Trivial things that make you annoyed beyond expectations?

[icowden]

people who have no clue how wide their car is
I may be exagerating
but that gap was big enough for him to get through with FEET to spare!!!

To be fair, it *can* be hilarious. My daughter's school is at the end of a narrow but 2 lane country lane. There is room for two cars to pass, but it is a little snug in places. The important thing to note however is that the side of the road is a very firm mud and moss bank, then woodland.

When the school coaches come out, there is, almost always, someone in one of those massively expensive 4x4s - either a custom Range Rover or Mercedes G Class "stuck" trying to get past the coach. It's just hilarious. They don't seem to know that they are driving offroaders. They are TERRIFIED of the verge. I just want to get out and shout ITS A F****ING OFFROADER YOU OVERPRIVELIGED MORON. And the coach drivers just sit and watch and laugh. They aren't backing up.

I laugh every time.

 

[ColinJ]

To be fair, it *can* be hilarious. My daughter's school is at the end of a narrow but 2 lane country lane. There is room for two cars to pass, but it is a little snug in places. The important thing to note however is that the side of the road is a very firm mud and moss bank, then woodland.

When the school coaches come out, there is, almost always, someone in one of those massively expensive 4x4s - either a custom Range Rover or Mercedes G Class "stuck" trying to get past the coach. It's just hilarious. They don't seem to know that they are driving offroaders. They are TERRIFIED of the verge. I just want to get out and shout ITS A F****ING OFFROADER YOU OVERPRIVELIGED MORON. And the coach drivers just sit and watch and laugh. They aren't backing up.

I laugh every time.

Alternatively...

My stepdaughter found the one who was NOT afraid of verges... SD stopped her car in a narrow Devon lane when approached by a 4WD. Driver of 4WD decided that it was perfectly sensible to continue by driving along the steep embankment to pass, rather than reversing to the nearest passing place...

That idea worked really well for all of about 3 seconds, before the 4WD toppled down onto car of SD!!

I thought that the story might have been slightly exaggerated until I saw the roof of SD's car. The insurance settlement hadn't come through at that point so the damage hadn't yet been fixed. I could clearly see the dents and scrapes along the TOP of the car's roof!

 

[icowden]

Alternatively...

Obviously there is a certain degree of sanity check needed but 10cm onto the verge I think is manageable in a 4x4 offroader.

 

[Supersuperleeds]

I can't remember how many different outbound and return variations I tried over the weekend, but Trainline just like GWR said no bike reservation possible for my specific dates.

Maybe they're really popular dates for some reason, but in the past, I've had no issue with reserving bikes by popping to a local train station that has a human ticket operator present.

But I'm quite happy hiring a premium MTB ebike again, not sure the weather will be dry this time, the MTB has at least twice the battery capacity of my gravel ebike plus I don't have to be paranoid on the train etc.

Maybe I'll try taking my ebike next time.

Be careful with the e-bike, a lot of operators have banned them.

I tend to only book my trains a day or two before I travel so maybe Trainline only gets access to bike reservations late on.

 

[mistyoptic]

Obviously there is a certain degree of sanity check needed but 10cm onto the verge I think is manageable in a 4x4 offroader.

I thought they only went “off road” on pavements

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Be careful with the e-bike, a lot of operators have banned them.

I tend to only book my trains a day or two before I travel so maybe Trainline only gets access to bike reservations late on.

Does that apply if they do not have a battery on them?

enforcing it would be a nightmare for staff - but I was just wondering

 

[N0bodyOfTheGoat]

Be careful with the e-bike, a lot of operators have banned them.

I tend to only book my trains a day or two before I travel so maybe Trainline only gets access to bike reservations late on.

Have they?

I was aware escooters were banned on some trains.

I think I read modified ebikes (technically electric mopeds/motorcycles) were banned on some trains.

But I've yet to read anything about legal ebikes being banned.

Edit: A quick google mentions restrictions of non-folding ebikes on TFL services.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Have they?

I was aware escooters were banned on some trains.

I think I read modified ebikes (technically electric mopeds/motorcycles) were banned on some trains.

But I've yet to read anything about legal ebikes being banned.

I have heard of some companies doing it

I assume it iis based on the concept that their staff do not then need to get into an arguemnt about whether it is legal or not
electric motor - not allowed - end of

if legal ones were allowed - then someone could turn up with anything and claim it is allowed
and then the staff have to be able to prove it is not

which is a whole load of hassle they don;t need

wrong really - but what can they do

 

[Supersuperleeds]

Does that apply if they do not have a battery on them?

enforcing it would be a nightmare for staff - but I was just wondering

Honestly I don’t know, you are best checking the websites of the operators you plan to use.

My gut feeling is if it hasn’t a battery on it then it can’t be an ebike

 

[No Ta Doctor]

You can't say that is "incorrect" use, it is perfectly acceptable use.

You don't like it, fair enough, but that does not mean it is incorrect. There are huge numbers of abbreviations which have multiple meanings, and that is just one of them.

Using the "In Search Of" meaning, it will always be pretty obvious from the context that they are not talking about standards.

Surely we need to standardise abbreviations to avoid potential confusion. We'll have to go ISO an international standardisation organisation that can help us do this.

True story though: I worked for the Danish Government in their ministry for IT, developing standards for data exchange in the government sector (e.g. an electronic invoice standard) and I met a guy who finally manage to standardise the fields for an address, after TWENTY SIX YEARS of arguing with various official bodies who all used different formats.

 

[Alex321]

True story though: I worked for the Danish Government in their ministry for IT, developing standards for data exchange in the government sector (e.g. an electronic invoice standard) and I met a guy who finally manage to standardise the fields for an address, after TWENTY SIX YEARS of arguing with various official bodies who all used different formats.

That doesn't surprise me in the least. I have worked in software developmentj in one guise or another for 45 years, and addresses have been one of the hardest things to deal with in almost every one of my jobs - and that is before you start having to handle foreign addresses.

 

[icowden]

That doesn't surprise me in the least. I have worked in software developmentj in one guise or another for 45 years, and addresses have been one of the hardest things to deal with in almost every one of my jobs - and that is before you start having to handle foreign addresses.

When I was involved in NPFiT (Community NHS Electronic Records area) we had so many issues with addresses and vendor systems not being properly compliant with the NHS Demographic Spine (PDS). You also have to be able to hold records with no fixed address, temporary addresses, addresses of POA, withheld addresses (either from people allergic to tech or for safeguarding reasons).

Even something as simple as matching a postcode gets thrown off if the spaces are in the wrong place, so you have to normalise postcodes, add more code to check the postcode is in a valid format etc.

 

[No Ta Doctor]

When I was involved in NPFiT (Community NHS Electronic Records area) we had so many issues with addresses and vendor systems not being properly compliant with the NHS Demographic Spine (PDS). You also have to be able to hold records with no fixed address, temporary addresses, addresses of POA, withheld addresses (either from people allergic to tech or for safeguarding reasons).

Even something as simple as matching a postcode gets thrown off if the spaces are in the wrong place, so you have to normalise postcodes, add more code to check the postcode is in a valid format etc.

The thing most people don't get about standardisation is how intensely political it is. Not party political, just that it involves a lot of negotiation between extremely large and powerful organisations. For instance, maybe one government department has an extremely large and critical DB of names and addresses, and imagine they had an arbitrary field length restriction on say, street name, that someone had decided when it was built in the late-mid 20th C. Now try telling them that restriction needs to be lifted. They don't know which entries have been truncated at some point to fit, raising the possibility of future mis-matches for the same addresses, and they sure as hell don't know if any of the systems consuming the data have data size restrictions that could cause errors if they changed it. They're more likely to try and get their minister to introduce a law restricting the length of street names in Denmark than to agree.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

When I was involved in NPFiT (Community NHS Electronic Records area) we had so many issues with addresses and vendor systems not being properly compliant with the NHS Demographic Spine (PDS). You also have to be able to hold records with no fixed address, temporary addresses, addresses of POA, withheld addresses (either from people allergic to tech or for safeguarding reasons).

Even something as simple as matching a postcode gets thrown off if the spaces are in the wrong place, so you have to normalise postcodes, add more code to check the postcode is in a valid format etc.

One of my first jobs in IT was to "sanitise" the customer database of postcode starting with SO
it was often entered as S0 and that caused the letters to be sorted in the wromg order
and hence the Post Office charged us a lot extra rather than the huge discount for pre sorted mail

Well THAT grew rather beyond its initial concept
I started with SO being S0
then found something else - then something else and so on

ended up having a program that changed abotu 50 different things that were always keyed in wrong

in the meantime the Techy guy was writing a subroutine to make the input correct by the proper standards

Then later I became the Techy guy and they found another problem and I ended up changing it again for several different postcode that were still being entered wrongly



Little funny thing
one of the things I was called out to look at when we got the whole thing sorted was one user's computer crashing when she was entering the postcode
everyone else was OK - but her's crashed several times a day


anyway - I went to talk to her - which pleased her as talking to a "manager" always meant they went onto "average perfromance" wages - whcih meant they didn;t have to work hard for the rest of the day

anyway - we chatted and she went back to working - it was a cll centre place getting orders over the phone

all went well - no crashes
then she got a call - and started entering the address

but it turned out that customer had a question not relavted ot orders and stuff - so the operator
who was female - which will matter in a minute
leant over to get a catalogue from the person next to her

and as she leant over the computer crashed

but I saw what caused it

firstly - she was a big girl in the chest department
and when she leant over her right breast pressed down on the zero button on her keyboard

which I then had to explain to the large Scouse woman
which caused an exclamation of "Oh My GOD - It was me right t*t" - (direct quite - and it was quite loud)

turned out that the post code verification rules mean that 00000000 is technically a valid postcode
but the computer system (a bit that I did) then needed, some some reason I can;t remember, to divide by something in it
which crashes any computer with Divide by Zero errors

which clearly became known as "The Right T*T problem) and went down in legend

 

[classic33]

One of my first jobs in IT was to "sanitise" the customer database of postcode starting with SO
it was often entered as S0 and that caused the letters to be sorted in the wromg order
and hence the Post Office charged us a lot extra rather than the huge discount for pre sorted mail

Well THAT grew rather beyond its initial concept
I started with SO being S0
then found something else - then something else and so on

ended up having a program that changed abotu 50 different things that were always keyed in wrong

in the meantime the Techy guy was writing a subroutine to make the input correct by the proper standards

Then later I became the Techy guy and they found another problem and I ended up changing it again for several different postcode that were still being entered wrongly



Little funny thing
one of the things I was called out to look at when we got the whole thing sorted was one user's computer crashing when she was entering the postcode
everyone else was OK - but her's crashed several times a day


anyway - I went to talk to her - which pleased her as talking to a "manager" always meant they went onto "average perfromance" wages - whcih meant they didn;t have to work hard for the rest of the day

anyway - we chatted and she went back to working - it was a cll centre place getting orders over the phone

all went well - no crashes
then she got a call - and started entering the address

but it turned out that customer had a question not relavted ot orders and stuff - so the operator
who was female - which will matter in a minute
leant over to get a catalogue from the person next to her

and as she leant over the computer crashed

but I saw what caused it

firstly - she was a big girl in the chest department
and when she leant over her right breast pressed down on the zero button on her keyboard

which I then had to explain to the large Scouse woman
which caused an exclamation of "Oh My GOD - It was me right t*t" - (direct quite - and it was quite loud)

turned out that the post code verification rules mean that 00000000 is technically a valid postcode
but the computer system (a bit that I did) then needed, some some reason I can;t remember, to divide by something in it
which crashes any computer with Divide by Zero errors

which clearly became known as "The Right T*T problem) and went down in legend

Wouldn't have been on the outskirts of Liverpool this call centre by any chance?