To cut a long story short I needed a new battery for my Tag Heuer watch and there is only one place in the UK to get it officially repaired. The only problem is that you have ot send it off to them and you have to wait 3 weeks for the watch to come back because they are really busy. I thought I would look up somewhere else to get it repaired so I found the The British Horological Institute @ http://www.bhi.co.uk and looked up a repairer. I contacted one close to me that could get a battery changed same day and landed with Mr E C Shimmin at Ripon. I arranged to meet the man today and all seemed well. I left my watch with him – my watch in near new condition as it’s been on my wrist pretty much for the last 5 years. When I went back my watch was ticking again but my bracelet and back casing looked different. It was totally scratched! He queried me straight away to tell me that there used to be a leather strap fitted to the watch because there were a series of marks on the back of the watch. Why would there be be markings from leather? He then said it must have been the way I stored my watch but I keep the thing on my wrist all the time. Besides him saying all this and winding me up I reminded him that I gave the watch to him in good nick and now it looks 20 years older. I got a huge gash in one of the links and there are small marks all over the watch. I was so unhappy and angry at this guy it was unbelievable. OK so the short version wasn’t quite so short. You can associate with my general fury though I’m sure. Who hasn’t experienced an encounter with an absolute arsehole? In future I will just wait and get it done at the official place in Manchester. Actually I’ll just go with one of the dive watches from Breitling or Rolex next time and save myself the hassle.
As Harrogate was on my way to Ripon I met up with my old buddy Sean aka Ataraxicstorm on youtube and administrator of tuberavers.org. He’s not had too much activity on his as of late so he’s running a competition to get more people involved. To help him out we started creating a series of virals to be shown over the month of November. They should be out soon and should gather a little more interest. To see more about the competition where peeps can win a camcorder check out http://www.tuberavers.org/index.php?referredby=517
Marketing is such an important part of business and a friend in business learnt how hard it is to survive without a budget for advertising. He phoned me up this morning to tell me that his business had gone under. In these harsh economic conditions it is vital that your brand stands out from the rest and his company was too far away from achieving that. That and some fundamentally poor decisions led his business to the point where he could no longer pay the rent on his premises and the place was shut down at short notice. It’s very sad that this is happening at a seemingly accelerated rate at the moment. Perhaps with Obama in power there will be a shift in consumer confidence and the economy can once again grow instead of the predicted shrivel we are expecting for the next year. Only time will tell but I would not like to speculate. If I were braver I could make a killing… Then again, knowing my luck I would get it wrong and lose my money. If you want a good tip then place a bet to counter mine 🙂