The stupidity of broken Britain

[Dave2002]

We have a robot mower - I have written about this before. Currently it is outside working hard, and saving me the bother. However it has developed a fault, which is slightly annoying.

It is a Flymo model, with a flap which comes up to reveal a keypad. Sometimes the flap opens up, and sometimes, after that, if the mower bumps into something, it will stop.

This was just beginning to be a problem last year, but it took me quite a while to find out whether it could be fixed. On the face of it, the problem seems trivial, but I can't find out how to remedy it myself. So eventually I contacted several Flymo offices, and eventually one of them replied and said I need to take it to a Husqvarna dealer.

As winter was approaching I eventually just put it away for the winter.

This year the weather has been so bad that I didn't even get it out until a month or so ago, and to my relief I got it working again quite easily - maybe an hour's work to check the wiring, plug everything else etc. Within a couple of days it tidied up our front lawn, and even when we went away for a week and parked it, it was able to get most of the surface tidied up within two days.

The flap up problem is still annoying though, so by now I had found out which was the nearest Husqvarna dealer - a tad under 20 miles away. I phoned them up and explained the problem.
The first person seemed to understand machines, and said it sounded simple enough, but maybe a catch had broken. He then warned me that it might take a while, but passed me over to someone else to see if I could book it in. She warned me straight off that there was a waiting time of at least 2 weeks - possibly a lot more. After a brief discussion I then said, "OK, - book me in, and let me know when to bring it in".

Then I heard the dreaded words - which are totally stupid - IMO.

"No - we don't do it that way".

"You bring it in, and we might get round to looking at it in two weeks, or more, then we can decide what to do".

As the machine is currently capable of doing an acceptable job, with the slight inconvenience of having to check on it every few hours, we have decided not to take it in for the moment.

There is of course no competitor local company that I can identify which will do the repair.

For the curious I won't mention the Husqvarna dealer, though Peter Rabbit's father wasn't keen.

This is not "life threatening", but a small example of the stupidity which I think is endemic in much of the UK right now.

[smittims]

Quite so. Many years ago Kingsley Amis called it the EFTA : 'Easier for Them Association'.

I'm sorry to hear of your trouble. Many of us, I think, live in dread of our lawn mower refusing to start next time we need it. We're still using an old one passed down to us by my sister-in-law. I've repaired it twice and it worked OK yesterday.

Oh. for the days when there was a little man down a lane who could fix anythiing with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.
Anyway I was relieved to read your post, as,,when I saw the title I feared it was a promotion for the Reform Party. 'Fixing Broken Britain' is their slogan. .

[Old Grumpy]

Bit like paying on your phone for parking (which I've just been reading about on another forum) - apparently Ringo is out of action in some areas. All car parks should be able to take payment by card, cash or phone! Who is it easier for to have phone-only payment? Certainly not the car park user!

[Dave2002]

The phone parking thing is a pain. So far we haven't actually had too many problems, but I recall on one occasion mrs d. took a car to the local station car park, couldn't pay, so "did it" from her phone on the train. However it was only after that that she realised that she had paid for our "other" car at the time - as that was how her phone was set up. Fortunately nobody noticed or cared, but I could have imagined a rather heated dialogue if that had been followed up by some jobsworth.

However I do love it when one or more car park machines go wrong in some areas. Round here [Invernesss] there is a Morrisson's car park which many use, but recently plastic bags have been put over most of the ticket machines - don't know why. Unlike the railways there are no suggestions that we now have to use a mobile phone to pay, so for the moment we get free parking. The ticket machines in many of the SW Trains car parks often didn't work - so why was that the users' fault? Having to compensate for failures elsewhere by doing something with a mobile phone is just not on IMO.

[Roger Webb]

We have a robot mower........

.

My wife has one too.........

[oddoneout]

The end user of all these modern ways of doing things doesn't figure at all, since all that matters is getting the money. Equipment or service not working, gadget broken at first use, too bad. The solution is to make it so difficult/impossible to get the company to do what it should that customers give up and go away. For things like car parking, the end user is always in the wrong, and strong arm tactics(sending "fines", not accepting evidence) presumably work well enough income-wise to make addressing the problems unnecessary? Public parking in my area is free, so long as time limits are observed(number plate recognition picks up overstayers), and I don't drive far enough to encounter the kind of machines I can't use.
The days of the fixit man down the end of the road have not been helped by the rise of non-fixable items, but a combination of voluntary community repair "shops", and legislation to increase the repairability of said items, to say nothing of the increasing awareness of manfacturing and waste environmental consequences, is beginning to nibble away at the disposable approach.

[french frank]

My wife has one too.........

Does she have a dishwasher too?

[Serial_Apologist]

The phone parking thing is a pain. So far we haven't actually had too many problems, but I recall on one occasion mrs d. took a car to the local station car park, couldn't pay, so "did it" from her phone on the train. However it was only after that that she realised that she had paid for our "other" car at the time - as that was how her phone was set up. Fortunately nobody noticed or cared, but I could have imagined a rather heated dialogue if that had been followed up by some jobsworth.

However I do love it when one or more car park machines go wrong in some areas. Round here [Invernesss] there is a Morrisson's car park which many use, but recently plastic bags have been put over most of the ticket machines - don't know why. Unlike the railways there are no suggestions that we now have to use a mobile phone to pay, so for the moment we get free parking. The ticket machines in many of the SW Trains car parks often didn't work - so why was that the users' fault? Having to compensate for failures elsewhere by doing something with a mobile phone is just not on IMO.

As can be seen from the latest and still unresolved NHS computer crash, all that Putin would need to do to save his armed forces the trouble of physically invading us would be to crash all our traffic control and parking systems, thereby gumming up all our roads and streets to bring the Bruitish economy economy to a complete halt. Am I giving him ideas?

[Roger Webb]

Does she have a dishwasher too?

Yes, and a cooker....

[oddoneout]

This goes beyond stupidity - electric bikes that fail at the feel of rain or a less than perfect running surface...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/15/the-big-problem-is-water-uk-ebike-owners-plagued-by-failing-motors

It's not just that they fail, it's the added issue of the attitude of the manufacturer to the problem.

[Serial_Apologist]

This goes beyond stupidity - electric bikes that fail at the feel of rain or a less than perfect running surface...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/15/the-big-problem-is-water-uk-ebike-owners-plagued-by-failing-motors

It's not just that they fail, it's the added issue of the attitude of the manufacturer to the problem.

There's a chap who runs a small household products repair business not far from where I live. I first learned about him from an ad he placed in a local paper, some twenty years ago when I first moved into this district. Having found out he still operates I was able to get an old audio cassette player repaired by him in a few days and at minimal cost. When I mentioned not having seen his publicity for a long time, thereby assuming that he no longer operated, he said to me "Well I was just getting inundated with work from people who had nowhere and no one else to turn to, and was finding it difficult to cope with the resulting workload. I had thought it would decline as people just resorted to chucking out their newly acquired faulty equipment, but people were finding it too expensive to always buy new".