dave21478

Post deleted for offensive language.

Most of the DIY places have Mastic Vitrage in tubes for a normal sealant gun. https://www.leroymerlin.fr/v3/p/produits/mastic-de-vitrier-blanc-300-ml-e1500204237 Im not convinced it isnt just silicone sealant.

Total cluster-fck as usual. Currently standing in a carpark in the pishing rain waiting as the seller waves his phone around in the air trying to get a good enough signal to do whatever needs done. Aye, this is tons better than a bit of paper and a ballpoint pen...well fcking done, France.

One year.

Really? Im not very careful about consumption, and my sums make that to be 1.80 or so per day not including the service charges....I thought that not unreasonable.

what is that? a photograph for ants? try this. https://s14.postimg.org/voembccpt/Untitled.jpg

If its any help this is my last bill.... living alone in a house with terrible insulation, wood and electric heating, electric water heater and lots of garage use...welding, grinding etc. [img]https://s14.postimg.org/voembccpt/Untitled.jpg[/img]

Within an hour or so drive of me every single brocante and troc shop has gone to the wall. Every now and then someone tries to open a new one, lasts for a few months and closes. I guess there just isnt a market for piles of manky old plates, incomplete sets of Ricard promotional glasses, massively heavy imposing old furniture that doesnt fit in modern houses, CRT tvs, piles of foosty old books and the occasional filth-encrusted kitchen appliance. Given the outrageous price of running a business here....rent, utilities, wages and the crazy taxes, I guess its hard to make the books balance for a couple running a brocante out of an industrial unit and having an average turnover of maybe a few quid a day. On the other hand, glossy Cash Converters type pawn shops seem to be doing well selling obsolete laptops for the price of a new one from Conforama, flatscreen tellys and countless numbers of mobile phones. Probably because they make it their business to buy them for a fraction of their worth from people hard up financially and make then believe its a good deal, then convince people slightly better off financially but maybe not well off enough to buy new stuff that its a good deal to buy used for almost new prices.....its a marketing dream. I just dont see charity shops being economically feasible in any way at all.

Fibre is apparently online in the nearby town. Slower than the old ADSL. You couldnt make this sh1t up.

I seem to have got this working reliably now too. Back on page 1 I was using an old smartphone sellotaped to the lounge window as a mobile hotspot with my sosh contract. while this worked fine, the phone was getting alarmingly hot and starting to get unreliable so I bit the bullet and bought a 3G/4G modem from amazon. its a TPLink brand and cost a hundred sheckels. The sosh card went straight in (there are sim card size adaptors included with the modem - it uses a full size sim and mine was a small one for the old phone) and once the pin number was entered it started working pretty much straight away. In the lounge it was giving similar speeds to the old phone....4-5mb down, approx 1 up. I spent an afternoon wandering around the house with it on an extension lead to find the best signal. This is a minor gripe....it has 4 leds that light up to show signal strength and even logging into the modem and checking the signal strength it only gives 4 divisions of 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent signal, but internet speed can vary greatly depending on the modem location even with "full" signal indicated. Best result was unsurprisingly in the loft next the the wee gable window that faces towards the nearest orange tower. I now get a consistant 8-10mb down and 2-3 up, the variance I assume depends on network load. It has been as high as 12 down in the small hours of the night. I ran a cable to it for power and fitted it into an old ice-cream tub with the two aerials poking out so keep the dust and spider out and stop loires pi55ing on it. I have a 40gb limit per month for 24 euros from Sosh, and so far its a little touch-and-go. I currently have 4gb left and it wont reset for another 6 days. I am waiting to see what is happening with the landline/adsl here. Frankly I think I will cancel it and buy a second Sosh card and swap over half-way through the month. This will give 80gb, which should be more than enough for under 50 sheets a month, which is what I am paying now. No more landline though but that doesnt bother me. The fart-sniffers at Orange have been digging around the area putting in patches on their already patched lines after several complaints from the commune but to no avail, its still 0.8mb down for me at best. Fibre is supposedly coming to the next village....well, it was supposed to be here at the start of last summer, then at the end of summer, then at the end of the year, now....who knows. Anyway, I will hang onto the ADSL line until fibre happens and see if it makes a difference. I think I might be too far from the exchange for a real improvement, as its just fibre to the exchange then their janky old copper to everyones houses. Looking at various websites giving mast location, they seem to be split about half and half as to whether my nearest is 4G or not. Its not, but I wonder if it will be upgraded soon - that should give me really fast speeds.

Who gives a flying one what colour it is? Most sit in a drawer for 50 weeks of the year and the other two are spent in a cheap digital safe in the bottom of a hotel room wardrobe. I doubt if the guy at Luton checking you onto the easyjet to Malaga gives a chuff what colour the cover is. Im glad that half-way through the transition period to severing links with Europe and bringing about the biggest geopolitical shakeup since God knows when, the important stuff like passport colour is decided....just all those tedious niggles like reciprocal healthcare, employment rights etc to decide now....they should be able to bash all that out in a morning and knock off for Pimms oclock. "look at these wonderful BRITISH BLUE passports..." "yeah, thats pretty. Does it give me the right to easily travel to, live and work in dozens of nearby countries?" "No." "What does it do, then?" "uh...its BLUE. British Blue." Cretins.

[quote user="andyh4"]My experience is more in line with Dave's and more often than not I get an email that following my absence they have delivered to the point relais - 11m away, but at least it is near the supermarket. Of course I have not been absent, they have just not bothered to even try. However having worked in logistics I can at least understand why this happens. 11km off the main drag means that they have a 22km round trip and at 90kph with say a 30 second drop off means that their traffic office will reckon on a 15 - 16 minute delivery off that main drag. on a good day with no hold ups I can do a one way trip in just under that time. The time pressures the drivers are put under makes it near impossible for them to maintain the traffic office schedules, so if they have a chance to gain a quarter of an hour by delivering to the point relais they take it. Only if they have an accumulation of packages (and especially if they are COD) for the village do they make the detour and actually deliver.[/quote] I totally understand why it happens. Maybe they could do something utterly crazy like...perhaps....employ more drivers? Madness, I know, but it might just work.

[quote user="richard51"]Dave - given your previous experiences why did you not use the relay service straight away? Frustrations can occur in the UK as well.[/quote] I wasnt given the option. Relay points only became available on the later message.

In further rants...courier companies. Every time...EVERY SINGLE TIME i order something, there is a problem with delivery. Got a text message on Monday asking me what day I would like my delivery. Since I live somewhere remote they couldnt be more specific than "between 9am and 8pm". I chose delivery for the following day and sacked off work, opting to do some jobs round the house while waiting. No show the next day and I got a text message about 4pm...Sorry, we cant deliver it, please choose another day. There is no way to phone up and speak to someone...by God, I looked long and hard, but then thought, whats the point? they wont give a 5hit, they will just feed me whatever they think i want to hear and carry on as before. I have reselected to have it delivered to a relay point tomorrow.....we will see. I get it...its Christmas, they are probably busy, but Jesus, its not rocket science and yet I still get screwed around by every single courier company out there. When I become ruler, every employee of every courier company, from directors down to the cleaners will be executed in a horribly grisly manner, probably involving chainsaws. This will be shown live on all channels over a week or so and be mandatory viewing for all. The sudden availability of thousands of jobs will solve the employment problems and hopefully having seen what happened to their predecessors, the new employees should be suitably motivated to not screw up one of the oldest and simplest professions in the history of civilisation.

Someone I know told me about their mortgage and how is would be paid off this year.....if their bank had not screwed up and "lost" five years worth of payments at the start of the mortgage term. The monthly amount was taken without problem, but where that money went....literally nobody knows. Certainly not towards paying down their mortgage. Their branch couldnt do anything. Their personal adviser in the branch retired during this time and the replacement couldnt figure out what was going on....mortgage from previous property, bridging loan, some kind of deal for VAT reduction on rennovation on the new place....apparently it was "complicated". Head office couldnt do anything. Some kind of banking ombudsman got nowhere....it just faded away and they gave up with it all a long time ago and just accept that they have a further five years to slog. If that were me i would have been onto the cozzers at least and more likely would have ended up making the news and then not having to worry about mortgage, or any other expenses, for the next six years or whatever murder gets you these days. Caisse D'epargne, if you need to know.