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Re: F#$king small claims court
What an unfortunate story and I have empathy with you, that said like has been stated it is prudent to retain all paperwork for at least six years preferably seven and in the case of PLC insurance these certificates must be retained for forty years.
I even keep any correspondence from customers and my letters to them just in case something happens in the future and at the end of the day its all in the detail.
I do however hope this all works out for you, personally I would try and appeal and you could summon the baliff who witnessed the reciept in an effort to show to the court that you had settled the claim. The court will look at the facts and base its deceision on what is reasonable.
Re: Quality Tamperproof Torx/Security Torx bit sets
Teng are quality and have a lifetime guarantee, I have recently bought a 48 piece set which inludes all the sockets you need, whitworth, Torx, Philps etc etc and is quarter inch.
Re: Free Estimate.
Sorry I was under the impression that we were discussing this on the basis of a commercial enviroment as opposed to the simple things of life.
Certainly there are many things that we all endear that cost nothing in terms of money, however those things usually require the giving of something in order to receive.On the basis of the original question of Free estimates can any of us really afford to be running around allday for free ?
That is the question to be or not to be !
Re: april fools day…..ive a washer in my shower room ..!!!
I aways make a full report on jobs like this that I come across, the punters are ignorant and the landlords don’t want to hear anything that might cost them money.
You were right to disable the appliance and if the landlord wishes to reconnect it after your visit and advise then it will be him facing court.
I have known of landlords connecting faulty gas appliances as well as electrical appliances all in the name of saving themselves money.Re: Free Estimate.
I wonder if these same people go to Tesco’s and ask for free food !
There ain’t many things that are free in this life and those that are probably ain’t worth having in the first place:
I leave free estimates and the like to my compeditors, the less money they make the sooner they will be out of business.
Re: Belling IDW603 Dishwasher
Mm I have checked the Door Microswitch first ! had the PCB and examined it, it looks fine. I have not checked the wiring loom where it passes through the door that will be my next move, other than that I am not sure. The module is about £150.00 retail plus labour and I don’t really want to order a module down at that price.
Hopefully it may be fractured door wiring .
Re: Belling IDW603 Dishwasher
Guys, the diswasher does not function at all, it displays those symbols but there is no pump or fill, nothing its just sitting there dead.
Going back through the search pages I was starting think it may be a Servis machine as it looks simliar.
The machine appears to have completed its last wash cycle and then when the customer came back it had those two reversed LL letters on it !
Thanks for any input you can give 🙂
Re: Test Gear & Safety testing
Exactly Andy, after all said and done a decent megger is a necesarry item and when I leave a repair I know in my own mind that I have done as much as I can in testing that appliance.
Funny that we seem to encounter these could’nt care less types along the way, another one that I heard was this, ” A megger ? thing is if you have one of them things and it shows you a fault, you could be there hours trying to get the fault to go away !
Can you believe it ? Some actually see it as a hindrance.
Re: Test Gear & Safety testing
Ha ! I can remember broaching this very subject not long after I first became a member here, with varying results !
Having worked for a major manufacturer which is how I got started in this business even then Circa: 1990 the safety testing of all appliances was mandatory and the results logged. Ever since those days I have always maintained this standard which is good practice in my book.
Firstly by performing the relevant safety checks you ensure not only your own personal safety but also that of your customer. Secondly should there be an issue you can show that you did perform all reasoanble steps which would judge you as being competent. We have a duty of care when dealing with the public and that is a legal issue which if it could be shown you acted without due care that you personally would be liable.
Only yesterday I went to a job where an engineer had fitted a surround door seal to a intergrated dishwasher. By questiong the customer it became apparent that the reason the seal was replaced was due to the appliance tripping the RCCD unit and that it was blowing the 13amp fuse in the plug.
The seal had not rectified the fault and it turned out that the previous engineer had not tested for earth insulation as he did not possess the necesarry equipment and as he thought the seal look a bit dodgy and he could not be bothered to remove the appliance he was guessing it may be the seal ! even though it had blown three fuses why he was on site !!!!
Having applied the megger to the appliance I was able to ascertain a serious earthing fault straight away, next removing the appliance I was able to quicky see that the Heating Element was the culprit of this problem.
The customer then asked me why it was that the previous engineer had not found any of this out ? Duh ! how would I know what working practices any other engineer may or may not have ?
I have met a fair few so called engineers who have said Megger ! whats the point, I have never really needed one and I been doing this job for years !
Personally I cannot understand how not having a megger and other testing equipment can be the accepted norm as by having this stuff it will actually HELP you with the job in so many ways.
Re: There Go I For The Grace Of God
I feel that we should share our experiences in an open way in matters that affect the job we do. There is no guarantee that any of us will get a nightmare customer like this as its plain to see that this situation could have happened to any one at any time.
As I have said I would have had no problem in taking this woman to court and the evidence would have shown the court that her malicous allegations were just that ! Fame and notoriety I can do without and I doubt that she would want any adverse publicity herself. I have accepted now that the matter is closed and I have move my mindset on from those events.
Oh Happy Day !
Re: There Go I For The Grace Of God
Martin & Robbra, thanks for your kind words which I appreciate ! its not the fact that we never received payment for this repair but the fact of what she did to discredit and falsely accuse me, the money is one thing the principle is far higher in my book.
What comes around goes around and I certanly hope that in this individuals case those words come true.
Be Careful out there guys ! & girls if we have any 😉
Re: There Go I For The Grace Of God
Hi Robbra,
The long and short of this is that against my better judgement we have let this go. I work in a democracy and did not have the internal support necessary to pursue this case in which I was confident of success.
So not only has this witch got away with having me nearly arrested and my good name guttered she has acheived her goal of getting away with full payment ! :angry4: Peculiar how some people are like electricity in that they always take the least line of resistance:
Ain’t life a bitch !
Re: Whirlpool Fridge Fire Caught On Video
Kind of reminds me of the days of the Whirpool ADG series of dishwashers when we were mad busy changing wiring looms !
Re: Travel Database:
This was printed in The Times 16th March, a serious newspaper.
E-borders – the new frontier of oppression
Soon, every time you travel, you’ll have to give all kinds of intrusive details. And you can bet they won’t be securely storedLibby Purves
From time to time, when low in spirits, I find solace in websites on “How to Disappear”. It is not an urge to deceive loved ones and insurance companies like the appalling canoe man, but merely to toy with the idea of slipping below the official radar. Imagine walking cheerfully through the world: harmless and innocent, untraceable, unlisted, unfollowed, private.The guides make it clear how hard this is. It is not only CCTV and biometric passports that betray our whereabouts but also banking, bills, phones, cars, laptops (how ironic , just as you completed your escape, to be outed by web records showing you surfing for advice on how often to throw your prepay phone in the river). As technology moves on, not only fingerprinting but facial scanning may betray you, and if – while remembering your gloves and refraining from sneezing your DNA – you take your sunglasses off to see the cash machine screen on your secret bank account, then iris-recognition technology will get you, snap! Oh yes, we have all watched Spooks.
Well, it is a pleasantly paranoiac way to pass a depressed half-hour, and there is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.
There is something fundamentally unnerving about being watched. After the fall of Ceausescu, our Romanian friends said that one of the worst things under his regime was not lousy housing, shortages or even fear of arrest but that “They knew everything, they knew where you went”. Even in an age of Twitter and texting it is good to feel that obscurity is available: provided we do no harm and pay our taxes, we can go off-radar when we want to and Jacqui Smith can never find us.
Governments, always slow to grasp psychological realities, should try to understand this need. That they do not is apparent in their mania for collecting personal data (soon to include phone, e-mail and text records) from birth onwards, and sharing it between agencies or indeed selling it. At the last count the DVLA in Swansea had scored £9 million in “admin” fees by giving vehicle owners’ names and home addresses to private parking companies – ie, to any dodgy character who claims they saw your car on their yard.
Nor is information guarded efficiently: staff at the Revenue & Customs burnt 25 million child benefit records on to CDs, twice, unencrypted; three million UK learner drivers’ details were lost in Iowa, and in one year 1,500 passports were lost in the post. Even if not lost, data can be handled cavalierly: a Newcastle mother reports that her “hungover, gap-year sons” were hired, without checks, by a sub-contractor two steps from government to spend long yawning days copying NHS personal medical records on to a computer, with the occasional giggle at a funny name or embarrassing ailment.
“But,” splutters government when we jib at this, “it’s for your own good! We’re protecting you!” The same tone of hurt ministerial outrage will be heard more and more as people come to realise exactly what is involved in the vast new “e-borders” system, currently being set up to track everybody’s international travel just because a tiny minority are up to no good. A huge new database near Manchester will hold your personal travel history and mine for up to ten years. A pilot is already running on “high-risk” routes; by the end of April 100 million will be tracked, by next year all rail, air and ferry travellers; by 2014, everyone.
And what will they know? Who you are, where you live, how you paid, your phone and e-mail, where you’re going, who’s with you, where you plan to stay and when you’ll be back. In most cases they want your intentions logged a full day in advance. We may be forced to be “EU citizens” in a hundred other ways, but there’ll be no more casual booze-cruises or spontaneous hops to the Normandy gîte or Frankfurt office; not without telling Nanny.
At the extremes, by 2014 pleasure boats, fishing vessels and private planes will be included. I recognise that yachtsmen are a minority, even counting big sail-training vessels with young crews. I can see that our problems with weather and last-minute changes of crew are hobbyist stuff. But all the same, it may interest you to know that the Royal Yachting Association and others have been trying without success to get government to say how it will work, and have little hope of modifying it.
This causes consternation, what with a £5,000 fine for not notifying your movements online 24 hours early and heaven knows what penalties for accidentally being blown on to an unplanned coast, or indeed filling in the form and then chickening out and staying up Mudlump Creek with a bottle of whisky. It may seem odd to those who do not sail, but there was a pleasing sense of ancient liberty in being able to slip out of a UK anchorage at dawn and make for Dieppe or Waterford (yes, Ireland is included now).
Opposition voices have pointed out the complexity, the cost, the paucity of consultation, the extraordinary power given to the UK Border Agency by statutory instruments without parliamentary scrutiny. Given the cases of councils already using anti-terrorist powers to catch litterbugs and school admissions cheats, there is a real fear that e-borders will be used to trump up tax claims or detect petty infringements like taking your children abroad in the school term. And there is something profoundly dispiriting in the principle of us all being suspects: universal
surveillance rather than targeted concentration on known criminals and murderous creeps with terrorist ambitions.
All this began when Tony Blair was embarrassed by a question about how many failed asylum seekers were here, and when it became clear that UK immigration control is ludicrously ineffective in an enlarged, porous EU. The depressing thing is that there used to be a reasonable system for knowing who was here – exit checks on passports. These were largely abandoned in 2004 to save money.
Under e-borders, the idea is that the pendulum will swing back until they know everything about everyone. And having so much information, they will become even more confused and give your plans to some cowboy IT contractor, who will leave it on a train seat to be picked up by grateful burglars, blackmailers and gossips.
They’ll write in saying this is a caricature. It’s not. It’s an extrapolation, based on experience.
Re: Travel Database:
This new database is concerned with people leaving the country not coming in. Everday illegals enter the country and disapear without trace, surely if they want to track terroists wanting to maintain records for 10 years on us lisitng all the times we go on holiday is not the way to prevent such things.
These Terorism laws are being used against us and the professional terrorists will find ways of working around this just like they have done in the past. Makes me wonder how brainwashed they have got people
