I woke up this morning and, incredibly, the sky was blue so I took my little girl to Griffith Park off Botanic Avenue to have a run around in the small but perfectly formed little playground. We arrived at 9.45am, hardly early by anyone’s standards (except, maybe, my own five years ago) and were surprised to see the gate to the side entrance locked. So I pushed the buggy around to the main entrance much to the annoyance of my daughter who had got all excited at the sight of the swings and climbing frame and see-saw (the only three things she has any interest in). The main entrance was also chained shut. I asked a man in his fifties who was pushing his chubby, and less than impressed, dog through the railings and preparing to scale them himself what the story was and he explained that the park doesn’t open until 10.

Sorry what? A public park, paid for by all of us, doesn’t open until 10 on a Sunday because the Dublin City Council wants to give its staff a little weekend lie in! It’s not like the signs at the entrance were of any help as they just carry the closing times, no mention at all of what time the place opens which seems very, very stupid to me. Anyways, I patrolled the perimeter of the park, like an angry bear, for a full half an hour before, eventually, the park and the playground opened.

Bah!

Mind you at least the playground in that park is safe and well maintained. A couple of weeks ago, we stopped off at the almost completely empty playground in Fairview Park. Scattered through the wood chippings that are supposed to make the place safer were huge shards of broken glass that would have a small child in casualty gushing blood before you could say ‘sort it out council people”.

We didn’t stay long and haven’t been back.

Say what you like about the National Consumer Agency, but I have just been on to their helpline and they have the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack as their hold music.

News off the wires:

Japan’s Sony is recalling thousands of its Vaio portable computers, citing a potential hazard that could cause them to overheat or short circuit. The US Consumer Products Safety Commission said on Thursday the recall is for 74,000 machines in the United States, after Sony received 15 reports of overheating, including one consumer who suffered a minor burn.

Sony has been dogged in recent years by recalls of laptop computer batteries, amid concerns they would overheat and catch fire. In 2006, Dell Inc, Apple Inc, Lenovo Group Ltd, Toshiba Corp and some other PC makers recalled more than 8 million Sony batteries.

I’ve long complained - to myself, mainly - about my own Vaio overheating, I wonder how many Irish computers will be hit by the recall? Am off to find out now…

Walking into work today I was struck (for the thousandth time) by how incredibly friendly, good natured and upbeat the people who hand out the Metro and Herald AM freesheets are. Even the ones who are off duty smile and salute you on the street. I can’t imagine it is a particularly engaging job to stand on street corners in the rain handing newspapers to grumpy commuters. And while I can’t be certain, I’d imagine it probably doesn’t pay a whole lot and definitely involves very early starts. So why are they all so pleasant all the time and why aren’t they being headhunted to work in our retailers, call centres, airlines and civil service?

The Government is to bring forward the budget by two months, it has just been announced. I wonder what sort of delights we can look forward to? Tax breaks for all? Billions invested in the health system to bring it up to scratch? Some ingenious plan to kick start the property market and stop retailers ripping us off?

Sigh.

Irish patients and their visitors could have been forgiven for casting an envious look across the Irish Sea earlier this year, when the Welsh Assembly voted to make car-parking free at most NHS hospitals.
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While I am not adverse to the odd marmite sandwich, I was pretty horrified to read – in The Sun, admittedly – today of the builder who has been living on little else for the last quarter of a century. The builder named George apparently eats the savoury spread at every meal and each month he makes his way through a stack of sandwiches seven feet high. He’s not entirely adverse to variety in his diet, however, and occasionally adds beetroot, bananas, celery and sardines to his marmite treats.

Incidentally, wordpress has just told me that this is my 400th post (I am glad it’s about such a worthy topic!) I might go make myself a marmite, beetroot, bannana and sardine sandwich to mark the occasion.

It has been a long time coming, but the day motorists, who have spent hours on the M50, parked and fuming, have dreamed of is nearly upon us. From next Saturday, we are promised that the tool-booth bottlenecks that have played a starring role for years in Ireland’s motorway black comedy will finally disappear. Or at least start to.

The National Roads Authority (NRA) took control of the West-Link toll plaza at the beginning of this month after buying out the National Toll Roads contract for €488 million. On Friday night, the barriers will rise for the very last time after which they will be replaced by electronic tags and number plate recognition technology which will levy the tolls.

The hated plaza won’t disappear until October at the very earliest, however, and the dismantling process means congestion is likely to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Diversions through the plaza will be put in place and speed will be restricted during the autumn demolition works.

Worryingly, the NRA has admitted it expects motorists to face “teething problems” with the new system and has said that it will take two years before the full benefits of the scheme are realised, news which is sure to depress the 100,000 motorists who use the M50 daily.
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AER LINGUS has increased the handling charges for people booking return fares through its website by over 60 per cent, or €4, since the start of the summer.

At the beginning of July, tickets booked on the airline’s website incurred a handling fee of €6 per ticket, irrespective of whether the ticket was one-way or return. On July 8th, the company scrapped this flat fee system in favour of a per-journey charge of €4.

While the change meant that the small number of people booking one-way trips saved €2 on each journey, people who booked return trips were hit with an increase of the same amount.

The latest price hike, introduced with little or no publicity on August 12th, has seen the airline’s handling fee for a return journey booked using a credit card go from €8 to €10. This means a family of four booking a return journey with the airline would now have to pay €40 in handling fees - compared to €24 six weeks ago.
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This delightful little sign was spotted and snapped by an eagle-eyed user of the magicmum.com website this week. And to think most other supermarkets go out of their way to hide price increases from shoppers!

More problems with Dell, this time from a listener to the Ray Darcy show. She bought a Dell laptop in February but about six weeks ago it started acting up. She had a next-business-day warranty which meant – or was supposed to mean – that a technician would be on site within 24 hours to fix it. She phoned Dell but an agent told her there was nothing he could do for her. She rang again to be told fixing the laptop would cost €400. She rang a third time and got through to someone who seemed helpful. He asked to take control of her laptop remotely to determine the problem. He then spent about 2 hours ‘fixing’ it and started looking through her personal photos and files. Two days later the lap top broke again and wouldn’t turn on. She rang the support line again and eventually Dell accepted she needed a technician.
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I’ve just heard what might the most pointless ad ever broadcast on Irish radio. It was from the water conservation people and urged listeners not to use hoses to water their grass. Sorry, what? Did someone really think it was absolutely necessary to spend money - our money - on cautioning people against watering their grass with a hose? Just when are we supposd to be out watering the grass? In between sandbagging our houses keep the torrential rains out? Pity they haven’t heard of money conservation.

A sad day. . .

THE RIP-OFF CULTURE that exists in Galway during the races can only be described as “utterly disgusting and opportunistic and extremely short-sighted in these toughening times”, writes Joe McElwee, a businessman from the city. In the middle of race week, McElwee rang a hotel in the city which he uses frequently for business purposes. The corporate rate is approximately €68 per night, he says, but the price he was quoted for a single room on the night in question was €299. He gave his name and the name of his company and pointed out that he had at least 15 of his clients stay in the hotel over the past year alone and asked if he could get a better rate, “but the answer was an emphatic no”.
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The recent spat between two of the country’s biggest supermarkets has been very public, very bad-tempered and very expensive. Over the past fortnight Tesco and Lidl have been paying big money to tear strips off each other in newspaper ads and on billboards, with claims and counter claims going back and forth about the quality and value of the products they’re offering.

Last month, Tesco, perhaps unwittingly, started the mud-slinging by launching what it described as a €100 million price-cutting campaign aimed at stopping its customers switching to the discount retailers Aldi and Lidl. The campaign saw 1,000 products bundled together under a “Cash Saver” range and the retail giant making a promise that its prices wouldn’t “be beaten by anyone”. It also warned its rivals that it would do whatever it felt was needed to keep its word.

The move was prompted, in part at least, by repeated National Consumer Agency (NCA) surveys which showed that the discounters were between 20 per cent and 50 per cent cheaper than the more established retailers. Separate studies from the NCA showed that, because of the increasingly wide price gaps, consumers had started modifying their shopping habits in search of better value.
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IT WOULDN’T BE summer without the tourist industry chiefs complaining about the fall-off in visitor numbers. And while in the past few years there has been a distinct whiff of the boy who cried wolf about many of the moans, this year the hoteliers and restaurant owners might be right on the money.

As the euro remains stubbornly strong and the economic downturn really takes hold, all over the world - or at least those parts of the world that can afford to come to Ireland on their holidays - times are undoubtedly getting tougher. Not only can fewer overseas visitors afford to come here, fewer Irish people are willing to spend their money blindly in expensive cafes, pubs and restaurants.
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A listener to the Ray Darcy show, where I do a turn every Monday as a consumer agony uncle got in touch in connection with Paypal. This listener sold her laptop in March to a chap in Kenya for £500 sterling. The money was paid into her paypal account. She contacted the buyer to arrange shipping and was asked if she could send it via courier to insure it arrived safely which she did at a cost of €90.

She had a tracking number for the package which she followed all the way to Kenya. Then she got positive feedback from the seller both by email and through eBay.

Two months later and she’s looking at her paypal account when she notices that there is a credit card chargeback being made against it for €90. The amount the buyer in Kenya had paid for the delivery. Paypal contacted her asking for details and froze the money. They then told her the case was closed and the money was taken out of her account. Then a month later she noticed that there was a chargeback being made for the full £500 which she had sold the laptop for.
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A motorist from the Middle East, who obviously has a whole lot more money than sense, has reportedly spent the guts of €30,000 shipping his ‘Batman’ Lamborghini (it’s what the caped one drives in the latest film) over 3000 miles by plane from Qatar to London for an oil change. The €250,000 car was transported on a scheduled flight and then flown back to the Middle East. The service at an approved dealer (the least you’d expect after going to such trouble) cost €5000 while another 25 grand was spent on shipping. The owner, who remains a mystery - although I’d say he (and I’d stake your life on him being a he) is a bit of a gobshite - might has well have travelled to the Artic and strangled a few polar bears in person.

So I was watching TV a few minutes ago, again almost flat on my back (it’s a theme of the day), when I saw this ad for Just For Men. It is, I’m guessing, trying to be cute but comes out creepy. It also made me ask way too many questions. Where’s the children’s mother? Dead, I’m thinking, but you can never be sure - maybe she ran off with a carnie. How long has she been gone? A month? A year? When is it time, exactly? What made the kids think their dad needed to dye his hair before he’d be attractive to other women? And, really, what kind of lessons is he teaching them by so readily agreeing to cosmetically alter (I was going to say enhance, but who can say?) his appearance in order to find them a replacement mother? There are so many, many things wrong with this ad that I wish I had grey hair so I could refuse to buy it.

I’ve just been listening to the Ray Darcy show - flat on my back, incidentally for reasons best known to myself - and they’re running an item on a pub call Matt the Thrasher in Birdhill, Co Tipperary. Apparently it is quite a well known pub, but I have to confess to never having heard of it before this morning. A listener contacted the show to complain that the menu contained a warning that crying babies would not be tolerated in the pub/restaurant and their parents would be asked to remove them from the premises until they were settled. The owner, Ted Moynihan, came on air to defend the policy. He also defended (or at least tried to) past decisions to refuse mourners in a funeral cortege access to the toilets in the pub, while the hearse waited outside and a number of other, shall we say, strict interpretations of the door policy.

Sounds like a delightful place.

The show had a quick poll to see if readers agreed with the policy and nearly three thousand people voted in the space of no more than 10 minutes. Amazingly, 57 per cent agreed with the pub’s policy.

Incidentally I’ve just had a quick look on Trip Advisor and the reviews of the pub are less than flattering to say the very the least.