Fozzie

With what I’ve seen this week, you’re overqualified for this role

Cambridgeshire has some of the highest incidences of lightning strikes. I know as every time I do a project that way the protection needs to be more robust!

Good evening, Been giving interviews for a job at my place today. I was told the market was red hot at the moment, but we can’t seem to get someone with the right experience through the door. It doesn’t seem that big an ask, just someone with design experience who is used to going on site. Thought it was fairly common! Any electrical engineers here looking for a job?

I've said it before, but it seems there is a real uptick in small businesses in the past year or two. It's like after covid when the cost of living started rising, people began supplementing their income. Loads of cleaners, gardeners, dog walker, dog groomer, and baby/house sitter jobs have sprung up. And I consistently encounter these people on the road, in stickered up estate cars or old vans, and they are some of the worst drivers on the road. They are quickly approaching the "Addison Lee" London taxi driver level of incompetence. The most recent 2, had a lady in a stickered up old van for a cleaning business pull out on me at a roundabout and then go into a rage at me for beeping at her, after causing me to brake hard enough to trigger the ABS in dry conditions. And another in a old Kia Minivan called "Pedros pals", who sat in the right hand lane for 3 miles of a dual carriageway, and got upset/floored it whenever I, on cruise control the entire time, got close to passing up the inside. Due to a patch of traffic I got ahead, but she then followed me and yelled at me at a set of lights. She was "turning right ahead" after I said "I was on cruise control, and you were lane hogging under the speed limit". In the time she'd sat in the lane, the lanes had gone from 2 to 1, and back to 2 again, and she was still more than a mile from turning right. What I find a bit nuts about it, is they have their social media plastered on the side of their vans. The two I encountered would have you believe they were patron saints, which I guess isn't that unusual these days. I messaged one to say "I was the blue Kia you yelled at, I was on cruise control and you kept slowing down, I wasn't messing with you so I don't know why you took it so personally. Calm down in future as if you do that with dogs in the back, you'll end up either in an accident or on the wrong side of a bad person, and you're easy to trace due to your vans stickers". Didn't even get a scathing reply, just got blocked, which spoke volumes.

... I may have enjoyed the Buzz Lightyear shooting game Nah, I do like the rollercoasters. A lot of nostalgia there for me as I grew up with the stuff. Got Bali later this year where I'll be on the bike and doing very adult tours, so it's nice to break it up with something a bit more childish. And thanks, career is something I've always had my foot hard to the floor on even if I'm still nowhere near the top of a company. Probably because I pop on here and post too much

Good afternoon, Was over in Disney Paris last week with my partner, she definitely was in her element there. I had the drive back, which leaving Paris at 4pm to get to the ferry, only to then end up delayed, and then head first into a closed M1 once we were on the other side, meant I wasn't through the door home until 3am the following morning. With the time difference with France, a 12 hour journey door to door, should have been more like 10. Work is getting increasingly stressful, just more and more being piled on. I have a job interview this Friday with a competitor who is arguably doing worse, but they are building a new team to pursue different types of projects, so I'm keen to stick my head in and see if I can get involved with building up a part of the business. Prove one way or the other that the strategy in my head, that often differs from upper management is right/wrong.

Had someone go nuts at me this morning, white VW Toureg. Which I’ve noticed often houses a particularly entitled type of driver, in my area at least. He is sat in the right hand lane of a dual carriageway at the lights, left lane is clear until me and someone ahead of me comes alongside and stops. We set off on green and he’s below the speed limit so me and the car ahead are passing on the inside slowly. Traffic behind the VW tightens up as he’s holding them up, and I know in half a mile is a roundabout I want to turn right at. Seeing the queue behind this chap, and nearly being clear of him, I decide to keep going at the pace I am, and move over when clear. I do so with a few cars lengths between us about 400 yards from the roundabout, I do it smoothly and brush it off as him being another lane hogger. Immediately as I’d moved, he’d got on his accelerator, beeping at me, flashing at me. I hold my hand up like “what is your deal?” and he gestures back less politely. He follows me most of the way home, then as I turn off I see him in the rear view mirror giving me a caricature thumbs up. Best guess I have, he thinks I drove like a dick and didn’t make any meaningful progress for it. The idea that he left that situation thinking he was in the right is just a bit scary… The quality of driving in the last few years has really dropped, they just drive to their own invented rules, and get extremely emotional when someone does something they don’t like. I seem to encounter more and more people like this, who do things like sitting in the outside lane of a dual carriageway doing 55, no one else around but me, and when you go up the inside at 70 they suddenly go off on one. They chase you, ride on your bumper, cut in front with next to no gap. I just back off and leave them to it, but then find them a few miles later doing the same thing again. Lack of intelligence and poor emotional control, behind the wheel of 2 tonnes of metal… Not a good mix. Nobs.

Disneyland Paris

I have 3 motorbikes, I am only allowed 1 wife/girlfriend. I think I could easily have 5 motorbikes, limited by the amount of maintenance I am prepared to keep up with. For the same reason, I could only have 1 girlfriend Do the math. Get another bike.

I definitely forget it half the time I do it, and it's always on calipers with seized pin caps You should be fine, although worst case, if you can't manage it you can pop them in the post to me, I've done that for friends, family and a few forum members in years gone by

Big cans of brake cleaner are on offer at the moment from Toolstation. £3.99 a can. And the stuff is essential for jobs like this. I find caliper rebuilds quite therapeutic. It's delicate work on the internals. Removing them is easy, generally a couple of bolts. But I'd loosen the other bolts with it there, like the retaining pin/pins for the pads. When off pull the pin and remove the pads, also note there is often a retainer/shim at the top of the caliper that can fall out. Note it's position and make sure it gets a good clean. Remove the pistons with internal grip pliers, I find a slight twisting back and forth motion as I pull works them out easy enough. You can pump the brake with the line still attached to push the pistons out, but usually only one pops out a lot, and you end up using a piece of wood to jam one piston and get the other moving. Soft, but solid material is best so as not to damage the piston faces. Once apart, remove the seals. Clean their recesses well with either a pick (being very careful not to ) or I use a dremel with brass wire brushes that can't harm the bore. Cleans them out nicely. Thoroughly clean everything with brake cleaner and a tooth brush, with a final spray into the piston bores with the caliper held up so it all drains out. Reassemble with red rubber grease on the seals, and a very fine smear on the pistons, almost enough to not see. Brake fluid is fine for an alternative, but I like grease for its suspension properties. Bleeding is the bugger, you can be there for ages pumping and cracking the bleed nipple before it eventually comes through. I switched to using a vacuum pump that pulls it through from the nipple. Then I switch back to the usual one way valve, but as the seal is often imperfect around the nipple, I still tighten it after the last hold down of the lever. I usually pull it 4 times, and on the 5th hold it in and crack the nipple open, close, and repeat. Probably missed a few bits in here, but trying to keep it short.

Good morning! Money does weird things to people, I'm at a wedding later this month where half the family doesn't speak to the other half over the will of their still alive grandparents. One of the kids talked their parents into changing the will so she and her brother get 50% each, writing out all grandkids who previously had shares assigned. Doesn't help that the grandparents both have dementia, and were coached on what to say on the phone to the solicitor...

We live in odd times, if a beer company released an ad featuring a woman in lingerie today, you'd have to stop and ask if it was a man or a woman Good morning!

I've worked from home for 4 years now, I'd just appreciate the physical interaction to be honest

Is there a gym at least? Or facilities to keep you entertained? I always liked the idea of working on a boat, but more the engineering section (power generation).