The Night Mail

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

Had a bit of a bad do with the shearlegs I’m making for the layout yesterday. I had just finished it except for weathering when I knocked it off the bench and damaged it. Fortunately the damage is confined to the side frame of the gearing being knocked out of line so all the axles are skew whiff but it means taking off all the chain before straightening it out and putting the chain back on with the top part boxed in will be a real PITA. Oh, well, the tribulations of a careless modeller I guess.

 

Dave

In hindsight, you should never have rubbed off the GWR graffiti!

 

S&T Reading always has its revenge.

[Canal Digger]

Our (43rd) Wedding Aniv' yesterday so had a day out to Weymouth (in Dorset for those not local). Strange to see various posters on the theme of 'Please Mr Toad Hippo, don’t come back!' and a trail of destruction undergoing repair. Police are apparently looking for a battle scared Hippomobile, following numerous reports of speeding and dangerous driving. Also several village ponds need extensive repair, as they are now  just a muddy hollow. Any thoughts anyone?

 

Now to catch up on what I missed yesterday 

[Happy Hippo]

3 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Any business that is operating on  a model that relies on underpaying the staff then getting the public to compensate via tipping deserves to go under in my book.

Model businesses pay very badly:

 

Ask DH, NHN,  or even me!

 

Long hours, little return and if you are a sole trader, not much in the way of staff discount.

 

The only good tip I got was 'go and do something else'.

[Oldddudders]

3 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

Model businesses pay very badly:

 

Ask DH, NHN,  or even me!

 

Long hours, little return and if you are a sole trader, not much in the way of staff discount.

 

The only good tip I got was 'go and do something else'.

Similar to motor racing, where the conventional answer to how to make a small fortune is to start with a large one! 

[jjb1970]

The business practice I really hated (and which should be stamped on very hard) is big companies who basically wait for legal action before settling invoices which can push small companies under. I have worked for companies that did it, one was a large German multi-national gas and electricity company, and the other up in Cumbria. I found it profoundly embarrassing as I had contractors who'd provided services as agreed in their contracts who then took forever to be paid despite terms having also been agreed in the contract. They had every right to rant at me, quite a few companies refused to work for us and I thought they were correct to look elsewhere. The one in Cumbria was notorious for getting small suppliers addicted to their business then screwing them in a big way. Awful.

[jamie92208]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

Had a bit of a bad do with the shearlegs I’m making for the layout yesterday. I had just finished it except for weathering when I knocked it off the bench and damaged it. Fortunately the damage is confined to the side frame of the gearing being knocked out of line so all the axles are skew whiff but it means taking off all the chain before straightening it out and putting the chain back on with the top part boxed in will be a real PITA. Oh, well, the tribulations of a careless modeller I guess.

 

Dave

It happens so easily.  My 700 took a dive when a piece of track went live without an end stop on it.  I should have fitted it with air brakes. 

 

As to slow payment I was aware of that and it's the big companies that are the worst offenders.  When we were rebuild g the horse tram I made a point of settling as soon as possible,  once supp, iers got used to this delivery times were never a problem. 

 

Jamie

[rockershovel]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

The business practice I really hated (and which should be stamped on very hard) is big companies who basically wait for legal action before settling invoices which can push small companies under. I have worked for companies that did it, one was a large German multi-national gas and electricity company, and the other up in Cumbria. I found it profoundly embarrassing as I had contractors who'd provided services as agreed in their contracts who then took forever to be paid despite terms having also been agreed in the contract. They had every right to rant at me, quite a few companies refused to work for us and I thought they were correct to look elsewhere. The one in Cumbria was notorious for getting small suppliers addicted to their business then screwing them in a big way. Awful.

Nothing new. I abandoned working in the UK construction industry in the 90s because of this sort of thing. I eventually concluded that there was no value in working to pay the borrowing costs on my cash flow. 

 

Again, a contribution to Brexit. German and to a lesser extent, French small to mid-range companies have quite good orotection against this sort if thing. Our government didn't, and still doesn't care. 

[iL Dottore]

I suppose one way of dealing with companies that don’t pay promptly is to do the work until a critical point (for them) and then very publicly announce that your work will not be finished UNTIL you get paid (and fine print in the contract states that). And if they stand to loose money if you don’t finish your work, they will (probably?) pay up.

 

Now, I am very much an Anglophile, and having grown up in London for the first decade or so of my life, I retain a fondness for both city and country. But what I have noticed over the past 30 years or so, is the rise of both incompetence and venality in almost all walks of life, an incompetence and venality that seems to be institutional (although there are certainly enough individuals who are either incompetent or venal or both).

 

Were it in my power, I would certainly make some radical changes to the business environment in the UK. Amongst the things I would look at achieving would be the elimination of zero hour contracts, prompt payment of all invoices as specified in the contract (with automatic fines levied for each day a small or medium size contractor or  does not get paid as agreed), a significant reassessment of “shareholder value“ and how to achieve that, as well as making it a hell of a lot more difficult to buy a company just to asset strip it.

 

But what I think would benefit people in the UK the most would be the introduction of a DWP tax. This would be a tax levied primarily (but not exclusively) on big companies for each employee that has to claim that benefits from the DWP, the company would be taxed a certain amount. with further penalties enacted, if, instead of paying their benefit claiming employees a decent wage, they decide to fire them instead.

 

I would also be very tempted to create an executive suite downsizing law. This would require the termination of one (or more) “managers“ for every 10 (or more) employees “downsized“ or made redundant.

 

And finally, for those utilities and services now run by private companies, I would Institute a “no pain no gain” law. Whereby any company that provides a service to the country can, by all means, make money, but when things go pear-shaped, the people running the company have to be answerable for their incompetence even if it means them being made, personally, financially responsible for the company going down the tubes. 

Edited July 12 by iL Dottore
punctuation

[polybear]

2 hours ago, Canal Digger said:

Our (43rd) Wedding Aniv' yesterday so had a day out to Weymouth (in Dorset for those not local). Strange to see various posters on the theme of 'Please Mr Toad Hippo, don’t come back!' and a trail of destruction undergoing repair. Police are apparently looking for a battle scared Hippomobile, following numerous reports of speeding and dangerous driving. Also several village ponds need extensive repair, as they are now  just a muddy hollow. Any thoughts anyone?

 

Now to catch up on what I missed yesterday 

 

Couldn't have been "our Hippo" - he was at Bear Towers all the time, sharing cake....

[Dave Hunt]

22 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Couldn't have been "our Hippo" - he was at Bear Towers all the time, sharing cake....

 

And I wasn't invited?? I'm seriously thinking of starting a list...

 

Dave

[Dave Hunt]

3 hours ago, skipepsi said:

Avoid the Smart motorways if you can.

 

Good advice. I'm avoiding all motorways and going via 'ordinary' roads.

[Happy Hippo]

3 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

It happens so easily.  My 700 took a dive when a piece of track went live without an end stop on it.  I should have fitted it with air brakes. 

 

As to slow payment I was aware of that and it's the big companies that are the worst offenders.  When we were rebuild g the horse tram I made a point of settling as soon as possible,  once supp, iers got used to this delivery times were never a problem. 

 

Jamie

On Wednesday, I collected the cast iron metal bits (the children's garden bench I'd rescued from next door) from the sand blasters, and took them straight to the powder coating company, on the same industrial estate.

 

I got them back this morning!

 

Excellent service.

 

I now need to get on and get the timber work sorted out.

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

I suppose one way of dealing with companies that don’t pay promptly is to do the work until a critical point (for them) and then very publicly announce that your work will not be finished UNTIL you get paid (and fine print in the contract states that). And if they stand to loose money if you don’t finish your work, they will (probably?) pay up. 

The other way to deal with failure or default on contract is to insert a penalty clause.

 

Those old enough will remember the cancellation of the TSR2 project.  In order to have a nuclear strike capable aircraft, the Government opted to buy fifty F-111(K?) from General Dynamics.   This order was also cancelled after production had started.  (The Australians ended up with them I believe.)

 

However GD allegedly inserted a very neat penalty clause which covered the cost of the sales in case of contract cancellation, which meant we paid for the aircraft despite never receiving them.

Edited July 12 by Happy Hippo

[Winslow Boy]

Tiz amazing what you can get away with when it's not your money.

 

I see the new lot want to make the water company bosses  personally liable for any company failures. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought directors already were.

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

 

And I wasn't invited?? I'm seriously thinking of starting a list...

 

Dave

Perhaps you are on someone else's!

[bbishop]

Presently perambulating on the sward at Lord's. 

[polybear]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

 

And I wasn't invited?? I'm seriously thinking of starting a list...

 

Dave

 

Didn't Hippo pass on Bear's written invitation??  He promised he would......

HIPPOOOOOOO........

 

 

 

[rockershovel]

52 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

Tiz amazing what you can get away with when it's not your money.

 

I see the new lot want to make the water company bosses  personally liable for any company failures. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought directors already were.

No, not quite. Directors have a degree of personal liability for fraudulent or incompetent actions. They also have a degree of liability for certain specified debts, particularly to HMRC. 

 

However there is nothing actually illegal  in buying a company in order to asset-strip it and pay huge bonuses and dividends for a period of time. Most of the business done in the City is of this sort, after all. A company is fully entitled to decide that it no longer wishes to be involved in a certain category of work, and liquidate its assets. 

 

The problem is that successive governments from 1979 onwards have rather taken the view that this is how business is done; mainly because they don't actually know how to make profits or add value. It is useless to expect people to exercise skills they don't possess. 

 

Nor is it illegal to call in the receivers so that carefully selected debtors get their money. I was on the wrong end of a transaction of this sort in the 80s. The Board wished to oust a certain Director and major shareholder, and that's how they did it. To add insult to injury I was offered further work with the reconstituted company ... I didn't take it up. 

 

The problem with "making the water bosses liable" is that the ones doing the damage were always well insulated and are now long gone. I wouldn't particularly disagree with those responsible for the wrecking of a public asset built up over almost two centuries being flogged through the streets at the carts tail, or staked out on the foreshore over three tides; but I think you'd have great difficulty arguing that they had not complied with the letter of the law as it then stood.

 

 

Edited July 12 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

2 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 

 

Now, I am very much an Anglophile, and having grown up in London for the first decade or so of my life, I retain a fondness for both city and country. But what I have noticed over the past 30 years or so, is the rise of both incompetence and venality in almost all walks of life, an incompetence and venality that seems to be institutional (although there are certainly enough individuals who are either incompetent or venal or both).

 

Were it in my power, I would certainly make some radical changes to the business environment in the UK. Amongst the things I would look at achieving would be the elimination of zero hour contracts, prompt payment of all invoices as specified in the contract (with automatic fines levied for each day a small or medium size contractor or  does not get paid as agreed), a significant reassessment of “shareholder value“ and how to achieve that, as well as making it a hell of a lot more difficult to buy a company just to asset strip it.

 

 

I offer the example of the late Nick Leeson, of Barings Bank. His book, Rogue Trader might politely be described as an "unreliable narrator" but there is no getting away from the fact that SOMEONE within Barings Bank sanctioned the payment of quite staggering sums of money on payments to Singapore Stock Exchange which could not possibly produce a profit (specifically, margin calls by the Exchange itself, part of its regulatory procedure) .... sums quite beyond the Bank to fund for any length of time. 

 

Leeson alleges that the Bank of England were complicit in all this, by winking at their regulatory regime when they might have acted. This was never proven .....

 

Leeson's cast of grotesques and villains rank with Dickens. The drunken antics of the traders off duty are all too believable. But.... SOMEONE destroyed Barings from within. 

 

 

Or the "Lloyd's Names"  affair. The idea became current that to be a Name, one simply signed some papers and the money rolled in. Except that's not quite how it worked. A lot of people were drawn into a vortex they did not understand, including the rather unsurprising discovery that the "working Names" and their under-writing teams - present on the Trading Floor from day to day - had correctly assessed that this was a category of risk best avoided. 

 

Eventually Lloyds preseved its reputation of insuring ANYTHING for a price, and ALWAYS paying its claims... but radical change was forced upon it, because of the reputational damage caused by recruiting Names who should never have been allowed in. 

 

 

[Northmoor]

On 11/07/2024 at 14:18, polybear said:

There have been several occasions where Bear has gone to Restaurants during work jollies that I normally would never go; often I find there's nexttobuggerall on the menu that takes my fancy and it ends up being "pick the best of the worst" - which is often a Sirlion Steak (something I'd never spend my own hard-earned on simply because the "cost/enjoyment ratio" just doesn't stack up).  But since the G.E. was picking up the tab.....

 

Never been to any properly expensive restaurants on expenses - work may have paid for the conference in Las Vegas but I didn't expect them to cover Mrs Northmoor and I eating one night in the Stratosphere Tower - but I have had some very decent meals including "Ruby's" in Helensburgh, which pretty well known to anyone working at Faslane.  Despite the name, it is (or was?) a Chinese and not a curry house.

 

However, I did get beer on expenses once or twice.  Once, having eaten on both legs of my flight to the Azores, I simply ordered a round of beers for me and four other MoD staff at our hotel.  My manager couldn't translate Portuguese on the receipt so was none the wiser.  I've often said that amongst my best work memory is sitting out the front of a bar overlooking the old Marseilles Harbour on a warm September day 25 years ago, sipping cold beer with a work colleague and our customer - with whom we had an excellent, informal working relationship - who was picking up the bill.

[polybear]

2 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

Never been to any properly expensive restaurants on expenses - work may have paid for the conference in Las Vegas but I didn't expect them to cover Mrs Northmoor and I eating one night in the Stratosphere Tower - but I have had some very decent meals including "Ruby's" in Helensburgh, which pretty well known to anyone working at Faslane.  Despite the name, it is (or was?) a Chinese and not a curry house.

 

However, I did get beer on expenses once or twice.  Once, having eaten on both legs of my flight to the Azores, I simply ordered a round of beers for me and four other MoD staff at our hotel.  My manager couldn't translate Portuguese on the receipt so was none the wiser.  I've often said that amongst my best work memory is sitting out the front of a bar overlooking the old Marseilles Harbour on a warm September day 25 years ago, sipping cold beer with a work colleague and our customer - with whom we had an excellent, informal working relationship - who was picking up the bill.

 

Drinks on the bill was never a problem at the G.E....within reason.  The Boss did once say he didn't want to see the drinks bill exceeding the food bill.  Never was a problem cos' we'd just have a word with the restaurant/hotel management and get them to bury the drinks in the food bill.

I'm glad I never worked for Marconi/GEC - they were right 'sterds when it came to expenses; many of their guys said they weren't even allowed soft drinks with a meal - and the food bill had to be cheap as well.

 

 

 

[Northmoor]

21 hours ago, bbishop said:

Like what I do?  Hang on, I get in for nothing.

I felt much the same a few years ago when acting as a steward with Steam on the Underground.  I was in a compartment with seven other people who had paid about £100 for the privilege.  All I had to do was keep them inside the compartment, safely open the doors when required and give them some information about the coaches.  Oh and at the end of the day, my boss, gutted that he didn't manage to get a free ticket for himself, took me out for a beer to say thanks at the end of my secondment.

[Happy Hippo]

4 hours ago, polybear said:

 

Didn't Hippo pass on Bear's written invitation??  He promised he would......

HIPPOOOOOOO........

 

 

 

In my defence,DH was away at the time and you told me to destroy the invitation after I'd received it in order to avoid an incriminating paper trail.

 

This I did, by eating it, but by the time Dave got back, I'd forgotten what was written in the invitation.

 

Call it a Biden moment!

[New Haven Neil]

9 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Model businesses pay very badly:

 

Ask DH, NHN,  or even me!

 

Long hours, little return and if you are a sole trader, not much in the way of staff discount.

 

The only good tip I got was 'go and do something else'.

 

Well we paid our staff pretty well, well above the Fraggle Rock 'living wage' which is higher than the UK one, but we didn't always get paid too well ourselves if we were having a tough month!  It wasn't a route to a fortune that's for sure, and damn hard work.  We had a good 12 years from it, but I don't miss it, but I do miss the interaction with what were more a group of friends rather than staff.  Still are friends!

[Oldddudders]

There are those of us, who, due to our former careers, swan around in first class wherever we choose to go, for nothing. Ditto spouses, even if widowed. We do not underestimate the value of this, and try to play strictly by the rules when, for example, freebies are offered. We may accept tea and coffee, but not much more.

 

During Rail Privatisation, meeting deadlines was all that mattered, and a conference with overnights for many people at the Hotel Russell in Russell Square was almost trivial. With regular overnights at reasonable hotels in Birmingham and Glasgow, the whole expenses thing became quite ordinary, although at the former I was only posted to the Hyatt once, otherwise it was Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza.

 

When Deb worked for British Transport Advertising, she was once invited to a firms's jolly where she found herself at the Playboy Club, and as her last train had left, was found a room at the Charing Cross Hotel. Surreal.