Separated at birth?

Posted on April 15, 2024 by james

Not quite, but it’s been irritating me that I was reminded of someone I couldn’t place every time she’s been in the news recently.

Pussy cat

Pussy Galore

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New old strawberries

Posted on April 15, 2024 by james

Whilst on the topic of strawberries, I’ve also now dug all of the remaining plants out of the old raised strawberry bed. I think there are around fifty in total. They’ve all been put into individual pots and as many as possible moved into Frankenstein’s greenhouse, but the last fifteen or so have had to stay outdoors. There’s no room left in any of the greehouses because plants are stacked up waiting to go out once the ground dries sufficiently (or are just sulking, in the case of the tomatoes).

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Is it Wimbledon already?

Posted on April 15, 2024 by james

I decided to remove the fleece that I’ve had over the new strawberry plants now the weather is a little warmer. Mostly it was there to keep the deer off whilst they got established anyhow. All the plants are looking well and I was amazed to find these, hidden under the leaves of one plant

It is an early variety, but this early? Checking over the others revealed a few more. Looks like we might be eating home-grown strawberries next month 😀

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Memory Lane, 11th December 2022: Don’t they come from the sea?

Posted on April 11, 2024 by james

Is what everyone I’ve shown these to says. I don’t know why. It seems to be a very common misconception, and one that I shared myself for a long time. Regardless I have now peeled and removed the flesh and seeds of all the loofah gourds, leaving me with these.

Not all of them will get used in the bathroom I think. Many might be find their way into the kitchen as pot scrubbers.

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Corporate musings

Posted on April 11, 2024 by james

I’ve never really considered it before and I’m not entirely sure when it started, but since I’ve been looking for work this time around it’s struck me that there is an entire group of people, I guess we could call them “exit strategists” who appear to be employed to make a company appear as profitable as possible and get it sold on to a larger business. Then they move on to the next one.

They appear to have no actual interest or belief in the businesses themselves or what they actually do beyond what is necessary to spew vaguely credible bullshit at any PR opportunity; it’s all about the money.

I’m really not convinced this is a healthy situation, not least because it’s pushing more potentially socially-valuable services into the hands of fewer and wealthier companies who just view their customers as a cash-cow. It’s also encouraging people who start businesses to view them as just a means of ending up with a large cash pay-off and their employees as necessary inconveniences and a drain on finances which in turn leads to a complete lack of respect and loyalty on both sides.

I’m not sure it’s even now possible to build a company for the long term, investing wisely in staff that are not just “resources” that will contribute by bringing in new ideas or different ways of doing things because they won’t be able to compete on price and over the long term will probably lose out.

It all comes down to money, doesn’t it? How awful.

I was struck by something Jimmy Carr said recently: that the most important thing to know in life is what you really want. If the answer is pots of money then you’re wrong. Money is just tokens. Stuff you can perhaps use to obtain what you really want. Valuing the tokens themselves is ridiculous; foolish even. And if you’re moving from company to company just trying to make a bigger and bigger pile, have you actually thought about how they’re going to serve you in getting what you want? Or have you spent so much time getting more tokens that you haven’t even had time to think what you want them for?

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BT are utterly bloody useless, part 3

Posted on April 11, 2024 by james

I had a few things to get done today, but this afternoon decided to give creating a new
account another go. Same problem as ever: the email address I was using was already set up somewhere else.

So, as I’ve had no response whatsoever to my email to customer services I thought I’d best get on the phone again. After five minutes on hold (so fast!) I spoke to a “guide” who actually decide he really couldn’t help me and passed me on to a more technical person. Over the next three quarters of an hour we established that associating my BT account with my new BT id “didn’t work” (well blow me down) and he couldn’t help. So he’s raised an issue with their even more technical people so they can have a look at it. Apparently that may take three working days, but at least I got passed through to someone who could talk me through some of the bill (which I’m actually fairly certain is wrong) and allow me to pay so the in-laws in the granny annexe won’t get cut off. If I’ve overpaid then it will just have to count towards my final bill when I move the numbers away from them as I’m not even going to consider starting that until the outstanding problems are fixed, just in case. They couldn’t actually email me a copy of the bill however. They could email me all sorts of other stuff, but not a copy of the bill.

And I’ve also been given a way to contact them without fighting my way through the IVR and the hold system — I go to a web page and they call me back. Asking customers to hang around on hold about a problem with their systems is just insulting really. I must have spent at least three hours on the phone to them this week and I’d estimate that half of that was probably on hold.

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Not sure I can repair these two…

Posted on April 11, 2024 by james

My last two wooden brood boxes that I’d put aside to repair — for the last few years they’ve been home to a colony that swarmed into them when they were stacked up full of frames that I was intending to chop up for kindling.

I don’t think there’s anything I can do with them though. There’s so much damage that even if I broke them up I don’t think there’d be enough parts to reassemble into a single box.

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Memory Lane, 9th December 2022: Overwintering tomatoes

Posted on April 10, 2024 by james

In September I took cuttings from a number of tomato plants and left them in the greenhouse in jars of water. Those that produced roots were potted up and then moved indoors into a bay window when the weather became colder.

I’m concerned that they are getting a bit leggy now. We’ll see what Spring brings.

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Beehive repair thoughts

Posted on April 10, 2024 by james

I have some old boxes that were either made the wrong size (depth) or have shrunk over the many years they’ve been out in the open. Some of them I’ve extended back to the intended size with pieces of timber 2mm to 3mm thick. Today however I had a different idea…

I’ve been using some old Abelo poly hives as bait hives so far, ones that were made incorrectly and have both a top and bottom bee space. I reckon I can probably “adjust” those however, to return them to the correct size. Bait hives don’t need to be perfect, so as long as they can be properly closed up and not invaded by anything that shouldn’t be there (bee there, haha!) a box that is a few millimetres too short will do the job.

Keeping track of which are which might be awkward, so I should perhaps look for some paint or something to fit to them labelling them as a bait hive.

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BT are utterly bloody useless, part 2

Posted on April 10, 2024 by james

After 50 minutes on hold, I eventually managed to speak to another “guide” at BT this morning who insisted that I absolutely would have to wait the full twenty-four hours before recreating my account, despite previously being told it would probably be ok in a couple of hours. I also asked how I could get in touch with someone helpful if it didn’t work and was told that other than using the usual mechanism the only other possibility was to use the “self-serve” system on the website. He was of course completely unable to actually direct my to any obvious “self-serve” system on the website and I couldn’t find it anywhere, but many peoples’ experience seems to be that the website just sends you round in circles unless you want to give BT money, so perhaps that should be no surprise. He was absolutely adamant that it was the only other option however. If I’m honest, it sounded as though he was totally unfamiliar with the actual website.

So having waited 24 hours after my BT login was deleted, once again I tried to create a new account. Surprise surprise, it didn’t work, claiming that my email address was still in use for another account. And I could still log in using that allegedly deleted account, though there were no services associated with it. And when I tried to add them and waited for the required interval, they still weren’t there.

I feel utterly shat on. BT are utterly inept when it comes to providing clueful customer service. If you don’t fit the one of their scripts then you’re absolutely screwed and they just don’t care.

I’ve documented the entire thing and emailed it off to the address on the CEOmail site together with a list of what I want them to do to help resolve the mess. I might call them tomorrow. I might not. At the moment I’m not sure I can face it. As far as I can tell I’d just be wasting a load of my time, talking to clowns who actually have no idea how to improve the situation.

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