Surgical action

I took some stuff by car to the municipal re-cycling centre this morning, and went for a replacement flourescent tube for the kitchen lighting unit at Alan Wilson Electrical, which had exactly what I needed in stock. On my return, I could hear the buzz of a chainsaw nearby and found that access through the lane to our street was blocked by a lorry with a warning sign stating that tree felling was in progress. When I went up to my study at the back of the house, this is what I saw.

It was the end for the tallest tree in the back gardens of our neighbourhood. Several more look as if they've not been pruned for decades, including the leylandia and hawthorn either side in the picture above. Certainly if the tree being felled had come down in a gale in the direction of the house, its top branches would have landed on the roof of the kitchen extension. So, much as I hate aboricide, this was a good precaution, whether linked to garden remodelling plans or not.

That leylandia stands in the garden across the lane nearest ours. It had grown to twice the acceptable size for a tall hedge and cast a shadow over the flower beds in our garden for the best part of the day in summer, even worse in winter. Much to our delight, this was the lumberjack's next target. Hopefully, the extra light will make some difference to growth potential next year.

This is how it looks after surgery. Our flower bed is still in shade at midday, but not for quite as long. Now if this was Switzerland there'd be a communal regulation height of two metres for leylandia hedges and a uniformed officer to come around and remind you of your civic duty, then a notice of penalty for you to pay in the post if you ignore the advice. Would it work here?

Lighting and data triumphs

Before I left the office yesterday evening, Ashley had established that the florescent lighting tube I'd been hunting for over the past couple of days could be obtained from stocks held at an electrical trade wholesaler's store in Canton, the family business of Alan Wilson Electrical Supplies, just ten minutes walk from home.

I was there purchasing a couple of tubes by ten past nine. By half past I'd discovered that not only had the tube died but also its mounting. I rang up to check if they had one. The man at the other end expressed doubt, but went and checked and found there was one left. It was waiting for me when I arrived for a second time at ten to ten. This time everything worked fine, though I had to wait for Clare to return from school at lunchtime to have another set of hands - one to hold the mounting and tube, one to screw it back into a most awkward place under a cupboard.

All sorts of places we enquired of had lighting tubes and fitments available on their shelves, but Howden our kitchen suppliers three years ago provided accessories to their own standard, which wasn't quite the same in length or power consumption as varieties of equipment commonly used. With their name and address actually printed on the dud tube removed, their commercial operation is clearly big enough to enable them to commission mass orders direct from a suitably competitive manufacturer.  So, anyone who buys their equipment gets locked in to their supply cycle for obtaining spare parts. 

This may benefit the company and be convenient to some customers. However, our experience of ordering lighting components through our local Howden outlet was less then satisfactory. The same was true for Kath and Anto, who also have a Howden kitchen installed a year after ours.  Kath got spare parts for her kitchen lighting off the internet. This is the first time any of our original installed kit has needed replacement, so it was most fortunate to discover a local firm that has sufficient longevity to carry all kinds of electrical spares and odd bits and pieces across generations which people may need, but which get swept away in the tide of commercial progress by bigger corporates. It's not just the parts but the huge amount of expertise shared by a family firm which makes a small family business like this an unique treasure.

In between the craftsmen who can make anything you need, at a price, and the mass manufacturers which increasingly supply global markets with useable consistent standard products, comes a huge range of companies - SMEs is the current jargon phrase - small to medium enterprises which make, store, or distribute accessories or components that greatly prolong the life of useable equipment or installations with replacement parts. Sure, this service can be and often is achieved effectively by big corporate bodies using suitable computer inventory software and storage, but not always.

What's amazes me is how something even better and more efficient than this can be achieved by a company whose life and collective memory spans generations, a team of people able to remember what customers may need after the big guys have moved on and are busy promoting 'bettter' replacements for everything, although nobody asked them for this. Knowing what the customer may need is a different kind of service from persuading customers what they may next need but don't yet know. In the ecosystem which is trade and commerce, there's room for all types.

This afternoon, Ashley found his lost phone and spent half an hour negotiating BT automated answering menus in order to persuade someone to re-instate his blocked phone. When he'd succeeded, he observed that none of the real people spoken to asked him to confirm his identity for security purposes. Strange. 

Anyway, I succeeded in getting him to part with his recovered phone for long enough to perform a full system back-up, and a separate file of all his contacts on both our computers, just in case there's another incident of this kind in future. I wanted to do this nearly three years ago, but our RadioNet service is so dependent on telephone contact that it's taken me this long to get around to securing the vital information. I'm glad and relieved to have done it, but ashamed it took so long. These are hidden risks we didn't need. Thankfully, it's the first time such a nightmare data loss scenario has confronted us, and we survived - wiser for the experience, I hope.