Memoirs of a Roadie

Close (To The Edit)

Posted on 8th March 2011

On Saturday March 5th 2011, a neighbour of ours, Kate Angel, took part in a sponsored head shave for Cancer Research UK. Her friend Angie was diagnosed with breast cancer last September and with Angie living in Blackpool, Kate felt she needed to do something to help her. Shaving her head to raise money and awareness seemed to be a positive and inspiring way to do it.

Cora Flowers, a professional hairdresser and neighbour, offered to shave Kate's head, and David Le Marchand, "another Dad", worked on the posters and flyers for the event. Having a video camera, Nicole offered my services to record the whole event as "The man across the road".

Having recorded the event, I then spent Saturday and Sunday having fun editing the video. The full edit came to 30 minutes, but I also managed to make a shorter edit at just over 12 minutes for YouTube, featuring the main highlights.

So far the online donations and the money raised on the day has raised nearly £1,500 (and is expected to be more with all the promotion of the videos). If you would like to donate an amount, please visit Kate's JustGiving page, and donate as little or as much as you can to a very worthy cause.

To see the event itself, watch the YouTube video.

I Can See For Miles

Posted on 1st September 2008

Idiocy At Work, #1 in a possible series.

In July 2008 I received a letter from my opticians (Dollond & Aitchison), which I've only just got around to reading, and basically proclaims I am breaking the law for doing nothing! Apparently it regards a bit of new legislation that I've never heard of and which they fail to back up with any reference to the actual legislation. The actual quote is:

"Legislation designed to protect the health of your eyes means you are required to have a regular check to ensure that we can continue to supply you with contact lenses."

Further into the letter they also say:

"You must act before 21/07/2008 otherwise we cannot supply you with any more lenses."

So now I'm a criminal and blacklisted by D&A from them ever supplying me any contacts lenses ever again! WTF! How to drive away business in a nutshell. I have tried to phone their office, but keep getting an answer phone, so will have to wait to attempt to follow this up. However, I cannot believe a company would be so stupid as to commit commercial suicide by selling their customers this kind of rubbish.

There is no law that I am aware of that has ever been drawn up, that now means several million people in the UK are now criminals for never had their eyes checked in the last year. Or is it just contact lens wearers? On top of that, that any previous supplier to that (now branded) criminal is now banned for life from ever supplying contact lenses to that criminal. Now I am willing to be educated, so I'll pursue this as I don't believe that the message they are selling is the correct one. If it is then this country is in an even bigger quagmire than I thought, and if it isn't then I'd like to know why they think it's a good sales initiative to use scare tactics to frighten their customers into getting a contact lens check.

To be continued....

If anyone out there in webland is aware of the appropriate legislation and can point me at an online version, I'd be very grateful. If anyone from D&A reads this, then feel free to contact me to explain why you think threatening your customers is a good sales tactic.