Inane Banter

Dear Peugeot

Dear Peugeot,

With the ongoing credit crunch and general hard times for the motor industry you may be looking to reduce your costs. I have a suggestion that may help.

They say the biggest cost to a company is it’s workforce. May I suggest an easy saving to make is to find the designer responsible for the front lights on the 205 and the 206 and sack his sorry arse right out of door. Who thought that silly metal spring was a good idea? Everybody else has simple twisty bits of plastic but that’s obviously not Gallic enough for you. Why spend 5 minutes changing a bulb when you can spend 40 minutes flicking away at a stupid bit of metal then having to find a child because only their tiny little hands fit in the space your designer thought was acceptable for prying at the stubbord spring.

A further saving could be made by firing the author of the manual that thought opening the spring was a simple case of squeezing gently at the top. Did they even see the spring or was the concept of the device whispered to them casually at the end of an absinthe filled Christmas party? Please update the documentation replacing it with the following –

Claw blindly round the back of the bits of metal you can’t actually see, ignoring the area specified in the diagram, until something sharp embeds itself into your already raw and bleeding fingers. Painfully flick this sliver of metal around like a teenage boy pleasuring his first love if his first love were in fact made of barbed wire for 20 minutes until you happen to stumble on the correct direction. Watch helplessly as the spring flies away from the lights into some dark crevice under the dirtiest, tightest part of the engine.


Mr Fatuous

I appreciate that this blog post is very niche but the 205 and 206 were popular cars and I can’t have been the only poor sod to have to change the bulbs in them. Besides, it’s cheaper than therapy and less likely to get me locked up than screaming my lungs out and pissing on every French car I see.

Inane Banter

Sale Now On

Here is how I imagine sales working.

Company X gets product Y that they want to sell. They add a margin on it and then sell these onto the customer. After a while the product Y becomes old and stale and everybody wants product Z. Company X wants rid of product Y to make way for the new hotness that is product Z. Company X has a sale and drops the price of Y. People who liked Y but couldn’t afford it now can whilst people with money enjoy product Z. Everybody is happy.

Christmas sales work in a similar way only there’s a huge amount of product as everyone is buying for Christmas. Some things aren’t as popular or the shop buys too many of them. After Christmas it has a January sale to get rid of the excess to make way for next years greatness.

All with me so far? Nothing too complicated with that is there?

OK, now explain to me why a car rental company has just emailed me with it’s January sale? Has it suddenly found itself with a big pile of rental in the corner. “Quick Dave get rid of all this unsold rental, it’s stinking up the place. The new rental arrives next week.” “Fucking hell Steve this rental is getting a bit threadbare, lets sell it on this car quick so we can stick the fresh rental on it as soon as it gets back.” “Oh my God, did you just see Michelle in her January rental? That’s so last year, it’s got to be February rental this season.”

I though that was bad enough until I walked past the bookmakers yesterday and noticed they a sale sign in the window. “Ah shite Sean would you look at all the horse bets we’ve got left over. whatever will we do with them?”