Back in the day when I was can loosely be called a mechanic,
before I advanced to becoming a shop assistant, one of the things I used to
have to obtain were electronic components. From the mid 1970s we had a shop in
Chatham Street called CTS which sold these. Then along came Maplins and CTS
closed, so when there are issues:
“Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning.
"...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down
my left hand side..."
"No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside
him. "Really?"
"Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for
them to be replaced but no one ever listens."
"I can imagine.”
Diodes will now have to be bought online.
What went wrong is that diodes are cheaper online, but the
problem is that this is cutting into our lives, no shops, no – try before you
buy; no social interaction.
Here in the bookshop we don’t have the same issue as for the
most part the books are cheaper than they can be bought online and in all
honesty, if the weren’t, well there would be no bookshop.
My own take is that the ultimate problem will be with
manufacturers, on the basis that if you can’t look at something before you buy
it, well in some cases you just won’t buy it. So it may be that in some cases
manufacturers will consider subsidising actual shops; difficult!
On the snow front I posted up the following on some Facebook
groups this morning.
I am afraid to say that children in the Weatherly Drive area
of Broadstairs have been misusing the snow and have been building a snowman I
am very concerned that all attempts to rename it a snowperson have failed.
Google have Weatherly, Broadstairs and most worryingly of all snowperson
underlined in red, I tried snowwoman and on the commencement of the centenary
of female emancipation, is this good enough?
This is partly tongue in cheek, but partly not as having
been disabled when I was a child I have been on the receiving end of
discrimination and up to a point I have some accessibility issues. Speaking for
a moment as a mechanic of sorts who started using a computer a long time ago,
there doesn’t seem to me to be any reason why large organisations can’t write a
simple script into their spellchecking programs that make words ending in men
or man accept person, woman and so on.
Anyway here are today’s snow pictures.
Next a few historic pictures of Ramsgate
On the accessibility front I am once again stressing the
importance of keeping your technology up to date especially your smartphone and
your cloud integration, both in terms of saving you the hassle of plugging one
thing into another, but mainly to protect your precious photos and documents.
It is also very important to make sure that you have
configured backup and location settings for phones and tablets, in case they
get lost, stolen or damaged.
What really makes this issue so important is that things that existed before mobile technology are being removed or not replaced or repaired.
A simple example of this is that once upon a time if you woke up in hospital there used to be headphones by the bed enabling you to listen to Gardener's Question Time while you came to terms whith your situation, now you you are likely to be offered a charger and a wifi code and you will note there are no headphones, knob on the wall, it's all gone, like the bathing machines you need to buy a swimming costume.
You really can't swim in your nighty or the nud as depicted in this picture of The bathing place at Ramsgate in 1788
For those who read yesterday’s post and followed the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/FredrickRogers/ I have dug out the rest of the photos, here is the link http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/fr/
So some historic pictures of snow in Margate next
Interesting to see a tram encountering the wrong type of snow
And before Maplin there was the Tandy chain.
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