martyn1949

Absolutely! I am sick of people whingeing about not getting stuff for free.... nobody owes you anything. You don't like to pay a petrol station for their equipment and electricity? Fine... it's not compulsory...no one is forcing you to use their equipment. Do what sensible people with forethought do.. buy a small pump that plugs in in your car, costs about £10, and you can use it free for years. Alternatively, you can not bother to think ahead, just wait till you need to pump up your tyres, and then whinge because the world hasn't provided you with a free (or cheap) service. The margin on petrol has diminished so much in recent years, garages can't afford to subsidise other services. And why should they? Think ahead and save money. Duh.

I think that there is some confusion here... Butane bottles are usually 15kg, Propane are 13kg, due to the lower density of propane, given the same size bottle. Most equipment will work OK on either, but at this time of year, it is better to use Propane, if the bottle is outdoors, or in an unheated premises, as it will come off as a gas down to -40 deg. C. Butane, when it gets to below -1 deg C, will stay liquid in the bottle, and refuse to gasify until warmed up. Household portable heaters use Butane, cos the house usually never gets that cold.. but garage and workshop heaters tend to be propane, as they can refuse to work in winter.

Possibly - although it may have more to do with the fact that, as a Big Issue seller, you are classed as Self Employed, and if you say you work for more than 16 hours a week, you qualify for Working Tax Credit, (or something similar) which can be a substantial amount per week, (over £100 I believe, but don't quote me). On the other hand, begging is quite lucrative, and has the advantage of being taxfree on top of whatever unemployment or sickness benefits you can gain. Let's face it, if you live in, and register for benefits at, say Doncaster, and go begging in Sheffield city centre, you are unlikely to meet anyone who would put two and two together... Thus you can have Housing benefit, Job Seekers or, more likely some form of sickness benefit (I have lost count of all the changes recently) Free prescriptions, etc, etc and probably make quite a lot begging on top... not a bad lifestyle. I remember a while back, someone videoed a beggar in the town centre, and the end of the day, complete with dog-on-a-rope going back to his rather upmarket car and heading home, wherever that was. Call me a tad cynical, but..

This has gone on for YEARS - mostly old people (I have a lot of old customers quote it like this 01142...735 457 (say). I always ask them, what will you get if you just dial 735 457? They don't know. Young people don't remember phone numbers at ALL, not even their OWN bloody number - they rely on their mobiles memory! It can be fun watching two of them, neither of whom knows their own number, trying to establish contact. "What's your number?" "F*cked if I know, I'll text you, then you'll get it. What's YOUR number?" "F*cked if I know mine either - er.... oh *****!" I know how it came about that so many get it wrong though. It was originally 0742, then in one reorganisation a 1 was added to most codes, so Sheffield became 01742-xxx-xxx Then we changed to 0114, but this seems wrong to many older people, because all other codes have 5 digits. Worksop = 01909 Buxton = 01298 Chesterfield = 01246 Therefore, (and because the code for Sheffield used to end in 2) they add the 2 on to the 4 digits to get 01142 - which seems somehow RIGHT to them.

When they quoted £100 MILLION to extend it just to Stocksbridge? You have to be joking.. The whole thing was a colossal waste of money... it cost £250 million to build, and they sold it for £1 to Stagecoach cos they could not make it pay. It was losing half a million a MONTH under council control... you saw it going round empty all the time... And, it made mine, and lots of other people's lives and businesses impossible for two years when they dug up every damn road in Sheffield, just about at the same time. I could only get half my work done, it too so long to get anywhere. Mind you, the council leaders and money people, living in Dore and so on, weren't disturbed by it, were they? It doesn't go there. What is the use of a stupid system that doesn't go to the 4 main places any public transport system really SHOULD go to... It doesn't come in to a platform at the railway station... (to enable easy interchange) It doesn't come in to a platform at the bus station (ditto) It doesn't go anywhere NEAR the Northern General Hospital Or the Hallamshire/Childrens/Weston Park/Jessops Hospitals either.... All places where there is a huge demand for fast public transport at minimum physical effort, as people are not well, and with disabilities. What load of idiots designed the system that avoids the 4 main places where demand is obvious? Oh, I know, the People's Republic of South Yorkshire - the same lot that lost a ton of money on the World Student Games. Idiots. Don't waste another penny on this disaster.

Well, it's not quite the same thing, but we had no notification whatsoever before Virgin Cable's contractors came and dug up our whole road in Aughton to install cable ducts recently. No one in the street I spoke to knew anything about it either. It was chaos... I wasn't the only one to find a lorry and trailer parked right across my driveway so I couldn't get out - it took ages to find the driver, who had buggered off somewhere... and when I came back half an hour later, (I work from home) another effing van was parked across my drive AGAIN! They accidentally cut someone's mains supply off, and the underground BT cable to the street too was damaged... All for a commercial cable company that no one wants, or has asked for. Reminds me of my previous address, in a village in the country, where after years of campaigning, the council came and resurfaced the roads, which were littered with potholes. TWO days later, the Gas people came and dug up every road to install a gas supply for the first time. (Actually, we all had propane tanks in the garden, so weren't interested anyway). The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth... the council bloke went mental when I rang him and told him.

As a small business owner, who works a LOT of hours to please my customers, and am currently struggling around, still working with the aid of a crutch, even though I have needed a hip replacement for a year now, you sound like a nightmare employee that no business would touch with a bargepole. Talk about lack of commitment, and putting your job 2nd or 3rd in your life! I am sure this can't really be true, but you come across as someone who really doesn't want a job - just wants the wages, as long as the job doesn't interfere with your life whatsoever. I note you list possibilities as Council, NHS, etc. Yep, that sounds about right. These outfits get their money in regardless of whether they provide a good, or absolutely rotten service to their users. Their income is taxed off people by force and threats, rather than people voluntarily putting their hands in their pockets to pay for what you provide. They therefore tend to attract employees who want a laid-back, easy life, with not too many demands. The rest of us in the REAL world only get our money in if we show commitment to our customers, and do a good job. Reading your posting, I can't imagine you'd last 5 minutes in my sort of world. We don't have time for, or use for, half-hearted people, whose main interest is "work-life balance". Sorry, but there it is. I wouldn't employ you in a million years. Anyone who even MENTIONED "work-life balance" at interview is someone who has just opened the door onto the street and terminated their interview, right there.

This post only goes to show how hard it is to educate the terminally stupid. This idiot seem unable to grasp that the rear wheels don't matter - the system could easily work out the speed of a unicyle (provided it was heavy enough to trigger the tubes.) The rear wheel blips only give you the length of the vehicle. The rear wheels are NOT necessary to work out the speed of the vehicle at all. Jeeeez, why do I bother trying to educate idiots...

Not only does the length of wheelbase NOT make any difference, the system can detect the length of vehicle, and thus differentiate between cars and big vans, or bigger HGV's. Supposing the pneumatic tubes are 1 metre apart, the front wheels will give two pulses, one for each cable they go over. B-dum, b-dum. The time difference here gives the vehicle speed. A fraction of a second later, (depending on how fast the thing is going, but you already KNOW that by now) the rear wheels do the same b-dum, b-dum. Now the time delay between the front wheel pulses and the rear wheel pulses gives you how long it took for the vehicle as a whole to pass the cables, and since you know how fast it was going, you can work out how long the vehicle is. Or, if it was an HGV artic with 3 sets of wheels, you will get: Pulses from front wheels Gap Pulses from rear (driven) wheels on tractor unit Bigger Gap (as trailer is longer than tractor unit) Pulses from rear wheels on trailer unit. So you can detect that it is an artic, and the length of the tractor unit and the trailer unit. And, of course, if the cables go right across the roadway, covering both directions of travel, it is easy to work out which way the traffic is going, as it merely depends on which pneumatic tube is hit 1st, and which 2nd So those two little tubes tell you how fast the traffic is, which direction it was going, and how big the vehicles are, and what type they are. The chap who thought it was dependent on the time difference between the front wheels hitting and the rear wheels hitting was how the speed was worked out (and therefore the length of the vehicle made an error) is mistaken. That would be true if there was only ONE detector tube. Because there are two, the length of the vehicle is immaterial.

Well, for all those indignant "privatisation will ruin the NHS" types, I have news! A large part of the basic NHS is, and always HAS been privatised. I refer of course to your GP surgery. The ignorant posters on here probably do not know that each and every GP practice is, and always ghas been, a private business, paid by the NHS to treat patients. They get a combination of types of income - capitation - so much for every registered patient, and then various fees for performing various tasks, and hitting various targets. But this state of affairs has been in existence since the 1940's! When the NHS started. Seems to work pretty well to most people. The only time it is breaking down is in areas where there has been too great an influx of immigrants with complex health problems and language difficulties, which make them much slower and more expemnsive to deal with.

Noooo, I am rolling round the floor laughing... I am used to people spelling my name wrongly for 60 odd years now - my 1st name is Rod, and everyone thinks its Rodney (as in you plonker) whereas it is actually Roderick. Martyn is my middle name, but the spelling is so unusual that far more people get it wrong than right. I was just having a little humorous fun at the poor misused and abused apostrophe, which has a hell of a life, since teachers abandoned the idea of teaching how to use it about 30-odd years ago. Indeed teachers themselves usually have no idea... I caught the head of a primary school in Doncaster putting a poster up in the corridor announcing "Street Dance Lesson's" a few years ago, and laughed out loud. She was puzzled at my amusement - she genuinely could not see anything wrong with what she had written. Sigh. If Head Teachers on £50k a year don't know the basics, what hope is there for the children? And the idea of anyone being daft enough to WANT a Green MP or worse still, a Government, is pretty mirth-making - have you seen what a mess they have made of Brighton, their one power-base?

Er - Will the Green's WHAT win Sheffield Central. The apostrophe is possessive - The boy's bicycle, the dog's gonads, etc. So, what is it belonging to the Greens that you think may win? If, on the other hand, you meant the Green party - all of them, locally, then please write "The Greens". Plurals do not carry an apostrophe. Signed under the hand of the Apostropher Royal, the terror of Greengrocers (Greengrocer's?) since 1825. Mclusky's Rule states that, for every apostrophe that is erroneously missed off, ("the boys bikes", for example), an apostrophe is somewhere erroneously added on (as in "Will the Green's win...", above). Thus, the total number of apostrophes in the Universe remains constant.

Alas, if its too good to be true, it usually is. The first rule is: NEVER buy anything like this from anyone who only advertised with a mobile - too easy to ditch the SIM card and the number, and start again without all those annoying complaints. If you go to a shop or premises to buy a used item, or at least, someone who advertises with a landline number you know that they exist and where they are, and that they are much less likely to disappear overnight. This is all basic, and I am surprised anyone still takes this sort of risk. I am a TV aerial engineer, have been for 30+ years, and still get regularly rung up to come and sort out a "job" done by a cowboy on Gumtree etc, who - guess what? only has a mobile number as a contact, and has left a complete shambles behind him.. "But I paid him £150" wails the customer. "OK, what's his address?" I ask. "I don't know". "Where's the proper receipt and guarantee he gave you?" "I didn't get one" "What's his landline number?" "He didn't leave one" I sigh... Now the unfortunate gullible person is going to have to pay me to sort out the mess he paid someone else to create, all because he didn't take elementary precautions when buying. I despair sometimes. Really, people, you HAVE to take a little care. Especially on Gumtree. This isn't a criticism, I speak in sadness rather than in contempt - but this is nothing new, 2000 years ago, the Romans had the same problem with dodgy traders - they had a phrase for it - "Caveat Emptor" - "Let the buyer beware."

The RSPCA will do NOTHING, I can confirm from personal experience. They spend all their money on expensive prosecutions of foxhunters, and have nothing left for this sort of problem. Environmental Health re noise nuisance is where to go with this one. It's not quick, alas - they will ask you to keep a diary, etc - and if you are persistent enough, you can usually get them to fit noise monitoring device in your home to measure the nuisance level. You have to be persistent - they tend to do not much, in the hope you will get fed up and go away. However, the continuous level of the noise is well in your favour - easy to measure, in that they will want to send out an officer to hear it for himself before committing to measuring devices etc. We had a neighbour who would create REALLY loud banging noises - such that you could not hear each other talk in the room - but only for 5 mins at a time, cunningly, because that meant that, by the time the EH guy came out, he had stopped, so we could not prove anything.