London Metropolitan police have been fined over Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes shooting in a London Tube station back in 2005.
It has been fined £175,000 with £385,000 costs for endangering the public in the shooting of Jean Charles.
I find this amazing – no one is going to be held culpable. Cressida Dick, who was in charge of the operation has been accused in the past of not being in control of the officers under her!
I got pissed off at the Oxted and Edenbridge Show this year. So I decided to complain. I got the secretary’s email from the Edenbridge and Oxted website and wrote her the email below. the reply I got was so condescending I decided that it needed a post category of its own!
Read on – this is my initial email:
Hi -,
As a family of five visiting the Oxted and Edenbridge show on Monday, I have to say that overall it was a nice day – even without the livestock.
I was, however, disgusted with the prices of the fairground rides once again. With three children and two adults entries into the show it was a small fortune anyway, but to be held to ransom over the fairground rides really marred the day. The kids were so looking forward to the rides but at the cost of £2.00 per person for a four minute ride on the teacups was way too extravagant. The ghost train seemed a better deal at £1.50 but was so appallingly short that it was in face even worse value for money than the smaller childrens’ rides. We cut our visit short after those two rides much to the disappointment of the kids.
I am writing this in the hope that you will take it on board. I expect that there were many many parents thinking or even writing the same thing that I am. Perhaps next year you could try and book a fairground group that aren’t as greedy – although I expect that in some part their high prices are in direct response to the price they are charged for the pitch.
The condescending and somewhat snotty reply that I got is below:
Dear Mr. -
Thank you for your email from which we regret to note your concern about prices of fairground rides. Whilst we agree with your concern regrettably the charges are in fact similar wherever fairground rides are present up and down the country.
We make every attempt to include lots of attractions and entertainment for visitors to watch and participate in and mostly these are all included in the admission charges.
We are sorry the cost of these rides ruined your visit but we do hope you will visit again in the future and perhaps persuade your children there are far more fun things to do and watch than the fair, which is just a very small part of the whole show.
Regards -
I realised quite fast that I was dealing with someone that I was not going to get a satisfactory response from so decided to post my correspondence here so that others may comment or at least be prepared.
For the record, the prices were very much on the high side for fairground rides – even for the ripped off south east – but that wasn’t particularly my gripe: the quality of the rides were appalling. The Ghost train was pathetic! If the Oxted and Edenbridge show need to make prices as high as they were then they need to make sure that the people they book are providing quality.
In response to this statement:
and perhaps persuade your children there are far more fun things to do and watch than the fair
I challenge anyone to steer their kids away from the fairground attractions. After all – it’s why they put them there!
I’d like to hear from others who feel that they have been ripped off at the Oxted and Edenbridge Show.
Well it seems that the:
Shipley Bridge Garage
Antlands Lane
Horley
Surrey
RH6 9TE
Has made my list.
I took a car to be MOT’s at this garage and as suspected it failed. I was called by the owner and asked what I wanted to do. As there were very minor fail points; wiper blades, a light bulb and a weak spray from the washer on to the windscreen he suggested that it would be cheaper for me to leave the car with them to do the work as I would not be charged a re test fee if they completed the works. “OK”. I agreed. “Don’t let the cost run away if there is a problem with the washer motor”. I said.
I went to pick up the car and the total bill, including the MOT was £120.00 the test fee was £45.00. Two wiper blades cost say, a maximum of £12.00 and a bulb, what? A quid? 2 quid max? No washer motor had been replaced. So I got charged £61.00 approx labour charge for 5 minutes work? What a rip off! I said the person who I was dealing with “That can’t be right, they haven’t replaced the washer motor” So she queried it with the garage owner who told her that he had had to take apart the motor to fix it and that was why the labour cost was so high. I checked, the motors cannot be taken apart. I asked a mechanic friend of mine (ironically, the person who would have done the work for me for a fraction of the cost and still saved me money even though I would have had to have paid £25.00 for the retest) and he said that they would have just cleared the washer feed line with an air line. Typically, the washers still do not work great even after spending so much on labour.
Anyway, due to the greed of this local businessman I have decided that a fair warning to others would not go amiss.
Please note that the car sales part of this garage, which I believe is a separately owned business, is not implicated in my gripe.
I hope that it helps you to make an informed decision about the Shipley Bridge Garage if you are planning to have any work done there. They seem to be unable to check their greed even though it means that I for one will never MOT there again and this blog may further damage their pocket.
WTF is going on in Surrey roads? The roads are getting really dangerous. There are so many really deep holes on my way to work I am surprised that there hasn’t been a serious accident. In some places the road is just disintegrating from the verge outwards.
Has anyone else noticed the appalling state of the roads in Surrey? Is it just Surrey roads or is the lapse wider spread.
I will try and post some pictures of the larger holes that I see every day.
This is the directory is the height of arrogance! They ask for a banner link, which MUST be displayed on your index or home page prominently, which for starters is plain wrong! I hope that this questionable tactic of gaining more Google Page Rank than they give gets them banned from the search engines. No one should have to add a banner to get a link from a directory! I urge anyone who sees this first to remove his or her links! They will not do your site any good at all. Very few directories govern enough traffic to actually make it worthwhile and there are millions of better directories that do not demand a link back – especially from the index page!
What happens if you do add their link? Well. firstly, scroll down to the bottom of the page and read what it says there:
“Site submissions are currently closed while we work through our backlog of submitted sites.”
What the hell doesn’t it say that at the top? FFS!
And then, further down:
“Altering our link codes above may lead to your site being declined for listing in the UKSHOPSBoom directory.
We cannot give reasons as to why your site was not chosen to be listed.”
This means that you cannot even add the rel=”nofollow” link attribute that works like a kind of “link condom” to stop your site contracting any social diseases.
UK Boom Directory is wrong and bad. I don’t recommend that anyone add his or her site to it.
Instead, I urge you to add to The UK Small Business Directory where you will not be forced to link to anything. Has both free and paid for listings. Is a better directory. We are not affiliated with the UK Small Business Directory and receive nothing for writing this. We just don’t like to see people taking advantage!
Having just read an account of what was supposed to happen on the 17th October 2006 I noted some distasteful remarks about me amongst the miss spellings and bad grammar on this page 17th October 2006 by some burned out SEO Hack has-been and I quote “an old dead beat Chap who writes graffiti on nice bits of stone“. I was eager to point out to him that, deadbeat I may be, at least my site was still ranking in the top 10 of google for the phrase “Queens Christmas Speech” I noticed that his site was actually one or two places above mine, so I will keep quiet about that!
I would also like to bring up the slanderous comments on a blog (now a banned user I note) likening me to tomatoes. Tomatoes FFS!
This fucks me off. I get an email, below:
Hi Jez
Friend Ref – (TA1F3Z5F2QZ)
Your e-mail address (jez@irksu.co.uk) has been entered into the Who-Remembers-Me.com “Tell a friend” link by one of your friends in order for us to send you a short note recommending this web-site as they feel it maybe of interest to you.
So, I think, “I will have a look, see who is adding my email address to that site”. I get there and of course you have to pay £5.00 and be a full member before you can use the search facility. So I do. All signed up – totally distracted from busy fucking day. Pay by paypal as I am intrigued to see who remembers me. I cannot find a search that lets me find who added my name to the fucking site! What fucking use is that? FFS, I am pissed off with that! Five fucking quid to join an utterly fucking useless site that probably added my email themselves from a harvest fucking bot list they bought just for this purpose!
So, a word of warning, if you get an intriguing email from this site telling you that someone has entered you email address and you would like to see who that person was, well you fucking can’t so don’t waste your cash.
Glass Solutions
Unit 6/6a
Green Lane Business Park
Green Lane
Eltham
London
SE9 3TL
020 8851 2999
I wonder what I could write about Glass Solutions. It could go either way really. I could write something flattering about the company and the people that work for it or I could publish all of our correspondence on this page and let every sub contractor know what sort of a company they are.
I hope that this page should rank number one in google and other search engines for the phrase Glass Solutions failing that, I am sure that it would rank very well for the address. Something that more and more people do to see if there are any informational pages such as this about a company. Only about 25 days to go until we all know for sure!
