Firefighters and Policewomen

Two stories in the Basildon Echo caught my eye today for two completely different reasons.

The first was figures released under a 'Freedom of Information Act' request that show that Essex Firefighters have been ATTACKED 23 times between November 2010 and January 2012.

The first thing to ask about this report is, "What the f*%^ is going on, why are some people in society attacking firefighters at all?"

Surely there can be no reason on earth why people who have chosen to put their lives at risk in tackling fires and attending the most horrific crash scenes imaginable, with the resultant views of the dead and the dying, should be attacked by anyone at any time.....  I am at a complete loss to explain this, can you?

I have gone on the record in the past stating that all things being equal we would all live in a utopian society, where everyone was born equal and where we would all be gifted with the same level of intelligence as well as all the other gifts that such a society would bestow on us but, and it is a big but.  We don't live in such a society and not all people are equal in terms of intelligence or with the ability to determine even from the simplest right or wrong action, and clearly there are a number of moronic people living in the Essex area, and I am sure other parts of the country and indeed the world, who are so unintelligent or are so morally corrupt that they just do not see the stupidity of their actions.

Sure, we have all sat in front of the TV and witnessed images flashed to us from across the world where a demonstration has taken place and that demonstration, like so many of them, has resulted in violence and arson attacks and the demonstrators have attacked the fire crews and even ambulances going to the aid or assistance of the injured and the flaming car and buildings. Incomprehensible, but in the context of what is happening during these riots, you can see and vaguely understand why it is happening!

But Essex, or anywhere else in this country or the world, Why on earth would you attack a firefighter for attending an emergency near you?

And finally! Why does it need a request under the 'Freedom of Information Act' to get this information, are Essex County Fire and Rescue Services not reporting these incidents to the police at the time and are the police not asking for witnesses. And of course one way of asking for information is to release these incidents to the press! And are then the people who produce the Echo in Essex not doing their job at the time of the incidents, reporting them at the time to see if their readers can come forward with information that might lead to the arrest and conviction of these morons. Or is it a case of let's jazz this story up a little for the titillation of our readers who probably aren't very bright anyway.... just asking.

The second story to catch my eye was on Policewoman's Bra's!  Yes, bra's.

I know where you think this is going, but you will be completely wrong.  For those who know me, they will all know that I have been known to have a slight interest in matters Health and Safety, I can hear the groans now, but believe me people someone has to do it to look out for your safety as, sometimes you are all just a little bit silly when it comes to keeping you and yours safe, so, you need people like me and Andy Williams, no not the singer, but Andy, formerly of some outfit in South Africa but I think his over zealousness resulted in him being repatriated a few years ago to inflict pain and misery on our lives........,

Anyway, it is to the Basildon Echo once again we turn to for this wonderful piece of journalism that highlighted once again my lack of observational skills.

You see in my day to day life I have been known to sit with my thumb up my bum and my mind in neutral, day dreaming of what could be, if only I were rich and famous and not having to put up with tedious boring mundane life of the daily drudge of  9 to 5 worker that I have become.  A few months ago Essex Police (and I nearly did a blog on this but resisted the temptation) changed from white shirts and woolly jumpers to black T-shirts.  Today's article tells me that one un-named WPC states that if she is not wearing her 'stab vest' on top of this T-shirt she must wear a padded bra as the T-shirts are so tight that you can see her nipples.  Well I do meet a lot of Police officers from Essex in my daily wanderings and instead of concentrating on what they have been saying to me and looking at their faces when talking to me, I clearly should have been half paying attention to their utterances and looking at their nipples, I promise to do this in the future so that I can report back on the various sizes and colourisations of the  areola,  etc. But before I do that, can I be arrested for staring at a Police officers nipples, I wonder......

As to the safety aspect of the story, woman PC's have been told not to wear under wired bra's in case they are shot in the chest as the wire in the bra may cause more damage to them when hit by the bullet, I agree, sound health and safety advice at last.......

Parking - when it is just plain wrong - but a newspaper seems to think otherwise

Is it Me?  I noticed this in the Basildon Echo today and I got angry on two counts. An angry reader had written  to the paper to complain about receiving a parking ticket  while  parked at the hospital  in the wee small hours of the morning and the  'News' paper had given it prominence on their letters page with the bold headline , 

" Hospital's parking ticket at 3.20am is preying on the sick" 

Now, don't get me wrong, every one has the right to complain, that's what I am doing here.  I am complaining about the author of the letter in the first place, who and while in difficult circumstance's, followed an ambulance carrying her sick husband to the hospital and then parked in the Accident and Emergency Zone and followed the ambulance crew and her husband into A & E and waited with him for a couple of hours while he waited and was then attended to!  A natural course of events in trying circumstances, BUT, and here is the rub, she does say in her letter that there are two parking areas, and she DID PARK IN THE A & E area.  Now we all know, or at least we should know, that the area outside any hospital A & E department is for the setting down of patients by ambulance crews and that if we all parked in there, at any time of the day or night, then it would become difficult if not impossible for ambulance crews to get their patient into the department.  

And, while we have all railed against the obscene waiting times in most A & E departments when we have had the misfortune to turn up at one, in general, when a patient is brought in by an ambulance crew they tend to be seen rather more quickly than we, the walking wounded are ( and dependant of course on the nature of the illness or injury of the crew carried patient).  So, after following the ambulance to the hospital, seeing that her husband was being looked after, why did she not just move her car to a designated car park.  Yes, I know that some of you reading this will think that I am being unfair in my interpretation and that under the circumstances  the poor woman was more concerned about her husband than her car, and I do accept that as a fact. But, again having done what she did and then returned and found the parking ticket, is it not reasonable to assume that you would look at the ticket and think what money grabbing B*^%$*^ds  , and then have another rational thought and think to yourself, 'S*^t, I am parked in A & E, I should have moved the bloody car!

You might well go on to write a letter of complaint to the local rag about the injustice you feel about the situation, but would the family of a critically ill person be wrong to feel aggrieved at your inconsiderate parking if their loved one was deprived of a few minutes of time in a life or death situation as an ambulance crew fought their way through a row of parked cars, and this is where my second complaint lies, and it is this;

On receiving the letter from the disgruntled member of the public, and reading it, why then does the 'News Rag' publish it in the way that it has, giving it a prominence that it does not deserve.  Surely the so called 'intelligentsia' of the press know exactly why there are parking restrictions in front of an Accident and Emergency department and that parking by members of the public must be targeted in these locations, 24 hours a day, as I am sure like me, you too would always try and get as close to where you want to be, in terms of parking, and hope we get away with it, but then accept with annoyance at being caught, if we then get a ticket!

Yet, they publish the letter with the provocative headline to give it some semblance of credibility, why?  Crass sensationalism, of a petty complaint and justification by many as to why they do not take newspapers anymore.......  

A BBC Radio reporter and a Press Journo annoy me

    I manage a small office and shopping centre for a property company.  They, the property company, bought the site from a Quango back in the mid 1990's.  A Quango if you do not know what that is in the UK is a:

    Quasi Autonomous Non Governmental Body in essence what it means is that they are Government Funded with a seemingly Bottomless Pit of money and in many instances with Power and Authority and in some cases power and authority to run rough shod over local authorities in planning matters. If you want to know more about that here is an interesting article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph back in 2009, but do please pop back and read the rest of my little ramble, it's about a newspaper and a local BBC outlet!

    So, this site I manage, it has a car park with around 400 parking spaces on it and being a generous and magnanimous local landlord the company who own it has and still does allow free parking on a 24/7 basis.  However, the site also has a very large permanent street market on it that has existed since the 1970's, prior to that the market was a stone's throw away and I do literally mean a stone's throw.

    Problems started to arise when the local Tesco and retail park also in very close proximity to our site , imposed restrictions on parking and while the parking was still free, a time limit of three hours was imposed, remain after that time and you would have to pay a parking charge. Now, we and the other two sites mentioned also share another common thread in that we are all within walking distance of the local rail station and so commuters who did not want to pay for parking over there were using either the retail park or Tesco car parks and walking the few minutes to the station.

    However, when both of these introduced limited parking, commuters started to park in our car park.  Again, we were not to bothered to begin with, but, we did notice that while the car park was usually about half full on most days most of our tenant shops were seeing no appreciable increase, if any, in sales/ turnover.  In addition of course this was having an impact on market days as well when we needed every space and we needed to have a turnover of visitors to maximise the footfall to the market.

    So, we imposed restrictions similar to the other retailers in the area but unlike them we employed a chap who walked round the car park on market days and put  Vehicle registration numbers into a hand held device.  He would walk round all day and eventually if he put a registration in that had been recognised as having been there for more than the allowed three hours, than a parking charge notice would be issued.  The other units installed number plate recognition cameras to do this for them, which at the end of the day was/is a much more viable way of doing it in terms of making sure that anyone overstaying the three hour limit would have to pay the parking charge and then think twice about doing it again!

    SO, eventually we also decided to go down this route as we knew, without being critical of the chap employed to go round with the device, that it was a boring repetitive and tedious task, and we also know that some cars were being missed. We took the decision to change to the automatic number plate recognition system in late May early June with a commissioning date set for mid July.  All went well and the system was installed and trialled. The signs we had in the car park were replaced, 10 of them that included one on the public highway before entering the car park and flyers and leaflets were put in all of the local shops.  The only difference this time was that instead of enforcing the three hour limit on market days only we would also do as the other retail units around us had done and make it 24/7.  Bearing in mind that I have been getting quotes recently to re-surface the car park and the cheapest one obtained was in the region of £400k and that is a cost that the tenants have to pay for on the service charge.  So while we were not expecting to make a profit from the introduction of the scheme, my thinking behind it was that any monies raised, once the capital outlay for the cameras, etc, had been met, could be off set against the repair and maintenance bill, which I believe is a reasonable stance to adopt, you'd think!    

    So what has all of this got to do with the press and the BBC that I mentioned earlier?

    Well, about a month ago, which would have been a month into the new system I received a phone call from a local BBC Essex Radio reporter.  He introduced himself and then proceeded to tell me that he was calling to investigate a story, as a result of complaints received from local residents, on the introduction of car parking fees to a long established and local council car park!  He went on to inform me that prior to making the call he had in fact established that the car park in question did not in fact have anything to do with the local authority in question.  Did I have a comment?

    Well, as a matter of fact I did.  I started off by jumping past the local authority thing and said that in actual fact the car park was as it always has been in the past, FREE, to anyone who wished to use it, but for the benefit of the tenants in the shops and offices and for the market we were restricting the period of FREE parking to THREE hours every day and not just on Market days, so there really is no reason for anyone to feel that they are being charged as long as they comply with our reasonable directions not to exceed that time limit.

    Secondly, I enquired if he had called the local retail park or the local Tesco Extra to make the same enquiry of them.  This question was at first met with silence and so I repeated it only to have the reply to me of, " I don't understand why you are asking me about these other places and why you are being so aggressive about this, why should I be contacting these other places, it is you I am talking to"?

    "Well", said I, "the reason I am asking is that in your introduction to me you told me who you were and why you were calling and you said that you were calling, to investigate a story, as a result of complaints received from local residents, on the introduction of car parking fees to a long established and local council car park!  You then told me that you had established that we were not in fact 'a local authority' before you called me, is that correct", I asked.  "Yes" he responded.  "So. I will ask you again", says I, "why are you phoning.  You receive calls complaining about the introduction of parking fees where none apply to a council car park that is not a council car park and UNLESS they overstay the three hours and then you tell me that you have not investigated the same thing happening with two other businesses who did exactly the same thing some 18 months before we did.  And then you accuse me of being aggressive in my responses, why do you think that is"? I ask  "I've no idea why you are responding to me like this he says, It's not as if I am trying to do an expose".  "Yes, but forgive me for being so obviously obtuse here, but having established before you made the phone call to me today wasting both of our time, why did you think you needed to call a private company to enquire about their management of a car park in a small insignificant shopping centre, it's not as if it is a hospital car park where you might have had an interest and there might indeed have been some public interest, now is it, can you see my point"?  "No," says he and then tells me that there is no point in continuing the conversation.

    I thought that was the end of it until today, 27th Sept. There I was having popped out of the office as it was a nice sunny day to enjoy the summer revival.  Minding my own business and standing in the car park chatting to a couple of surveyors who had arrived on site at the behest of the London office.  As we chatted we were passed by a rather seedy and scrawny looking chap with a man bag slung over his shoulder ( I use one too so that was not a critique) and a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other.

    Without introducing himself he says, "Can I ask who you guys are"?  Now, normally that's my line. The receptionist will give me a call and direct my attention to a camera with some suited or not, person taking photos or writing notes as they wander about the centre and of course curious as we are I would pop out, INTRODUCE myself and ask if I can be of assistance, and then ASK who they are!

    Not this weedy little character, he asked us who we were without an introduction. And having already guessed who he was I then enquired who he was. He responded without giving his name as if to make us tremble in our shoes, "I'm a reporter from the (Basildon) Echo," says he, "I'm doing a story on the recent introduction of charges in the car park and the lack of signage"!

    "You are" says I, "and have you noticed any signage in the car park where it clearly states that PARKING IS FREE for the first three Hours and that there are 10 signs across the car park"?  "Yes, I've noticed the signs, but they aren't very clear" he replied.  "And there isn't one at the entrance"  "Well, yes there is says I and in fact it is on the public highway before you even enter the site", but by then he wasn't really listening so with that I ignored him and went back to my conversation with the two visitors and he wandered off.

   Now I have reproduced one of the 10 signs for you below and all I can do is ask you, and having read  any of my blogs you will note that I am not one prone to issue expletives in print, don't get me wrong it is not a prudish thing, I really can't explain it and as anyone who knows me, apart from my kids, as they have rarely heard me swear, but I do, like a trooper and as one of my nieces said to me recently, "Go for it Unky Tom, sometimes a written piece just needs a good fuck, and do you know what she was right!  

    So, Is it me, or are these Motherfuckers just messing with me?  I don't think I am being over sensitive about this even from the point of view that I manage the place but it just seems to me that it is a NON FUCKING STORY initiated by morons who have lost a facility that was never theirs to lose in the first place and I cannot for the life of me understand why tarts from the press are finding it so compelling?

The phot reproduced below is one I just snapped on my phone today and it is the one out on the public highway but it is exactly the same as the ones inside the car park and even from that one you can clearly note where it says FREE PARKING FOR 3 HOURS