Rave

If I wasn't married I'd scrap the TV altogether and as a side benefit enjoy winding up TV licensing on a regular basis. Twenty quid a month on top of my Phone and Broadband is IMO a fair price to pay to keep the wife happy (and in fairness the V+ box is very good, first TV I've watched in ages is The Wire which it has stacked up for me to view as I please ).

Virgin TV cut off my 'On-Demand' tv a couple of weeks ago. I'd got it as part of what I thought was a fair deal I'd cut with them for a price reduction and an upgrade to a V+ box a year ago. I almost never watch telly but my wife was annoyed about losing the On Demand so I phoned them up, having checked their website, and told them that I'd just pay the extra four quid a month for the XL TV package which includes a few extra channels and On Demand (the V+ box is included in the price, hence why it only costs £4 quid extra). I insisted that I didn't want to sign up for another years contract, and was assured by the Indian woman that that was not a requirement. A few days later I got the confirmation letter in the post and sure enough..... I was signed up for another year's contract. Phoned them up and insisted that they change it or I'd leave on the spot. My account is now 'annotated' apparently. Even though I really want high-def telly and Virgin's offering is extremely poor, my total antipathy towards Murdoch means I'm very unlikely to leave them for Sky anyway- but why flat out lie to me on the phone? There's no excuse for it.

My mum's had a '97 model Clio 1.9 diesel for a few years now, bought with 80,000 miles on the clock, now up to 109,000 miles with nothing more than an alternator belt and a couple of ball-joints needed. Admittedly the power steering stopped working soon after she got it, so the steering's a bit heavy when parking. I use it most of the time, and it does 45mpg on my 5-10 mile London commutes. She/I will not be scrapping it.

I think I might write to my MP demanding an eighty quid voucher towards a new flatscreen telly for trading in my old CRT. I don't want a new car, but I don't see why I should be denied some taxpayer funded largesse as a result.

What, you actually went and waited for them to remove the tag? A piece of advice: next time just tell the security guard to **** off and walk out. If he attempts to detain you, have him arrested for false imprisonment.

I used to pay nothing for the books I sold on Amazon- I got them from charity shop bins. Can't beat a 100% profit margin . Don't really have time for it now though.

This has been alluded to already, but: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7911735.stm ....have a look at that graph. It's plotting house prices relative to the price a year ago. Which means that the scale of the price falls has been accelerating pretty much every month since the indexes went negative, and is still accelerating now. If those lines were to go horizontal that would mean that we were cruising along at an annual rate of house price decline of 20+ percent, but right now it looks to me like they might even get down as far as 25% YOY falls, albeit that the line is starting to level off. That fills me with considerable joy , although the edge gets taken off when I remember that the government has just effectively handed RBS £320bn in exchange for a large bag of turds :angry:.

I didn't have much luck with wine admittedly, but I did a couple of the 'liquor' kits that Boots sold with great success when I was a sixth-former. They used a modified strain of yeast that was fine up to about 20% ABV, so you just chucked a kilo and a half of sugar in, let it ferment for a month, and then flavoured the resultant hooch with more sugar and whatever artificial flavouring the kit came with. Fine drinking it was not, but for less than a tenner, 80-odd units of alcohol could not be argued with. Well quite, I'm still smoking the GV I brought back from Spain in July last year. And ironically, I stopped bothering with homebrewing because I could get pissed even cheaper by just going on a booze cruise every few months. Just pointing out that there's no real difference between dope and booze/tobacco in the cultivation/production stakes, is all.

Actually home brewing is pretty easy. I've never tried it, but apparently growing tobacco isn't that hard either.

As always, I appreciate your hard work tommyboy, thanks!

Sooner or later I'll set up a direct debit to pay it off in full every month- I just keep losing the form .

I'm not a high roller like some of you, but recently I've taken to spending day to day on my credit card and then paying it in full by withdrawing cash from my bank account. Usually it's £500-600 a month but I've done two withdrawals of £1800 and £1100 from Barclays with no advance notice and no questions asked. The second time, just before Christmas (for the £1100), the cashier started to say something about it being over their limit- but then looked at my details on the screen and promptly clammed up. I don't know if that's because I'm fool enough to pay the £12.50 a month for an Additions account, or whether it was the fact that the withdrawal would take me into my overdraft so they could carry on making money out of me for a bit longer . I didn't enjoy walking the 400 yards from the bank to the building society with over a grand in my pocket, I must say .

I worked for Jessops from 2000-2003. I suggested in early 2001 when I was trying to get on the management fast track that they should be trying to take a decisive lead in the digital photo printing market- and I got laughed at. Didn;t get on the fast track either . The commoditisation of digital cameras has done for them- when you can buy a digital camera for <£100 which is pretty much guaranteed to take very competent pictures, you don't need to go to a specialist for advice- and even if you did, for that kind of retail price there's not enough profit to justify half an hour of a salesman's time. Now that Digital SLRs have come down to the £200-400 range I think there's a renewed opening for specialist photographic retailers, because they're affordable for most people but at the same time they're complicated products, and by their nature they take accesories like lenses and flashes that can be sold for reasonable margin. But for Jessops I'm sure it's too little too late.

http://www.rickyshalloween.com/flame_0153_...ray_p/flame.htm ROFL!

If they deserve it, have some balls and say 'I told you so', then laugh in their faces. Bastards.

Did you ever go back? And did he survive the many motorcycle market crashes that have happened since the since the 60s? Having read Serpico's seminal posts from a couple of years back I doubt it. It's all very well to treat your customers with contempt when times are good. I worked in retail for a few years and, TBH, I had more time for 'difficult' customers than SNACS had. I always sold customers what they needed, didn't switch sell them unless it was in their interests, and didn't lie, and trusted that having done them a good deal I'd get little comeback. 99% of the time it worked. I used to get people coming into the store asking that I price match an obvious loss leader from a competitor that was now out of stock. I always refused if it would cost us money, but I'd alwyas explain politely that we weren't in the business of losing money, rather than saying, in effect, piss off.

Wouldn't bother me if the BNP/NF made a comeback, cracking some stupid skinhead skulls will be fun.

Bump.

Meritocracy Is it me who needs to look it up, or you? 10 GCSEs, and 3 A-Levels here (2 As, 1 C) in case you doubt my academic credentials . Meritocracy was a perjorative term when coined, and it should still be one now. Do you deserve to earn 4x the national average wage just because you have 4 A-Levels? IMO, do you hell.

Yes tempting, but get a superbike. Just as quick, and much more usable on the road, since you can overtake far more easily.

Breasts have been getting bigger for years- and so has every other part of our increasingly overweight population. It's good news if you like chubby women mind .

Just looked up Wired For Sound on YouTube, and now I can see how painful this technology could really be. It's 5x as shit as I remembered it, and I didn't enjoy it the last time I saw it about 10 years ago.

Thank you all .

Thanks, and thanks .

Interesting you should say that. I've always hated public speaking- I got scared doing house debates at school in front of about 25 of my peers. When I got elected to the Union Council at university (as an ordinary member- so nobody important) I only intervened if I thought it absolutely necessary, and I didn't like speaking then in front of 50 of my peers. I nearly crapped myself when I thought I'd have to stand up in front of 1000 people at the NUS conference (again on a strict point of principle)- luckily someone else had called the procedural motion before I did. So....when they plumbed me in to the live radio feed (on my mobile phone FFS) prior to my actually speaking to Eddie Nestor I was literally shaking with the adrenaline. But once I was actually talking I totally forgot about it. Once I'd come off air feeling that I'd given a pretty good account of myself it was a massive rush. If you get the chance, give it a go .