The "I'm Such a Fecking Div" Thread

[Auntie Helen]

I live in a house that is called Bienenstock which translates to beehive. Our Wi-Fi Router name is Bienenstock.

I’ve noticed recently when looking at the list of available Wi-Fi access options there is one called Wespennest, wasps nest, which I imagined was one of the neighbours having a bit of a laugh.

Yesterday evening I discovered it is the name of the router for the downstairs of this house.

[Beardy]

Double dose of diviry from me today.

My pa has the same birthday as our youngest,,ie today. I haven’t sent him a card or pressie because I’m just a bad son (I forgot!)
So jump onto the interwebs to send him emergency supplies of GIN (he’s actually easy to please and we’d already decided we were going to send him a particular brand). Fill out the order, put delivery address and payment address in go to pay, and pick different payment method. Select Apple Pay, notice that the delivery address has changed to eldest daughter, and make the change using post code before committing. Place finger on fingerprint reader and watch with horror as I realise it’s pulled dads address out of my contacts list which still has it down as Mum and Dad.

Mother died two years ago but I’ve not been able to bring myself to delete her from my contacts. Dad isn’t an understanding man and WOULD take Umbridge with the error. Thankfully I found a contact number on the website and one panicked phone call later a very helpful man changed the recipient name. And breath.

[T42]

Zipped round Aldi this morning, got back to trolley rank, chained up trolley, got my token back, turned away towards car and realized that the bag was still in the trolley.

[matthew]

On monday I received delivery of my new bass recorder. I therefore checked it over and had a short play on it.

During this I noticed that the window and beak were not aligned with the instrument. I looked at this and tried to see if there was an adjustable joint to rotate them without success. So Tuesday I called the vendor to ask for help.

It turns out there is a dismantling / rotation joint  and despite my previous protestations the beak and window do rotate and I can sort it out at home without having to return the recorder.

[rafletcher]

So, I popped into the local market today to get some fish. Got some sea bass fillets, a cooked squat lobster for a treat, an£ a pot of crayfish tails. Well, I asked for a pot of crayfish tails, and wasn’t looking, and didn’t bother with checking the amount charged. Thought the bag was heavy.  Got home and unpacked it. Ah, instead of the usual tub of crayfish tails, I’ve got the whole pot from the display. About a litre o& them, for £20!    Still, my wife likes them and they’ll freeze.

[Basil]

Yeahbut,  it's August.   Tomorrow I'm going to have to go out with the bamboo pole of cleanness to check the oil level.  In readiness for the heating season.  Never done that in August before.

Oh shit. I've only just noticed the the filler cap on our oil tank was open. I can only assume that has been since I checked the level a fortnight ago.

There's been rain since then. Oh buggery, buggery bugger.

[Kim]

Yeahbut,  it's August.   Tomorrow I'm going to have to go out with the bamboo pole of cleanness to check the oil level.  In readiness for the heating season.  Never done that in August before.

Oh shit. I've only just noticed the the filler cap on our oil tank was open. I can only assume that has been since I checked the level a fortnight ago.

There's been rain since then. Oh buggery, buggery bugger.

Is there not some sort of sump plug arrangement, by which water and associated schmoo can be drained off?  Not that there's any way such a scheme could go horribly wrong, of course...

[robgul]

Yeahbut,  it's August.   Tomorrow I'm going to have to go out with the bamboo pole of cleanness to check the oil level.  In readiness for the heating season.  Never done that in August before.

Oh shit. I've only just noticed the the filler cap on our oil tank was open. I can only assume that has been since I checked the level a fortnight ago.

There's been rain since then. Oh buggery, buggery bugger.

Is there not some sort of sump plug arrangement, by which water and associated schmoo can be drained off?  Not that there's any way such a scheme could go horribly wrong, of course...

A correctly installed heating oil tank should be set at an angle with a tap at the lowest point - water will be at the bottom so can be drained via the tap.  Having oil heating at a 3 houses for a total of of over 20 years we seldom had any water in the tanks (it's not just rain but some condensation too)

TIP: If you're moving house and the oil is a bit low, jack up the back of the tank to maximise oil you can use and not have to buy any    . . . if the boiler splutters then you have no usable oil left

[Basil]

The outlet pipe is well above the bottom of the tank, although I have no idea of the internal dimensions of the double skin so I'm not sure how well above.
No evidence of a sump tap. I assume that the idea was to leave enough room in the bottom to cover usage for the suggested lifespan of the tank.
10 years aiui.  .  I can only assume that it is the same age as the boiler and ch system which was installed in 2004. 
Oh dear.

[ElyDave]

tbh there's probably not a lot got in through the filler cap, if any

[rafletcher]

The outlet pipe is well above the bottom of the tank, although I have no idea of the internal dimensions of the double skin so I'm not sure how well above.
No evidence of a sump tap. I assume that the idea was to leave enough room in the bottom to cover usage for the suggested lifespan of the tank.
10 years aiui.  .  I can only assume that it is the same age as the boiler and ch system which was installed in 2004. 
Oh dear.

10 years?? I know for sure the house across the road has the same (steel) tank that was there when we moved in in 1999.

[Basil]

The outlet pipe is well above the bottom of the tank, although I have no idea of the internal dimensions of the double skin so I'm not sure how well above.
No evidence of a sump tap. I assume that the idea was to leave enough room in the bottom to cover usage for the suggested lifespan of the tank.
10 years aiui.  .  I can only assume that it is the same age as the boiler and ch system which was installed in 2004. 
Oh dear.

10 years?? I know for sure the house across the road has the same (steel) tank that was there when we moved in in 1999.

Nah.  They're all that green plastic now.  It's quite common around here to hear of the latest tank collapse and destruction of neighbors' veg plots.  The best one was a tank that collapsed and fell into the main road above Alltwalis, closing the road for two days.

[Ham]

A few recent entries for here. Let's do the one about trying to be clever.

When TV Remote Control Aged 17 3/4 stops working, one option for resurrection if cleaning doesn't work is to replace the conductive rubber layer. This is a thin layer on the underside of the button that wears in time and use. The simplest way to do this is to use a sharp knife to slice it off, and replace it with the tops sliced off another remote, that you no longer use, sticking it down with a v small dab of silicone.

It is advisable, when selecting an unused remote, to choose a genuine unused remote like the Panasonic CD player that no longer exists, rather than the Panasonic HD recorder, that very much still does.   

[TheLurker]

The simplest way to do this is to use a sharp knife to slice it off, and replace it with the tops sliced off another remote, that you no longer use, sticking it down with a v small dab of silicone.

May one recommend a small bottle of conductive paint, as used to be sold by Maplins?  A small dot of this on the reverse of each key serves very well but does have to be redone at intervals.  In extremis a 2B or 3B  pencil can be used to restore the conducting layer, but this is a very, very short term solution. 

[Kim]

May one recommend a small bottle of conductive paint, as used to be sold by Maplins?

Halfrauds.  Rear windscreen heaters for the touching up of.  Very useful stuff.

[ian]

I may be the only person who remembers sonic remote controls (I figure it might one of those things that only featured in my life, because I imagined it).

My parents, in an attempt not to be so pikey with a one-careless-owner portable, got a giant TV from Radio Rentals. It was, according to my five-year-old memory, the size of a shipping container. Not that five-year-old me was familiar with shipping containers. Which would be odd.

Anyway, it had a remote control that clicked. Click, click, click to change channel and volume. So, if you're five-year-old and willing to risk a clip around the ear, you can control the TV by running through the living room and clapping and turn Coronation Street into The Generation Game. Just like that. My ears still sting.

We can control our TV with an app. It's diabolical magic.

[Jurek]

I may be the only person who remembers sonic remote controls (I figure it might one of those things that only featured in my life, because I imagined it).

My parents, in an attempt not to be so pikey with a one-careless-owner portable, got a giant TV from Radio Rentals. It was, according to my five-year-old memory, the size of a shipping container. Not that five-year-old me was familiar with shipping containers. Which would be odd.

Anyway, it had a remote control that clicked. Click, click, click to change channel and volume. So, if you're five-year-old and willing to risk a clip around the ear, you can control the TV by running through the living room and clapping and turn Coronation Street into The Generation Game. Just like that. My ears still sting.

We can control our TV with an app. It's diabolical magic.

Yes.
This is how it was. That's how remotes worked.
At a time when we observed the Nat West Tower being built through my bezzie mate's astronomy telescope atop his home just off Knight's Hill in West Norwood.

[Kim]

I may be the only person who remembers sonic remote controls (I figure it might one of those things that only featured in my life, because I imagined it).

I think they came up on my GCSE electronics syllabus.  Never seen one in the flesh, other than in a museum.

I reckon they were invented by the same person who went on to come up with the induction loop as a means of failing to transmit sound to hearing aid users.  Similar combination of clever idea and real-world impracticality.

[ian]

I feel validated. It could have been a false memory.

You also had to feed the TV fifty-pence pieces (that being the 'rental' bit). Honestly, there was a box on the back, and if you didn't feed it then blink-OFF! Cue screaming from my mother, for whom the soaps cannot stop. So, as a child labourer (they would have so sent me up chimneys), I was always dispatched to beg, borrow, or steal a fifty pence piece. I had the full-on alacrity of a small child so would stop and get and consume an ice-pop, talk to a cat, play in the park, poke random animals, that kind of thing. Which is why I once came home with a ferret firmly attached to my finger. Where is that fifty pence?, yells my mother, the tail end of Coronation Street having disappeared unwatched into the evening.

I don't want you to think I was unloved as a child. My dad did say 'strangle it, it'll let go.'

He wasn't wrong. They do.

[Kim]

Also, I recall a possibly apocryphal story of a budgie learning the ultrasonic tones and changing the channel at random.  Not that I blame it, you take your entertainment where you can get it when you're a budgie.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I remember ultrasonic remote control. A family we knew had one way back in the late 70s. They also had a cat...

[Jurek]

We inherited a 50p slot Radio Rentals TV from my partner's mum in the late 80's.
The flat was broken into and the TV coin box smashed with it's contents stolen while we were on holiday in North Wales.
I think we may've bought a telly after that.

[RichForrest]

I may be the only person who remembers sonic remote controls (I figure it might one of those things that only featured in my life, because I imagined it).

I found our one used to change if you shook those little metal puzzles* in your clasped hands.


*The ones that linked together and were only supposed to come apart when pulled and twisted a certain way.

[Ham]

The simplest way to do this is to use a sharp knife to slice it off, and replace it with the tops sliced off another remote, that you no longer use, sticking it down with a v small dab of silicone.

May one recommend a small bottle of conductive paint, as used to be sold by Maplins?  A small dot of this on the reverse of each key serves very well but does have to be redone at intervals.  In extremis a 2B or 3B  pencil can be used to restore the conducting layer, but this is a very, very short term solution.

You mean the sort of stuff I have in a little phial? As you say, that does work, but the layer replacement is more reliable (or at least, can be. Accurate slicing off with a scalpel is the key). The problem was not the repair which was effective*, but the repairman's divness.

*And yes, I did replace the pads on the hacked remote and used another.

[ian]

Wow, all this shit is real, I really should write my memoirs. I feel so much better. I bet you all had a tribe of Boodadooks at the bottom of the garden too. They kept the dead away (coolest thing ever, we had a cemetery at the bottom of the garden, so a lot of my childhood was spent with dead people who were mildly more animated than my mother during a Brookside omnibus – pedants will probably declare that Brookside started sometime after the era of coin-powered TV, but there was always some soap opera with its claws firmly in my mother's attention*).

The remote was very clacky, not ultrasonic. You could definitely change the channel by clapping. Ironically, when my mum gave me a clap around the ear, I swear the channel would change. Though, let's face it, there were only three back then and we were excited by the debut of Channel 4. No one made that mistake with Channel 5, which they tried (and failed) to make sound exciting by calling it C5. It just made it sound like a vertebra.

A friend of mine at university had a budgie. It was very unwell in a way that could reasonably have been redefined as dead (so wasn't about to change any TV channels). I had a veterinary student girlfriend (it's OK, I'm pretty sure they don't get elbow-deep into anything till the 4th year) and so we all looked to her. Fix the budgie, Kathy! Faced with such peer-pressure and alcohol-smudged commonsense tried to resuscitate it with mouth to beak. Never mix drink and drugs, kids, it's the nucleation point for all kinds of bad ideas (actually, really do it, it's fun). I had trouble kissing her after that. Minimal, admitted, she was ultimately a female and I was twenty. But FIX THE BUDGIE, KATHY! became a firm part of our student lore. Whenever something unpleasant needed to be done we'd yell FIX THE BUDGIE, KATHY! (she didn't have to be there, it sort of helped if she wasn't). It wasn't a long relationship.

*It's not all bad, my mum let me watch all the horror movies with her and she once smuggled me into the Nottingham ABC to watch Jaws. We also both enjoyed Prison Cell Block H. What's a lesbian, mum? Kick me, we didn't have the internet back then. I also spent a while thinking I was the antichrist after The Omen.