Diary Of An ADI

Being self-employed I have a couple of cash’n’carry cards – one for Makro and another for Hyperama.

I noticed in one of the searches used to get to this site someone had searched for ‘ Makro Job Cuts ‘, and after a bit of searching it seems that this is correct. WalesOnline reports:

I was at the Test Centre (TC) today and I saw a letter informing ADIs that due to some change or enforcement of the Data Protection Act (DPA) they cannot discuss candidates’ test bookings with ADIs over the phone. The pupil has to call and provide certain data as confirmation of identity (this is how I read it, anyway).

Last week, due to all the snow, I had four tests cancelled. In each case I phoned the TC to find out if the test was going ahead and was asked the pupil’s name so that they could register the test as cancelled – that’s the only way the DSA will allow a booking to be changed without the pupil losing the test fee (until it is officially logged as cancelled the test is considered ‘taken’).

Technically, the Driving Examiner (DE) I spoke to in each case was breaking the rules.

So, the only way I could have handled any of those tests last week – officially – would have been to phone the pupil, get them to talk to the TC, and then call me back with the status of the test. Since most of the tests were early morning ones the pupil would still have been in bed, so I would quite possibly have had to go to pick them up as agreed and then get them to call the TC in my presence – meaning a journey in hazardous conditions and often of a good few miles in rural areas, plus further wasted time and money (on top of the lost money from the cancelled test in my diary anyway).

It’s ironic that edicts like this come down from Government departments who appear to specialise in losing huge quantities of highly sensitive data concerning individuals, and yet they employ hundreds of people whose job it is to try and plug every tiny hole of flexibility and commonsense that exists without any problems whatsoever elsewhere.

Last week turned out to be a real stinker.

Thanks to the weather, I lost 25 hours of work. That’s £600 I didn’t get, but which I would have done if it hadn’t snowed.

Anyone thinking of becoming an instructor should bear this in mind. It isn’t easy to earn that £30,000 they keep telling you about on those ads when you lose 50% of your work without warning like this (could anyone have predicted we’d get that much snow after 20 years of the occasional bit of wet hail?)

On the plus side, those pupils I did take out – ones near enough test standard to be able to handle it, and only later in the week – benefited greatly. It might be another 20 years before they see the like again, but at least they’ll now know how easy it is to skid, and how slow you have to drive.

Watching the news last night and it struck me how pathetic we have become in this country! I mean ‘pathetic’ in the sense that we can’t look after ourselves and go all mardy (look that one up) when the going is less than easy.

Admittedly London had a fair bit of snow but was it really enough for the entire transport system to freeze up? Someone somewhere isn’t doing their job properly if this can happen – especially when a few hundred miles to the east Scandinavia manages splendidly every year in much worse conditions.

No, the bit that caught my attention was the fact that the entire system shut down in places where there had been no snowfall at all. Schools were particularly ready to shut up shop for no sensible reason and there have been complaints from parents and businesses – parents were forced to stay home to look after kids, and businesses lost their workforce as a result, all at a time when they can ill-afford to lose revenue. It is estimated that up to 3,000 business already close to bankruptcy could be sent over the edge as a result of closures due to snow.

Even on the BBC News last night they had their roving reporter standing in a big empty car park telling us how health centres had shut and ‘this car park would normally be full’. There was easily less than 2 inches of level snow on that park…

And just to balance things up a little here’s the single from Rush’s latest album, Snakes and Arrows (2007):

This was recorded live in Rotterdam during the last tour.

I’ve posted recently about various prog rock programmes on the BBC, but there is really only one band that is worth listening to these days. And that’s Rush .

I’ve been following them since the 70s and they’re still going strong – not in the crusty ‘reformed’ sense, but in full and continuous flight. This video is an oldie from the Moving Pictures album (1981).

They last toured in 2007 and I made sure I went to every UK show. It really was awesome.

Following on from the Mail’s highly embarrassing crusade to prevent energy-inefficient and environment-destroying incandescent bulbs from being phased out (and all because of those damned Johnny Foreigners in the EU. Eh. What), it reported this week that a bulb costing only £2 with a life expectancy of 60 years had been developed.

A lighting revolution is on the way that could end at the flick of a switch the battle between supporters of conventional bulbs and the eco-friendly variety.

It goes on to describe this ‘brand new’ invention:

Cambridge University researchers have developed cheap, light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that produce brilliant light but use very little electricity. They will cost £2 and last up to 60 years.

Despite being smaller than a penny, they are 12 times more efficient than conventional tungsten bulbs and three times more efficient than the unpopular fluorescent low-energy versions.

Erm, Mail-guys! They may cost £2 each, but a typical usable light bulb will need perhaps 5-10 of them inside. So your later comment involves a little bit of misunderstanding:

But until now the production costs have been too expensive for widespread use because the material had to be ‘grown’ on sapphire wafers, meaning a single household bulb would have cost £20.

A household bulb using these LEDs will still cost anywhere between £10-20, depending on how many LEDs it has inside. And the Maplin LED Strip I mentioned in the original story only costs £19 and has 36 ultra-bright LEDs on it (that’s about 53p per LED, Mail-guys!)

Maplin LED Light Strip – type 1

I suspect the Mail is trying (very badly) to dig itself out of the huge hole it dug over that free lightbulb offer to its crusty, middle-England readership – who, incidentally, are still flooding this site with hits based on the search term ‘Daily Mail free lightbulb offer’.

Of course, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that high-brightness LEDs have been around since at least 2007 . No, wait! Maybe since 2005 (and they’re made of Gallium Nitride – the same Philosopher’s Stone the Mail claims this fantastic new discovery is fashioned from). The Mail’s journo’s are a real joke sometimes – they can’t research any science story properly.

The cost of high-brightness LEDs will come down – everyone knows that. It’s just a shame that the kind of people who would happily sacrifice the planet to prevent the EU telling them what to do can’t get it into their heads that even now £20-30 for a bulb which never wears out and uses a fraction of the power is better than paying 70p repeatedly for something which breaks every few months and costs a fortune to run by comparison.

But that’s the typical Daily Mail reader for you. It’s no wonder we’re still stuck with a nonsensical Imperial measuring system and Sterling when metric and the Euro are just sitting there begging to be used.