Third Year On The Blog

It shows that my blog has been running for some time when one of our staff appears celebrating a birthday for the third time. Many happy returns for yesterday go to our popular and hard working store man Peter Barlow. Peter, who has struggled into work today despite an extremely heavy cold (he's a conscientious bloke), is now 49 and he has worked for Instanta for over thirteen of those years. Those of you who know Peter will know that he eats, sleeps and breathes football (or more particularly Manchester United). He was a very good player in his time but sadly, like me, his days of kicking a ball around are now gone and he has recently taken up golf. Peter is very much a family man and devoted dad and he tells me that his daughter Heidi has become fully qualified as a dance teacher this year and his son Alex has completed a sports qualification. I know that everyone at Instanta will join me in offering Peter our belated birthday wishes.



The power of TV advertising was thoroughly demonstrated when we put our vacant new Southern Area Sales Manager post on the Internet on that site that you see being advertised by the bloke who was in "Survivors". We have been trying to find the right person by a number of means, word of mouth (not so successful), this blog (nothing at all), recruitment agencies (some success but very expensive), another job site that does not advertise on TV (four, very poor, responses) but when we put the job on www.jobsite.co.uk Nick's email inbox almost crashed with the number of applications. Here is Craig sorting a few of them into some semblance of order before we plough through them and see if we can find our missing link.


If you're late paying your tax bills you can be sure that the Inland Revnue will let you know pretty soon (so people tell me). We paid our Corporation Tax today bang on time and have paid the PAYE promptly every month for years. So when it turned our that me and Marion were due a small tax refund this year I expected it in our bank account pretty quickly and didn't bother transferring money in from our savings to cover the credit card bill. Bad move. No sign of the tax refund five days after the accountant said that we should have it.Oh well at least we have an overdraft facility.

What a great Eurovision this year. It was so good that I immediately went online and downloaded the songs. I loved the German entry and said to Marion straight away that I thought it would be a winner. I put my money where my mouth was and won £31 (I wasn't risking a fortune.The vagaries of the weird Eurovision habit of voting for your neighbours makes that too much of a gamble). If a little bit of the joyful flash mob dance that ended the show could rub off around Europe, perhaps we can finally lift ourselves out of the gloom that the financial forecasters (for forecasters read speculators) are delighting in wallowing in. If you didn't see it, here it is.

My Boiler's Not Working Properly

We had a call from an engineer customer the other day. "I just can't fix my customer's boiler" he said. Although we no longer have a service department we offered to take a look and this mountain of scale was the cause of the problem. This serves to illustrate the damaging effects that limescale can have on a boiler and why we make huge efforts to provide customers with early warning of limescale build up. OK it's a pain to have to keep cleaning the boiler and the probes but it's a lot better than shortening the life of your machine. And if you can't be bothered with all that regular cleaning you can always buy a decent filter.



Regular blog readers might recall that we suffered a night of sleeplessness at the Ramada Bolton a few months ago due to being put in a room immediately above the dance floor on a night that an Abba Tribute band was performing. I asked for our money back but was offered a free night instead. We'll find out if that was a good thing or not on Sunday as there is an antique fair on at Bolton's Reebok stadium on Bank Holiday Monday and by staying at the hotel we can get to the fair early without having to get up at six o'clock. I'll reserve judgement.




I've got eleven items listed on eBay at the moment. It's my first step back into eBay selling since last summer. Because I always start the listings at £0.99 it can be quite nail biting as hardly anyone bids until a few minutes from the close of the listing and until then everything is showing a price that would bring a loss. At least the number of people watching a particular listing can give you an indication that there are going to be a few bidders. Most of my eleven items have between twenty and forty people watching them but this lovely little dish by famous art potter Bernard Leach has a massive one hundred and nine watchers so I have high hopes for it.



It's the last day of the month and I am delighted that the lads in the factory hit this month's production target with a day to spare. Congratulations Tony and Jason for achieving this and to Dave, Gav and Jenny for making sure that it could happen. Sadly we won't hit my sales target on the invoicing side as, although we hit our sales target for orders, for some reason a lot of orders were wanted for delivery in May and not April. But on the positive side, this should give us a very good May.

There's a big event next week. No, I'm not talking about the antiques fair at the Reebok or Liverpool's visit to Hull. I've steered clear of commenting on the election so far but have been itching to put something on the blog. Without wanting Instanta to look partisan and, in the interests of impartiality, here are three short videos that I enjoyed. They rubbish the lot of them.