Penguin got his…

Vision that is. 😉

Right, I’m fucking sick of all the shite surrounding DASA so let me through a little light on it for you all and show you just where you are as I see it….

DASA has no aims or directions that are of any note, worse the ones it appears to have are not being met or even attempted at this time, it is merely struggling to survive.

DASA cannot become a WP, it has neither the coverage or the capability to do so, apart from which managing such an endevour in DASA’s current format would be nigh on impossible with the bickering and political shite.

It cannot sell itself, it has fuck all to sell bar an antique code of practice and some legal gobble-de-gook document that serves as a constitution.

The list of members is next to worthless and the only bastards to do anything with it are me and Kev!

It has fuck all sway in political circles, we don’t kill enough people or cause enough havoc to be noticed. We also do not employ enough in one source to cause so much as an upset, in other words we’re on our own.

Chris did a good PR job on DASA members making them think it was important when it was not, even manufacturers pay little or no attention to it.

The “deals” like Hay Fielding really don’t do DASA any justice and, without a massive increase in membership no-one’s seriously going to give a shit about giving any deals worthy of note.

This whole Electrolux or “X” thing is merely a distraction and a load of bollocks, I just fail as yet to see the motive. If I were in Lux’s or Hurlpool’s shoes the last thing I’d want is all my agents under a banner that could call foul at any time. Think about it a bit.

There, is that negative enough for you? Added to which you can note the comments I made in the other thread earlier this evening.

As you can see, taking DASA apart really does not take much effort at all and if I so wished I could do it very comprehensively, as could Kevin, Dave or almost anyone else that has access to this forum. I’m sure many others could too, but knowing this trade they probably can’t be arsed to do it.

So, that leaves the question, where do we go from here?

DASA has been misguided and mismanaged for years upon years to suit only one man’s ambitions and goals. Now, it is up to us, DASA member or not to decide if DASA should survive and what it should become. Personally I don’t give a flying fuck about the officers or the council as it’s too full of bickering children and self-motivated goits with their head stuck so far up their own arse with their own agendas it’s unreal. The reason for that is that consecutive councils and, primarily, Chris let the fuckers away with it and buried their heads in the sand as to what was really going on as it didn’t affect them and Chris got a lot of support from those that wished the status quo to remain. Now we are presented with the perfect opportunity to change that.

DASA needs a year off. No, I’m not mad. DASA needs a year off.

DASA needs to consolidate itself, decide what it is and where it wants to be within the industry. It is indeed the perfect conduit to be used to reach AMDEA, CORGI and all the rest, but it also needs something to make it worth paying the membership fee for. If you take those factors alone, DASA will work for any trade member for free, you get the result, they get the benefit and they won’t even have to be members to get it. Believing otherwise is a falicy and, frankly, stupid and short sighted.

Taking the Rochefort approach and tackling the issues head on is fine in a perfect world, but with a lot of the points he raised, which many of us told DASA for free, immediate action and in particular knee-jerk reaction will only serve to worsen the situation.

UKW on the other hand is like DASA’s evil twin. We are in your face and have a serious attitude but with an underlying serious business tone as well as the social aspect of it. I don’t give a fuck who I upset if it meets my criteria and goals long-term, but I do think long-term. Being a commercial entity we have a lot more freedom to do what we will and change immediately as circumstance dictates, DASA does not have that luxury and change there is a long drawn out painful proccess. Hence, UKW will never become an association, it doesn’t suit me to be one.

Now, that said, it also suits me to have a trade association speaking with one voice for the trade. How do we achieve that? Easy, we work together and get our fucking act together, all of us. Stop fucking about bickering about who’s doing what or what’s being said.

We have e-jobs coming up, we can put a slant on preffering DASA members but we cannot offer exclusivity on it, that would be stupid. We have ACH on the way, that can also be used to further the DASA cause to some extent. Used wisely such things can be seen as an asset to DASA and, ultimately, to DASA membership. But if it goes that way then DASA may well have to look at helping fund all this, sorry guys but it costs money and if you want the benefits you have to also share the pain. We’ve invested countless man-hours already in various projects and will continue to do so with or without DASA. In fact you probably don’t know the half of what we’re up to.

Doing it this way allows DASA to become a kind of grand overseer of the trade and the official voice and lets us get on with the day to day nitty gritty of making it work. A nice arrangement for both I feel and offers both a role in steering the trade as a whole without ever forcing anyone down a path they don’t want to go down.

So long as you accept that DASA is not and shall not become a commercial entity, which by it’s very nature, it cannot become. Therefore, the choices for DASA are extremely limited right about now if it is to survive long-term.

Much of what I have done, what I have written and what I’ve accomplished already could have been and indeed, would have been, done under the DASA banner had it not been for some of the twats that have been on the council over the past decade or so and the man himself, Chris Hayter, the single largest liability that DASA ever had. He stood in the way and suppressed so much input over the past two decades that it has in effect killed DASA and the fucker knows it, so do we all, just sometimes we don’t like to admit it.

If you want to go down the path of trying to become a WP then be my guest, you won’t succeed. Even with Lux onboard and/or Whirlpool it would be accused of being a club for them then and, as Mark correctly pointed out on the phone this afternoon, it’s all about perception and not the reality.

I have a shitload of ideas for DASA, I could take it forward but I’d need carte blanche to do it and I know I’m not going to get that, especially by some on the council so I save my breath and await my time or I do it through UKW and maybe make a buck out it, it is of no consequence to me really. But do I want to run DASA, hell no! It’s a fuck-off hot potato that is and I don’t envy Mark in the slightest in having to try and appease everyone.

I stand by the statement that DASA is currently “useless and toothless” with little or no influence on the trade and over 200 people agree with me from UKW as they’re not members, over 2000 agree UK-wide, as they’re not members. The numbers speak for themselves.

This is because DASA has nothing to offer anyone to entice them to jump through the hoops and, even if they do, no fucker actually adheres to them once they are accepted.

So here’s the challenge for the DASA people, tell me I’m wrong! Prove to me that DASA is not as I describe it. And, if it is the way I describe it then fucking change it for the better instead of allowing some twats to be bumping their gums, shut them the fuck up and get on with what has to be done. Get rid of the politics and get on with the job.

It can be saved, it can be something worthwhile but it has to be done right, not some hurried quick “fix-it” to meet one report.

There, and you got all that for fuck all, didn’t even cost you £300 an hour for the analysis that took over an hour to type. I didn’t have to research it though, I’m involved in it!

K.

I was hovering over the “Submit” button for about ten minutes or so reading this and thinking it would upset a lot of you, but fuck it, it’s what I do. 😆