Currently Reading

Book 5 of 5. I've read this book once before, but I cannot remember anything about it now. So this one should be almost as good as reading a brand new book!

Where's the Grease Monkey when you need one?

Where I live, there has been very little vandalism in the area over the past 13 years. So it was a surprise to discover some mindless idiot had decided to break off the aerial on my car right at the base. I now cannot receive any radio signals until I do something about it!

It is many years since I had to replace a car aerial. and I know it is never an easy task to do, as the wiring is always a sod to get connected from the aerial to the radio. As my years advance, I find the thought of contorting myself into the inaccessible places within bodywork is distinctly unappealing.


Now I could probably cheat and find an old wire coat hanger and shove it into the remains of the present aerial. Or I could pay someone else to do all the work. For some reason, I decided to attempt the task myself! Big mistake, HUGE mistake!!!!


First, I had to take the old aerial out. I had to remove the plastic wheel arch cover over the front wheel to gain access to where the aerial was attached to the bodywork. I discovered that where the plastic was attached, the metal had all corroded, and I got a massive shower of rusty wheel arch all over me as I tried to remove the plastic! Now there is no way I can re-attach the plastic to the wheel arch again, unless I go and get new metal welded back on again!


Oh well, now I have got this far, I might as well continue and worry about putting everything back together again later. Inside the car, I managed to get to all the wiring behind the dashboard, and located the aerial wire. The next thing I did was attach a piece of string to the wire securely and then went back to front of the car and successfully pulled the wire with the string attached all the way out, and removed the old aerial completely. Phew, half way there!

After all the trouble of getting the old aerial out, I though I might as well make it worth my while and replace the old aerial with a new "motorised" version. "No one will be able to break this off" I said to myself. When I purchased the new aerial, I discovered that I had a new set of problems to overcome!

When I got the aerial out of the box, it had about 1.3 metres of aerial cable attached. It also had 3 wires for the electrical operation. These wires were approximately 6 inches (15cm) long. How I am expected to connect these wires to the radio, live and negative points, in the car, is something I couldn't work out. Now I have to rummage around the garage to find some extra lengths of wire to extend the wiring so that I can connect the aerial to the correct parts of the car.

Putting everything back again, has definitely been a challenge for me. The weather hasn't been of much help either. Every time I go out to the car, somebody turns the tap on and I get a soaking! For some reason electricity and water do not mix! So my attempts at finishing this task is now dragging on over a number of days.

Having managed to add extension wires to the original ones at the aerial, I then start rummaging around inside the car to find the correct wires to attach my new leads to. At first it was quite easy as I had plenty of space to get to the wires under the steering column. It was when I needed to connect a wire to the radio that I came across a major obstacle.

There simply was no room to feed a wire through behind the dash board to anywhere close to the radio. So I had to remove the centre console to be able to get to the wiring behind the radio. Only after removing enumerable plastic bits, and dozens of screws, was I able to peer into the dark depths inside. (I am now distinctly worried! I didn't realise that the car had been secretly trying to build its own version of "Short Circuit"!)

I managed to connect all the wires to the correct places. I was even smart enough to test that the aerial actually goes up and down when I switch the radio on, before I started to put everything back together! So after about 5 days, I now have a fully functioning motorised car aerial, a rusty wheel arch that has suddenly become more religious than I will ever be, and a mixed sense of accomplishment, tempered with chagrin that I have caused more damage to the car than the vandal originally did!

Recently Viewed

This was definitely a weird film. Very dark and depressing. "The end of the world is nigh!" type of film. There is no hope left for us mortals!

Recently Viewed

Had a chance to see this movie, and I was quite impressed with the overall effect. I did find the time travel theme just a little bit hard to swallow though. A bit surprised that there was a relationship between Spock and Uhura, which was something new to the franchise. This is one movie that will definitely end up in my DVD collection at some point.

Water, Water, Everywhere!

A colleague of mine sent me an e-mail with a link to a PowerPoint presentation about bottled water. With all the media hype of how global warming is going to ruin our planet, and how we must all do something about it NOW! This message about how much energy and resources are put into the plastic bottle of water you drink, is scary!

I have personally hated paying an extortionate price for bottled water, though I have bought a bottle or two, especially on a hot day when I haven't been able to get any water to drink in any other way. I understand how many people find it so convenient to carry a bottle of water with them.

What I cannot understand is why we cannot go back to the days where drinks were always sold in bottles. Nowadays, all your milk comes in plastic bottles, all your fizzy drinks are sold in cans or plastic bottles. When I was a child, I can clearly remember buying a glass bottle of fizzy drink, and when it was consumed, I could take the empty bottle back to the shop and receive some money back. The bottle was then sent back to the manufacturer for re-use.

Take a look at this presentation and perhaps one day we might return to glass bottles that can be be re-used over and over again. If enough of us change our habits just a small amount, then perhaps, collectively, we can all make a huge difference to our environment.

Recently Viewed

Interesting film, as it certainly made me more aware of the exploitation of Africa's riches by foreign Nationals, who think nothing of setting up terrorist groups who brutally subjugate the local inhabitants to do whatever they want.

I will certainly be more careful about where a diamond I want to purchase has come from, and how it was obtained!

Secret Squirrel at Work!

This week, I have been quietly doing a Mystery Shop assessment on a high street bank. The work involves two parts. First I had to make a personal visit to the branch, and assess the cleanliness, friendliness of the staff, and their ability to answer certain questions accurately. Next I have to wait to see if they call me back on the phone as requested.

I have been doing mystery shopping as a hobby since 2004. So far, my reports have not been challenged, either by the venue or the companies I work for. Only once, have I made a mistake of going to the wrong venue, and basically wasting my time and effort on the survey.

Since the onset of this recession, the number of different venues, has begun to shrink, and more to the point, the payments for the time, and effort have reduced considerably. The biggest cutback has been the travelling allowance. One of the companies I worked for was called NOP. They had a policy of paying a mileage allowance to all destinations. So I was quite happy to travel over 50 miles to visit a venue. Sadly, NOP is no more, and the current employers either have a maximum payment of £3.50 for travelling, or sneakily include the travelling expense into the overall payment. So now I have become very choosy as to what venue I will visit.

Because I seem to provide good quality reports on the venues I visit, I often get contacted by one of my employers to visit a number of venues further away than I would normally accept. Then the employers are happy to pay the full travelling expense! It is actually quite fun to receive a call and get them to negotiate a price that is favourable to me!

Doing this kind of work also proves very helpful where I work for my main job. Here the tables are turned and we get mystery shopped on a regular basis! It also allows me to understand that every survey is always going to subject to the individual assessors viewpoint, and no two assessors can be truly similar. I am also very quick to challenge any result that shows that the assessor hasn't done his or her job fully.

When I first started doing this work, I was given the opportunity to visit a loan company. Now at the time, credit card companies were offering interest rates around 20%. Bank loans were about 10%, and mortgages were about 7%. This loan company specialised in giving loans to people who did not have a good enough credit rating to get a loan from the usual places. My task was to ask for £1000 to buy a new TV. I would only need to borrow the money for 1 year. As I went through the process, I discovered the sales person was trying to hide something from me. Whet she was trying to hide was the staggering 59% APR they were charging for the loan!

I never realised that if you you are in full time work, and pay your bills on time, you can get low interest credit, which you probably don't need, very easily. For those people who are in desperate need of credit to help sort out the mess they have got into, they are the ones who end up paying extortionate rates they can ill afford to pay! No wonder you hear stories of vulnerable people ending up with nothing from having out of desperation gone to loan sharks!

How difficult would it be for some institution to offer to help those in need by offering them a loan at a reasonable rate with the condition that they are taught how to manage their money as part of the deal. Most people in financial difficulty, do not want to face up to their problems, and let the problem continue to get worse until it is at a stage where they either lose everything, or they become so depressed that they seek solution in committing suicide.

There was a TV program a while back that had a financial advisor help families sort out their financial problems. Although this an interesting way to do this, it would only help a few people, lucky enough to be chosen to go on the show. There are thousands of other people in as much need of help, and don't have the luxury of waiting until a TV company might or might not choose them for its next broadcast.

It has puzzled me that everyone of us has to attend school from the age of 5 to 16. Everyone of us has to deal with income and expenditure, savings and loans, credit, and debit. Yet none of what we have to deal with on a daily basis in our adult lives is ever taught during our school years. I doubt much emphasis is placed on how important it is to budget your finances.

The present Government seems to think that getting further into debt is the answer to stop this recession biting deeper. Surely they would have been better off offering better incentives to businesses, so allowing them to continue trading, or new businesses to start up. Yes, there a large number of businesses caught up in the borrowing spiral, borrowing more than they can pay back. I still don't understand why banks would prefer to write off the debts to these businesses and lose all the money, rather than work with the directors of the company to work out a way of first stopping the hemorrhage of money disappearing, and then work to slowly get the business back towards profitability, and then to pay back their loans.