From their website: “We sell remaindered books. Often when a new title is going to be released, the publishers can only guess at how many of that title they are going to sell. A lot of the time they guess wrong and print too many. They send the books out to regular bookstores and department stores and they sit on the shelf waiting to be purchased. Eventually the popularity of that title will wane and those books will just be taking up valuable room. The retailer would obviously prefer to fill the shelf space with newer titles that they hope will sell better. After a certain amount of time the bookseller is able to pack up the remaining copies and send them back to the publishers for a refund. The publishers suddenly find themselves with a lot of books that the regular booksellers no longer want to stock, and they are left with two options – either destroy the books or resell them at a discounted price. In most cases the publishers would rather resell them to bookstores like us! When this happens the books are classified as ‘remaindered’.”.

There’s a delicious touch of irony in the oversupply of a book entitled “Fell’s Guide to Writing Bestsellers“. Based on it not selling enough to leave the store with consumers, and it’s had to be remaindered, I don’t think I’ll trust the advice within it. Today’s SPOTD award goes to the person who estimated whether a book about writing bestsellers would itself qualify.

Fell's Guide to Writing Bestsellers

Awesome.

If there’s one thing I love to do after arriving home at 10:30pm, it’s turn around and drive another two hours…*facepalm*

With ~15 items on the belt and 7 bags to put the items into, the checkout lad initially tried loading everything into a single bag.  In the first bag, he first loaded a 2.4L fruit juice bottle, then a second.  As he scanned the third bottle and went to put it in the bag, he was clearly moving items around ready to try and get more inside the bag.  The bags are not engineered to carry excessive load so I quickly interjected and said “just two bottles in that bag, thanks!” which made him stop.  Briefly.  Before putting the third bottle into the bag…

Again I stopped him and explained more fully this time: “we have lots of bags so there’s no need to put more than two bottles in because otherwise it’s too heavy and the bag will break“. He seemed to understand, and put the third bottle into a second bag and I assumed he’d keep loading that second bag.

No.

Instead he took me at my word and didn’t load more than two bottles into the first bag, but did then start putting large 500g soup tins into the bag.  I got quite short with him at this point and pointedly (and somewhat loudly) told him to stop, explaining that the two bottles was all I wanted in the bag.

Aha! The light of recognition went off in his eyes!  ”Just the two in the bag then?” he asked, and I replied that was correct.  I’d taken the soup tins off him and put them in the second bag with the third bottle, then turned around to put it in the trolley.

As I turned back, he was scanning more items and loading them into a third bag as I expected.  What I didn’t expect was for him to now stop putting more than two items in a bag.  Apparently unable to recognise the difference between 2 x 2.4L bottles of juice vs 2 x 100g packets of marshmallows, he was now only loading 2 items in each bag…

He looked up at me after each bag quizzically, unable to comprehend why I would want to put only two items in each bag, and by that stage all I could really do was stare at him, slack-jawed as he disregarded the logical sorting of items on the conveyor belt and put two items per bag.  Thus it was we ended in a scenario where each of us thought the other was a cretin because he could not differentiate between “don’t overload the bags with many heavy items” vs “don’t put more than a certain number of items in each bag, regardless of weight”.

Dear Woolworths – I repeat my request for aptitude testing…

We take our own recyclable canvas bags to the supermarket and have 7 of them, 6 neatly folded inside one so they’re all easy to grab out and quickly use.

The checkout kid tonight started off by noting there were 7 bags and we had ~20 items – then put as much into the first bag as he could.  We had to stop him and then repack, as he stuffed 8kgs of groceries into a single bag.  We then re-explained we had many bags and he should use as many as he wanted because we wanted only a few things in each bag.

Less than a minute later, after stuffing 2kgs of potatoes, plus oranges, apples, carrots, capsicum, etc into a bag – he looked at the bread and then asked “do you want that in another bag?”

Um.  He’s still got four bags available, yet he was considering stuffing the bread in with heavy fruit and vegetables.

Dear Woolworths management – please include some sort of aptitude testing immediately…*sigh*

Click the thumbnail to view a larger image and see the error.

Oops - wrong Newcastle...

https://www.ideservetobeheard.com.au/getInvolved/shareStory.php

The other day I went to the pub and there was just me smoking in the beer garden.  Everyone else was not smoking.  I found this offensive so I puffed away madly and tried to give them all as much second hand smoke as I could because, as a smoker, I apparently have the right to destroy the amenity of any area for other people.  As we all know, we smokers believe smoking is just a one-person activity and and it does not affect anyone else, which is why it’s always okay in every smokers’ mind to stand anywhere they want and breathe foul pollutants onto other people.  It’s not my responsibility whatsoever if smoke fills the rest of the area.  In fact, you can’t prove it to me because I am (1) pig-headed and (2) desensitised to smoking because my lungs are filled with tar.

Oh, and at the end, to make sure everyone knew I was a smoker with rights, I threw the lit butt onto the ground because Big Tobacco needs our support.  All those cigarette butts lying on footpaths and being washed down gutters into waterways?  That’s us smokers advertising how awesome we are and why we don’t need a nanny state.  I mean, it’s not like anyone else on the face of the planet would want either water or a pristine environment.

My SPOTD today is “anyone who smokes”…

ideservetobeheard.com.au

About the only downside of the work was deciding to bash my thumb, not the chisel, when working on the doorframe.

So, for putting up with the frustrations of a stupid door for that long and then it being such a quick fix I could have done years ago, I am my own SPOTD.

As the students return to the university this week, they all show up to the underground carpark precinct I use and try to enter. Unfortunately for us regular users who all have swipe cards, the process for entering as a casual carpark user is to press the intercom and call security who then take time to answer before a conversation ensues, resulting in security personnel remotely opening the boomgate across the entrance. Of course, this backs the traffic up all the way down the road so it’s a pain in the neck for someone like me who’s going to take <3 seconds to drive up, swipe a card and drive in. In fact, the swipe card is usually so fast that I don’t even have to hit the brakes – I can just roll the car right through the entire process.

But when I get inside at the moment, all the little darlings are EVERY-FREAKING-WHERE through the carpark, all attempting (it seems) to reverse park for the first time.

Note that it’s not a requirement to reverse park in the carpark – it’s just that people choose to do it because it takes far longer than regular parking with no extra advantages. Oh sure, there’s a rule in the army that tells soldiers to reverse park because they may be under enemy fire and need to escape in the future. That makes sense. But seriously, this is not the army. If you reverse park in front of me and do that stupid little back-forward-back-forward-back-forward crap that keeps you moving your car in the same three feet of space without actually getting your car into the carpark then it’s likely to INCREASE your chances of coming under enemy fire. From me!!!

And then, finally when I spied a carpark this morning the person who was parked in the carpark next to it was slowly going to the rear passenger door to get out a book on one side of the car, then walked to the front passenger door and got her handbag, then back to the rear passenger door and got another item, then back to the front passenger door to lock the car. FFS! Get out of the way! Walk around to the side of the car where you will not be blocking someone else from parking and then just reach across the car! It’s a pitiful little useless car anyway so it’s not like you have to reach far.

Grr.

I have no idea who the biggest SPOTD of today was. Take your pick!

• Security for making casual and long-term users use the same entrance although there are two
• People who can’t reverse park
• People who can’t get out of the way of an incoming car parking next to them
• People in general
• Me for going to work instead of staying home

All I know is it took me about 4 times as long as usual to get into the carpark and leave my car, and now I’m irritable and grumpy.

Grrrrrrrr!

He looked at the name of the software: “Greeting Card Factory Deluxe Version 7″ and started to enter his Google search.  I was astonished when he searched simply for “Version 7″ and then just started peering at the top 10 search results as though that was going to yield something useful. I advised him to just search on the vendor’s website (printed on the box) and also that searching for such a vague term was pointless, but he persisted in re-reading the top 10 search results just in case he’d somehow (1) managed to get it in the top 10, and (2) overlooked it or (3) they were updating sneakily so he had to keep an eye on them.

Google search for "Version 7"

The SPOTD refused me when I asked to search instead of him, and he wouldn’t search for anything more specific like, oh, the software name!!! Thus it was I left him with the software and drove home to search online.  I was probably still faster finding the answer that way despite needing to drive across several suburbs.  Sigh.