No Comment

I'm itching to comment on today's election results and the current standing of the parties but, as Marion and I no longer own shares in Instanta, I don't feel justified in putting forward political opinions on the blog. What a pity as I could rattle on for ages on the subject. I can say that I stayed up late to watch the results come in and I found the whole thing fascinating. As I write, David Cameron has announced that he will be making an announcement soon and I look forward to hearing what he has to say. The sooner we have something positive the better and we at Instanta can all carry on busting the recession as we have been doing for some time.



Good luck to all the players in the Guardian Pick The Score competition which finishes with Sunday's Premier League matches. There's no question who is going to win our Instantasports league. Max Vidal has walked away and is in an unassailable position (and might even win the Guardian's top prize). I am still vying with Jenny for second place although it will take a miracle for me to catch her and both Tony Lowe from our stores and Mike Chubbs for our machine shop have a chance to overtake me. The Instanta team has been fairly poor in the team events and we are languishing at 408th. It's a great competition and it's free to enter. Give it a try next season.

It's nice to be appreciated but it doesn't happen too often.We are always striving to provide excellent service and send out most of our boilers and most of our spare parts on the day that they are ordered. Tony Lowe in our spares department just showed me a fax from a satisfied customer "Tap Received 7/5. What excellent service- unusual to find today! Many thanks" . Well may thanks to you customer. It's always good to be praised.



We haven't managed to get our regular Orange Wednesday cinema trip for a few weeks although we did go to the cinema on Saturday to see The Ghost. It was a good film although I honestly don't think that it merited the rave reviews that it got in the papers. Next week I quite fancy seeing the new Chris Morris film Four Lions. I'm not 100% sure about the subject matter (a comedy about suicide bombers)but I do admire Morris' stuff. I also quite fancy The Disappearance of Alice Creed. However, as Southport's Vue tends to favour blockbusters, neither is showing and we'll probably be stuck with Hot Tub Time Machine.

I'll close this week with someone who didn't take the election too seriously.

Still Not Decided How To Vote?

If you are like me and you are finding it hard to decide how you are going to vote tomorrow, here's a very helpful little flow chart provided by our ace local photographer Peter Raymond. Follow this carefully and you will have no trouble in coming to the correct decision.

With the stock exchange graphs looking a bit like this at the moment it can be a bit scary if your pension and life savings are tied up in investments. And that's why we have left it to the experts who are managing all this sort of thing for us. We have a progress meeting with them tomorrow. We'll keep our fingers crossed although it will be difficult for anybody to know what to do in the light of the current turmoil with volcanic ash, Greek bankruptcy, Portuguese wobbles and Spanish record unemployment. Oh and a general election with an uncertain outcome to boot. Promises to be interesting.



And speaking of experts, here's Max Vidal who is not only an expert in Instanta technical matters but is also proving something of a wizard in football forecasting. Max is a keen player in our Guardian Pick The Scores contest which has its final day on Sunday. Not only is Max leading everyone here at Instanta in both our staff and our friends' leagues but he is lying fifth in the whole country and just a few points away from winning. That is a real achievement. Anyone can predict a few scores correctly now and then but to do so consistently week after week does require a bit of skill and Max has been ahead of the rest of us for months now. So good luck on Sunday Max. We're all rooting for you to win the league. As for the rest of us? I'm third a few points behind Jenny and a few ahead of the pack. It promises to be an interesting climax to the season.



On the business front things are running smoothly at the moment and we have a good number of machines on order and a very big potential order for our under counter models to go out in June. It will be great if that comes to fruition as these are quite excellent units.




I was just having a quick catch up on our brochure designers Workhouse Marketing's blog and spotted a few interesting items. The first was about the resurgence in Direct Mail. As Workhouse MD Mark Jones says, this is a very effective way of getting the message across and we will be taking his advice on board and sending a few mailings out in the near future. Mark also mentioned the effectiveness of video case studies and puts in a bravura performance in an example that Workhouse produced for Business Link. I could see these short films being really useful for demonstrating the super features on our latest range of boilers and much more. My only question for Mark relates to a clock that appears in the clip.What was the office doing open at 6.45? At 6.45 here (both am and pm)it's like a ghost town.

I'll leave you today with an original little film.

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.

An abject lesson on digging oneself into a big hole

Poor old Gordon. I didn't think I would ever find myself writing those words but if there was ever a case of digging oneself in deeper and deeper,the Rochdale blunder or Bigotgate as it will probably be known henceforth was an absolute classic. Anyone listening to the Labour supporter's comments about immigration would probably agree with Brown that she did sound a bit of a bigot and plenty of people would have laughed at the blunder and forgotten about it. But not Gordon. He had to go and try and wriggle out of it and ended up having an unscheduled forty minute meeting at the woman's house and writing apologies all over the place. Why? OK he was overheard and nobody likes that but I suspect that a huge number of people would sympathise with him and he just needed to make a very simple apology and move on. Instead he has found himself all over the media over twenty four hours later. An abject lesson in crisis management.



And poor old Greece too. What a beautiful country and what a disaster for them to find themselves in such a financial mess. On the old edict that there's no such thing as bad publicity Greek ministers and diplomats should henceforth insist that all press conferences and interviews are conducted in beauty spots such as this one in the hope that the worldwide publicity will bring the tourists flocking this summer.



Remember at the start of the recession how it felt like the newspapers were revelling in the bad news and talking it up and up until the whole thing became inevitable? I get that horrible feeling that the media are trying to do it again with the current European economic problem. Why are they doing this? Trying to make us all feel better? Or is it just easier to write negatively than it is positively. Come on press barons and media moguls, sort yourselves out and put a more positive spin on things. We can all do without this double dip stuff.



Sitting here in my cell like office I have to communicate with everyone else here by email. I just got one from Marion sending me a great story and video to put on the blog. It's the new John Lewis ad. Would that be the new John Lewis ad that I featured on yesterday's blog Marion? Come on now. Keep up.



Off to Anfield tonight to watch the semi final of the Europa League against Atletico Madrid. Liverpool are such a Jekyll and Hyde side at the moment that it would be a fool who bets on the outcome. My big problem is that it will be standing up all night which plays havoc with my hip. I still don't understand the phenomenon. The view from a seated position is perfect.

Whilst on the subjects of football and Greece what better than to close today with a clip highlighted in today's Guardian. Vassilis Hatipanagis Greece's greatest ever footballer and (as they said in the paper) the best player (probably) you've never heard of.