Rant thread

[Old Frightful]

15 hours ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

We get so many issues with car hire firms claiming damage.  We now expect a damage claim on every hire!

I hired a VW Transporter van a while back. When I returned it, the hire company employee spent some time wandering round the vehicle before pointing out a small chip in the windscreen, underneath the windscreen wiper that was invisible from the driver's seat. I was certain I hadn't done it but couldn't do much else but accept it. The woman in reception said that they may be able to repair it for £50 but, if it needed a new windscreen, as I'd taken out insurance against damage, it would only cost me £250. I nearly exploded but she said a new windscreen on its own was over £200. I phoned a mate of mine who has his own windscreen repair/replacement company and asked how much a new windscreen for a VW Transporter was. After checking, he said I can get one for £47 + vat. I explained the circumstances and he said I'll supply the windscreen, replace it for nothing and anybody from the company can check it until they're happy. When I contacted the company and asked who carried out their repairs and pointed out the trade price of a new windscreen to what they were claiming they were being charged, the woman in reception said they'd look into it. I then received a phone call a short time later saying that they had decided it could be repaired so I would only have to pay £50. I smelt a rat and every time after this experience, when I went past their depot I had a look for the VW as I wanted to see if they ever repaired it or if it was possibly just a scam. Rather annoyingly, I never saw the van in their yard again. This could be because I just never went there at the right time but I couldn't help but feel that summat wasn't quite right there.

I also couldn't help wondering if the windscreen company they used had lost its contract. 

 

 

[Bedford Roughyed]

30 minutes ago, Old Frightful said:

I hired a VW Transporter van a while back. When I returned it, the hire company employee spent some time wandering round the vehicle before pointing out a small chip in the windscreen, underneath the windscreen wiper that was invisible from the driver's seat. I was certain I hadn't done it but couldn't do much else but accept it. The woman in reception said that they may be able to repair it for £50 but, if it needed a new windscreen, as I'd taken out insurance against damage, it would only cost me £250. I nearly exploded but she said a new windscreen on its own was over £200. I phoned a mate of mine who has his own windscreen repair/replacement company and asked how much a new windscreen for a VW Transporter was. After checking, he said I can get one for £47 + vat. I explained the circumstances and he said I'll supply the windscreen, replace it for nothing and anybody from the company can check it until they're happy. When I contacted the company and asked who carried out their repairs and pointed out the trade price of a new windscreen to what they were claiming they were being charged, the woman in reception said they'd look into it. I then received a phone call a short time later saying that they had decided it could be repaired so I would only have to pay £50. I smelt a rat and every time after this experience, when I went past their depot I had a look for the VW as I wanted to see if they ever repaired it or if it was possibly just a scam. Rather annoyingly, I never saw the van in their yard again. This could be because I just never went there at the right time but I couldn't help but feel that summat wasn't quite right there.

I also couldn't help wondering if the windscreen company they used had lost its contract. 

 

 

If it was once or twice we might accept it, but its now numerous.  We somehow manage to drive our own cars with issue... 

[getdownmonkeyman]

19 hours ago, ckn said:

My car has just been handed over to the leasing company.  The pickup driver asked me to do a signature on his phone that I have read the damage appraisal and agree to pay for all reasonable repairs.  He said that he couldn't show me the damage appraisal as it had already been sent.  He then got a bit stroppy when I refused to sign, wondering why I didn't trust him.  Someone I haven't met before taking away a £46,000 car and he's sent a "damage appraisal" before I can read it then doesn't get why I won't blindly sign away that I accept it.

He re-did it from scratch and only put minor road-stone chips consistent with the car's mileage.  That I accepted and signed.

Sometimes I really wonder about people...

That is unusual in my experience. The inspection is done jointly.

[getdownmonkeyman]

Rant at myself; managed to crack my head closing the boot on my wife's car. 

That really is a special kind of stupid.

[Bedford Roughyed]

End of year appraisals, when 90% of staff can't be bothered with them why does some bright spark decide that we need to be doing them all your with monthly documentation of what great things we have done.

All I want to do is my work then go home, I'm not bothered about progression.  Do i do my job OK?  Yes or no, thats all thats needed. Now give me the bonus and we can forget all this continuos assessment rubbish.  

[ckn]

1 hour ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

End of year appraisals, when 90% of staff can't be bothered with them why does some bright spark decide that we need to be doing them all your with monthly documentation of what great things we have done.

All I want to do is my work then go home, I'm not bothered about progression.  Do i do my job OK?  Yes or no, thats all thats needed. Now give me the bonus and we can forget all this continuos assessment rubbish.  

As a (now former) senior manager, appraisals were a good management tool for me to make sure my subordinate managers were doing their job properly.  Did they know what their staff had done well, or not so well, in a year?  What development had each employee done, was it effective?  What development do they need next year?  Is that development realistic?  Is each staff member being treated objectively fairly?  Did the staff member's comments completely disagree with or contradict the manager's?  Why?  Was there a consistent theme in the team's performance?  Did the manager actually know how to constructively critique an employee's performance?  Have an employee's problems or development needs rolled over from year to year unfixed?  Why?  What did all of that mean I had to do for the manager's own development?

All things that point me in the direction of whether the manager is effective or not.  Appraisals are simply a snapshot of a year, you can tell by how they're written if a manager has half a clue about an employee's actual performance or not.  My manager in the NHS asked me to write my appraisal each of the last three years and then he'd sign it as if he'd written it, he really didn't want to get into tough questions about performance or development needs.

For the person who is the subject of the appraisal, the benefits are only notable if something will change because of it.  In 99% of cases, that means the appraisal has no benefit at all as most competent managers will already know what your problems/strengths are and what development you need while rubbish managers won't do it anyway regardless of an appraisal "agreement".  An appraisal really is a management tool, not an employee tool.

When I take on a completely new service of people I don't know, I typically ask for the last two years of appraisals for each of my direct reports.  Those who have strong appraisals are asked if they're truly reflective and if they want me to use that as a benchmark for what I can expect from them.  Those who have weak appraisals are told that I intend to disregard them entirely and let them set their own benchmark.  In other words, I don't trust a word that's written in them.

Finally, when there's a really poor employee who needs to be properly performance managed in the negative meaning of it then it's a tool for management to use to give the employee a chance to fix things based on past objective analysis, or to get rid of them fairly when they simply won't change.

I always think back to army days for appraisals, once we reached a set level we got our annual "Confidential" performance review.  If you didn't get an "O" (outstanding) or an "A" then your long-term career promotion aspirations effectively stopped (the system went O then A-E with E usually meaning you were incapable of spelling the rank you had).  It put one hell of an emphasis on a soldier in getting that expectation right each year so when the OC (officer commanding) approved the grade that he was doing it from a position of knowledge, I saw too many excellent NCOs get side-lined because they thought everyone could see how good a job they were doing.

[Tongs ya bas]

Why do people struggle so much to handle kindness? 

[ckn]

Here's a hint for Enterprise rent-a-car, try not to let people down 40 minutes before their rental starts and the office closes. "Sorry, we've no car for you and there's nothing we can do". Too late for other branches or companies as well.

Abysmal customer service, truly abysmal.  Their attitude was "not our problem".

So, that's me a bit ****ed for this weekend then.

I really can't remember the last time I've had service that poor from any company. It just truly was abysmal.

First, I tried to call them this morning to arrange a pick-up, the thing they promote as their USP, phone rang for ages then it was picked up and immediately put down again. Obviously customers are too much of a bore for them to answer.

Then they got in touch with me and said "sorry, we've no car for you and there's nothing we can do".

Enterprise helpdesk found me a car at another branch but said they won't do a pick-up and there's no way I could have got there in time anyway as the office closed at 12 and they wouldn't wait.

Thwaites.  Utter thwaites.

[ckn]

6 minutes ago, ckn said:

Here's a hint for Enterprise rent-a-car, try not to let people down 40 minutes before their rental starts and the office closes. "Sorry, we've no car for you and there's nothing we can do". Too late for other branches or companies as well.

Abysmal customer service, truly abysmal.  Their attitude was "not our problem".

So, that's me a bit ****ed for this weekend then.

I really can't remember the last time I've had service that poor from any company. It just truly was abysmal.

First, I tried to call them this morning to arrange a pick-up, the thing they promote as their USP, phone rang for ages then it was picked up and immediately put down again. Obviously customers are too much of a bore for them to answer.

Then they got in touch with me and said "sorry, we've no car for you and there's nothing we can do".

Enterprise helpdesk found me a car at another branch but said they won't do a pick-up and there's no way I could have got there in time anyway as the office closed at 12 and they wouldn't wait.

Thwaites.  Utter thwaites.

Quoting myself with my go-to anger management clip...

 

[Mark S]

Another pub/bar based rant.

Bar staff who work establishments which serve cocktails that have 2 speeds, slow and very slow! Learn the cocktails so you don't have to read the instructions as you go!!

[Griff9of13]

2 hours ago, Mark S said:

Another pub/bar based rant.

Bar staff who work establishments which serve cocktails that have 2 speeds, slow and very slow! Learn the cocktails so you don't have to read the instructions as you go!!

Even when they know what they're doing it's still a very slow process compared to pulling a pint.

[BryanC]

On 07/07/2017 at 2:37 PM, ckn said:

My car has just been handed over to the leasing company.  The pickup driver asked me to do a signature on his phone that I have read the damage appraisal and agree to pay for all reasonable repairs.  He said that he couldn't show me the damage appraisal as it had already been sent.  He then got a bit stroppy when I refused to sign, wondering why I didn't trust him.  Someone I haven't met before taking away a £46,000 car and he's sent a "damage appraisal" before I can read it then doesn't get why I won't blindly sign away that I accept it.

He re-did it from scratch and only put minor road-stone chips consistent with the car's mileage.  That I accepted and signed.

Sometimes I really wonder about people...

Couple of points here.

Really necessary to mention the value of the car? Showing off?

Nearly fifty grands worth of company car? Sums up everything that is wrong with the NHS in a nutshell and to my knowledge you've neglected to mention it in any of your previous diatribes.

[ckn]

3 hours ago, BryanC said:

Couple of points here.

Really necessary to mention the value of the car? Showing off?

Nearly fifty grands worth of company car? Sums up everything that is wrong with the NHS in a nutshell and to my knowledge you've neglected to mention it in any of your previous diatribes.

I paid it entirely as personally funded through the NHS leasing scheme, the NHS paid nothing towards it and it cost them nothing. Also, it was a plug-in hybrid car with an official MPG of 156.9 meaning I paid a trivially small company car tax on it making it cheaper than a £25k BMW 3 series to lease by quite a way.  I paid way less on it than the average person pays for a car loan on a moderately new car.  My P11D showed the car as having a taxable value of under £1000, a BMW 116d (one of the cheapest BMWs you can get) has a P11D taxable value of £3500.

My point was that it was a high value asset that was being assesssd by someone else without my oversight and I was being asked to sign that I accepted the damages when there were none. 

Maybe ask before being openly judgemental next time when you're very wrong about something.

Edit: not a single person in the 2000 strong NHS company I worked for got a NHS-paid company car. I only know one NHS employee with a NHS-paid car and he's at a different site every day across England and needs one otherwise his mileage claim would be astronomical. 

[BryanC]

Good point well stated.

Incidentally, I can run a 20 year old Land Cruiser on filthy diesel for another twenty years without producing anywhere near the carbon emissions churned out manufacturing your "green alternative". You might want to think about that one.

Still don't see the need to brag about how much your car's worth though...

(I'm always judgemental. It's a rant thread. I'm having a rant).

[Shadow]

Just now, BryanC said:

Good point well stated.

Incidentally, I can run a 20 year old Land Cruiser on filthy diesel for another twenty years without producing anywhere near the carbon emissions churned out manufacturing your "green alternative". You might want to think about that one.

Still don't see the need to brag about how much your car's worth though...

(I'm always judgemental. It's a rant thread. I'm having a rant).

Do you have figures to support that or are you repeating something you heard in the pub?
As an owner of the same type of Plug in Hybrid that CKN has just handed back I did some research before buying and this report summarises the situation. It's also a much lighter vehicle for a similar size (Mitsubishi Outlander) to your Land Cruiser so causes less damage to the road surface and it has given me the best tyre life of any vehicle I've ever owned, over 46,000 miles on the original set and they still have over 3mm tread at the front and 5mm at the rear so incidental costs are lower meaning fewer tyres being made and fewer being sent to landfill. 

Add to the lower carbon footprint the absence of Diesel Particulates and the PHEV is a far more environmentally friendly vehicle than your ancient Land Cruiser.

The value of the car is relevant to the expectation by the leasing company for the customer to sign paperwork unseen.

[Tongs ya bas]

2 minutes ago, Shadow said:

Do you have figures to support that or are you repeating something you heard in the pub?
As an owner of the same type of Plug in Hybrid that CKN has just handed back I did some research before buying and this report summarises the situation. It's also a much lighter vehicle for a similar size (Mitsubishi Outlander) to your Land Cruiser so causes less damage to the road surface and it has given me the best tyre life of any vehicle I've ever owned, over 46,000 miles on the original set and they still have over 3mm tread at the front and 5mm at the rear so incidental costs are lower meaning fewer tyres being made and fewer being sent to landfill. 

Add to the lower carbon footprint the absence of Diesel Particulates and the PHEV is a far more environmentally friendly vehicle than your ancient Land Cruiser.

The value of the car is relevant to the expectation by the leasing company for the customer to sign paperwork unseen.

It's a lift from a jeremy Clarkson riff

[Phil]

My "co-ordinator" at work has been overlooking me for available overtime. I emailed him asking why, no response, I managed to ask him face to face and he muttered that he had concerns about my performance. I asked him what these concerns are and he was unable to answer. 

That and other issues I've got with him have led me to filing a grievance against him, I've been here for 20 years and it's the first time I've had to do this. Incandescent with anger here. 

[BryanC]

46 minutes ago, Shadow said:

Do you have figures to support that or are you repeating something you heard in the pub?
As an owner of the same type of Plug in Hybrid that CKN has just handed back I did some research before buying and this report summarises the situation. It's also a much lighter vehicle for a similar size (Mitsubishi Outlander) to your Land Cruiser so causes less damage to the road surface and it has given me the best tyre life of any vehicle I've ever owned, over 46,000 miles on the original set and they still have over 3mm tread at the front and 5mm at the rear so incidental costs are lower meaning fewer tyres being made and fewer being sent to landfill. 

Add to the lower carbon footprint the absence of Diesel Particulates and the PHEV is a far more environmentally friendly vehicle than your ancient Land Cruiser.

The value of the car is relevant to the expectation by the leasing company for the customer to sign paperwork unseen.

The extortionate road tax on the Toyota more than covers the extra road damage.

Ability to pull two horses in a trailer out of a muddy field far outweighs any issue with particulates in my book.

[Mark S]

1 hour ago, Phil said:

My "co-ordinator" at work has been overlooking me for available overtime. I emailed him asking why, no response, I managed to ask him face to face and he muttered that he had concerns about my performance. I asked him what these concerns are and he was unable to answer. 

That and other issues I've got with him have led me to filing a grievance against him, I've been here for 20 years and it's the first time I've had to do this. Incandescent with anger here. 

Is there a young attractive girl/boy that's your manager seems to give all of the overtime to?

[Phil]

51 minutes ago, Mark S said:

Is there a young attractive girl/boy that's your manager seems to give all of the overtime to?

He definitely has his "favourites" 

[Shadow]

1 hour ago, Mark S said:

Is there a young attractive girl/boy that's your manager seems to give all of the overtime to?

Are you implying Phil is neither Young nor Attractive?

[Robin Evans]

33 minutes ago, Shadow said:

Are you implying Phil is neither Young nor Attractive?

I'm not sure it's an implication........

[Robin Evans]

5 hours ago, ckn said:

 

Edit: not a single person in the 2000 strong NHS company I worked for got a NHS-paid company car. I only know one NHS employee with a NHS-paid car and he's at a different site every day across England and needs one otherwise his mileage claim would be astronomical. 

I've got an nhs car.... they pay their bit of the lease based on the miles I do.... I pay my bit.

It works in my favour but only just.

After I did the sums & factored in all costs and benefits tax penalties etc ... I'm a few quid a month better off.... and I mean only a few quid.

[graveyard johnny]

rant at bbc 6 music presenters/ djs

not every track played and every session done on 6 music is exiting, brilliant , fabulous , fantastic and amazing, some of it is quite mediocre and instantly forgettable - so stop saying it!

[Phil]

2 hours ago, Shadow said:

Are you implying Phil is neither Young nor Attractive?

I'm a catch I am ??