don't have one.  I had considered piling it up in front of their door, but that would also entail blocking the footpath and require as much work as just getting rid of it.

[myglaren]

Dob them in for littering/fly tipping.

[vulgalour]

Okay, fine, I get it.  Instagram is all about thirst traps for desperate lonely boys with strong right arms.  I get that it assumes I'm one of them and the token Morgans are at least car related.  I'm a new user, fine, okay.

 

Give me strength though.  There's pages and pages and pages of this.  Just thirst posts and plastic surgery and Americans in sad beige rooms as far as the mouse can scroll.  It's fucking depressing.

That's okay, apparently all I need to do is engage with accounts to train the algorithm, get it to understand what I do as a small business, what my interests are, all that good stuff.  It can take a while.

Urgh.

 

I remain incredibly unconvinced by this social media platform.  At every step it puts effort in to making sure that for me, as a small business user, it's just a time sink.  Hyperlinks are just turned into text so you can't direct people to your stuff.  It regularly presents that message above so trying to get posts out on any sort of schedule is basically impossible.  There is no infinite timeline, only the most recent posts, unless you manually go to individual profiles to see their feed like it's 2004 or something.  I swear it's designed by the same people who hide the exit in department stores.  There is nothing appealing about it at all.  I've done it because of the number of other people yammering at me to use it (who, interestingly, aren't following my account or expressing any interest in it so wtf?) and the Job Centre wanting to make sure I'm showing willing and doing everything I can.

I've had genuinely better success in the same period of time using Mastodon than I have Instagram, and found more meaningful connections, and made sales, and been able to promote my work with a considerably smaller audience to access.  I shall persist with this garbage fire of a platform because I'm obligated to, not because I want to.  Apparently you need to give it three months where you feed it regular updates before it starts to work.  However, I can see why so many other small business and creatives I know have dropped it like a hot stone at the first opportunity.

[BorniteIdentity]

8 minutes ago, vulgalour said:

Okay, fine, I get it.  Instagram is all about thirst traps for desperate lonely boys with strong right arms.  I get that it assumes I'm one of them and the token Morgans are at least car related.  I'm a new user, fine, okay.

 

Give me strength though.  There's pages and pages and pages of this.  Just thirst posts and plastic surgery and Americans in sad beige rooms as far as the mouse can scroll.  It's fucking depressing.

That's okay, apparently all I need to do is engage with accounts to train the algorithm, get it to understand what I do as a small business, what my interests are, all that good stuff.  It can take a while.

Urgh.

 

I remain incredibly unconvinced by this social media platform.  At every step it puts effort in to making sure that for me, as a small business user, it's just a time sink.  Hyperlinks are just turned into text so you can't direct people to your stuff.  It regularly presents that message above so trying to get posts out on any sort of schedule is basically impossible.  There is no infinite timeline, only the most recent posts, unless you manually go to individual profiles to see their feed like it's 2004 or something.  I swear it's designed by the same people who hide the exit in department stores.  There is nothing appealing about it at all.  I've done it because of the number of other people yammering at me to use it (who, interestingly, aren't following my account or expressing any interest in it so wtf?) and the Job Centre wanting to make sure I'm showing willing and doing everything I can.

I've had genuinely better success in the same period of time using Mastodon than I have Instagram, and found more meaningful connections, and made sales, and been able to promote my work with a considerably smaller audience to access.  I shall persist with this garbage fire of a platform because I'm obligated to, not because I want to.  Apparently you need to give it three months where you feed it regular updates before it starts to work.  However, I can see why so many other small business and creatives I know have dropped it like a hot stone at the first opportunity.

Sorry to be a pump, but anyone who thinks organic posting on Instagram equates to a successful marketing campaign is going to have the same, grimly predictable results.

IG/Meta is a business.  They have been steadily strangling the reach of organic posting over the last few years because they want and need revenue.  You sticking links into the slug of your posts takes people away from their walled garden and away from their revenue streams.  So it doesn't happen.

Digital Marketing is supremely effective, very efficient and absolutely transforms businesses.  But you need to mean it.  Mean business.  Otherwise you're going to get 4 likes a time from your friends and no sales.  

Obvs I wish you every success, but I've seen hundreds of businesses over the last 10 years struggle because they think posting on Facebook each day will bring the customers in.  The reality is, it doesn't.  (Remember - they're customers at the point of purchase, not point of being a fan)

Good luck man.

[barefoot]

I agree, I used to post my stuff on utube, but it all fell flat. Posted something very targeted, got 13000 hits in about an hour and an award for some fastest whatsit bollocks

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f1q23RvLVaM

and barely used it again.

[vulgalour]

14 minutes ago, BorniteIdentity said:

Sorry to be a pump, but anyone who thinks organic posting on Instagram equates to a successful marketing campaign is going to have the same, grimly predictable results.

IG/Meta is a business.  They have been steadily strangling the reach of organic posting over the last few years because they want and need revenue. 

Digital Marketing is supremely effective, very efficient and absolutely transforms businesses.  But you need to mean it.  Mean business.  Otherwise you're going to get 4 likes a time from your friends and no sales.  

 

Getting to grips with digital marketing has been a real challenge for me. When I'm told 'you have to mean it' I do mean it... I just don't communicate it well, mainly because I don't know what I'm doing wrong so I can learn how to do it right.  I have found Mastodon and Youtube to be surprisingly good for generating commissions and print sales which is why I persist with those, there is actually a reward for the effort sunk in.  I'm still struggling to see how IG even fits in with my business, I'm not very good at selling me and IG seems geared towards the cult of self rather than the promotion of business.  I can dump my product on there all I want but how do I get people to then follow up?

Digital marketing is really hard to do.  Any marketing is.  Especially so when you have no training in it.  I'm a bit stuck too in general.  I want to get some professional training so I can understand and enact some better strategies.  Unfortunately my health is still fragile and the Job Centre, for all their talk, are totally unwilling to help assist with getting on a training course.  Extra annoying is that I risk being sanctioned if I do undertake a course because it would be taking time away from my employment and right now I'm having to rely on the benefits support because I ended up signed off sick and some days I'm still struggling to do enough work to earn (today is one of those days, hooray for chronic pain).  It's a rotten situation to be in really.

I just want to succeed over here.  I'm putting the work in and doing the things I'm supposed to and I'm just not getting it right because there's only one of me and I'm a bit broken at the moment.

[Zelandeth]

1 hour ago, myglaren said:

Dob them in for littering/fly tipping.

To whom?  Council won't be interested as it's been dumped on private land?  Police?  Given their total and utter disinterest when I've tried to inform them of actual meaningful crimes in progress, yeah not even going to bother thinking about talking to them.

Did go round to knock on the door and ask politely if it could be dealt with in case it was a genuine mistake by whoever they had in to do the work (they had someone in to do it as I saw the van parked there and remembered thinking "Finally!" when I saw it - can't remember the bloody company though!).  Was met with a wall of "Sorry no speak English!" And the door literally slammed in my face, after I'd got precisely as far as saying "Hi, sorry to bo..."

Yeah, I could hear them nattering among themselves while on the way to open the door.  In English.

[dave j]

2 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

To whom?  Council won't be interested as it's been dumped on private land?  Police?  Given their total and utter disinterest when I've tried to inform them of actual meaningful crimes in progress, yeah not even going to bother thinking about talking to them.

Did go round to knock on the door and ask politely if it could be dealt with in case it was a genuine mistake by whoever they had in to do the work (they had someone in to do it as I saw the van parked there and remembered thinking "Finally!" when I saw it - can't remember the bloody company though!).  Was met with a wall of "Sorry no speak English!" And the door literally slammed in my face, after I'd got precisely as far as saying "Hi, sorry to bo..."

Yeah, I could hear them nattering among themselves while on the way to open the door.  In English.

This is the point at which I would now be dumping it outside their door, blocking the pavement or not!