the weekly whinge

Until today, I had no idea you could set up these in firefox. I’d used similar functionality in konqueror and been suitably impressed, but no-one had ever mentioned it as a firefox feature, as far as I could tell.

It now turns out that you can set up something very similar in IE 5+. Years of my life wasted… Kinda.

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So I’m reading all the hoo-hah about the arty ending to The Sopranos and it occurs to me that this is yet another cult American TV series which I don’t get, along with Six Feet Under and The West Wing (off the top of my head).

I don’t know why but everyone goes on about them as if they’re just amazing but when I rented the whole first series of The West Wing I ended up watching about three episodes and going “what?”…

Lost, err, lost itself in the second series (about episode 208 it completely disintegrated into rubbish-ness), Prison Break became a completely different show after they broke out of prison (well, yeah, I guess that was to be expected :)) and ground to a halt for me when they all started digging holes looking for buried treasure.

OK, 24 is still great and Kiefer is still the God of Sunday nights, but even that has become a little tired since season 4. This last season was stuffed with new people who we don’t really care about and ended on such a complete nothing that I had to check that, yes, that was 24 hours and there wasn’t another one to come.

Yes, we used to watch a load of stuff – Frasier has some of the funniest moments of TV ever and Friends was mandatory Friday night viewing, while Sex and the City kept us laughing for all six series – but they’ve ended (in Friends’ case, thankfully, it has to be said)

So the only other American TV we still watch and enjoy in our household is Desperate Housewives, heaven help us.

Maybe the only thing the Americans can do well any more for more than one season is torture and violence or sitcoms about what are essentially gay people played for the camera by heterosexuals…

I’ve kind-of forgotten what I was going to write about here, but, err, I think I got my point across 😉

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My better half was driving along in her Clio about 2 months ago when some stupid bitch in a Jeep Cherokee decided it would be fun to pull out from a driveway into the side of her.

Although it was a fairly low-speed crash (about 25mph) the damage to the car was significant – the central column was bashed in, the driver’s side window smashed (all over Chris, you can imagine she was shaken up!). Anyway, Norwich Union arranged to have it picked up by a specialist repair centre (I won’t name names… yet…) who spent nearly two months doing a solid professional repair, not just sticky-plastering over the cracks, oh no.

Anyway, we got it back on Friday and I immediately noticed that the driver’s door is on slightly higher than the near-side which, were I to find it on a second-hand vehicle I was considering for purchase, would be a clear sign to steer well clear. So, not being a trained mechanic I figured I ought to get one to look it over.

Den is a great mechanic who I trust implicitly and he managed to look over the car last night. The look on his face when I came to pick up the car was enough to tell me that I’d done the right thing in getting it checked out.

I won’t bore you with the exact details but suffice it to say they left sections of the underneath of the car unsealed, forgot to put some of the cabling in its mountings (so eg the rear brake hose – it’s discs all round – is hanging loose and rubbing against a bracket), and left the central locking faulty.

As you can imagine the car is going back today. The thing that really annoys me, though, is that they continue to carry out repairs even though the cost must be far beyond the write-off value (the car’s 5 years old).

Norwich Union, of course, refuse to discuss the issue: their Indian call-centre is staffed with aggressive and unhelpful script-monkeys who fail to attempt to understand our questions and flatly refuse to ask the assessor to contact us. One fax to their head office has produced no response and a second – sent today with a copy of Den’s assessment – is likely to do the same.

We’ve now had the courtesy car (a Ford C-Max, which is surprisingly nice, by the way) for two months: that must have cost a grand or so. On top of the £3.5k they’ve spent on the actual repair (now set to increase further) the write-off value is now just a dot in the distance. A more cynical observer might wonder whether the garage is giving some sort of kick-back to the Norwich Union assessor to let them carry out the work.

Tags: norwich union.