Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged

I'm contemplating using the Small Claims Court to try to get back a payment made via a credit card. Has anyone used the Small Claims Court, in particular going up against a large corporate operation? Any experiences would be useful.

Yes, the mighty Zed is back on the road, after a long hiatus and still with a little work to do, but tax, MOT and insurance are all up to date and I'm busy reacquainting myself with the joy of riding again. There is a small fly in the ointment though, the back brale seems to be binding a little, my MOT man passed it after drenching it with carb cleaner and belting it, quite a few times with a club hammer(!) but it seems be back binding again so I may have to strip the calliper, which I've never done before and I just know the bleed nipple is going to be seized which is one problem before I even start. The oil also needs changing, which means getting at the filter in the front of the engine block, behind radiator and oil cooler and around the exhaust headers, which is never much fun. Did manage to get a bit of a bargain on the oil, though it was hard to track down. Hein Gericke are currently offering semi-synthetic oil at £10.99 for 4 litres, which seems like a good deal to me, and to a lot of others I guess as I had to wait for two weeks for more stock to come into the local store.

I have to admit to getting a bit dischuffed with the bike after the last chain I put on got a tight link after only 12-15 months, it was an expensive X-ring chain and the latest of many that seem to develop this problem. I look after them pretty well but the bike spends winters outside, under a cover, and maybe there is something more than chain lube I could put on the chain to protect it over winter and reduce the possibility of this chain suffering the same fate?

Well it certainly felt like it for a while, though it did nothing for the meagre bank balance. I went for my first job interview yesterday, for an operations job with a major high street retailer, not much more than a McJob, not much, but a little, above minimum wage but it was a job I could do quite nicely thank you, whilst waiting for a proper job to come along. The thing started downhill even before the interview started, a troglodyte rocks up and introduces himself as the guy who will conduct the interview, now, call me old fashioned but I expect a hand out at this point, I'm reasonably sure it would have been a clammy, dead fish sort of a handshake, but it would have been a handshake nevertheless, but nothing. He then hands me off to his second semi-assistant troglodyte (who was nice enough to be fair, though followed her bosses lead and didn't offer her hand either) to do a multiple choice, PC based, 'talent screening' questionnaire. Let the bullshit begin. 21 questions, three possible answers attracting 1,2 or 3 points as it turns out and a pass mark of 50 which means 10 2 pointers and 10 3 pointers approximately. It said at the outset that you should go with your first thought, didn't really work for me as there wasn't a 'what is all this bullshit' option to be found anywhere. So I had to try to work out from the answers if there was a consistent thread which might indicate what they were looking for and there seemed to be three, 1) mindless drone who refers anything even vaguely contentious to supervisor/manager/head office, 2) sales monkey who's only goal was to shift product or 3) someone eager to take responsibility to resolve any and all issues, disregard customer preferences and bluster their way through just about anything. My thought was that you needed elements of all these but many of the questions had answers which didn't seem appropriate coming from any of these three. So I waded through the first 12 or so questions and chose randomly for the last 9. It was marked and I scored 48. The troglodyte collective asked if I wanted to try it again, I was tempted to say no at this point as the questions were all about customer facing situations and I thought I was going for an ops job, but I said I would have another look. Now this is a big organisation, but the questionnaire was in a full Excel screen and looked like something I could knock out in half an hour where as I would have expected something like a locked web page over an intranet linked to a central database but I'm not complaining as the troglodytes had left the scoring template open behind the main answer window, so I simply fed in the A, B or C answer to the first few questions and recalculated my score, when I got it to 50 I stopped. I still have no further insight into who they are looking for though? So the collective returned and concluded, as I had, that my score was now 50 and went on to talk about the jobs available; customer assistant, these hours - er no, customer assistant, those hours -er no, I came for an ops job? 'Well we just have the one ops job', well that's all I'm looking for. That will be four hours on the tills and the rest doing ops, so would you like to go on to the role play now? Well, no. I came on the impression there was a full time ops job on offer, so thanks but no thanks. I would love to report that this resulted in cataplexy but I can't go that far, there was some degree of surprise registered though. Which gave me considerable, though probably unwarranted, satisfaction, seeing the folks who regard it as their virtually exclusive reserve to decide who will be employed and who won't, have this prerogative usurped. There is every possibility that, if I'm still unemployed in six months time, I may not feel quite so smug over this little event.