Bugger Brother

How long has it been since the beginning of term? Yep, two weeks, give or take. My eldest's school bag tore across the top in the middle of last week. Was I cross? You bet.

So I took it back to Intermarché today. No till receipt, natch. I bought it some three weeks ago, and don't keep supermarket receipts that long. I was expecting, after all, that the bag would last ten months, not two weeks.

A guard was lurking around the customer service counter so I went up to him and told him about the bag and how unimpressed I was. Did he care? Not in the slightest. All he did was to ask me if I had the till receipt to which I said no, but that I wanted Intermarché to contact the supplier to complain about the crappy quality of their bags.

This was obviously not in his job description, so he advised me to go and see the lady on till one, who happened to be on till three (are you keeping up here?). When I showed her the bag, she tut tutted sympathetically and called some geezer.

I suppose he was some sort of manager, so I told him all about the bag, and he, guess what... asked me for my till receipt. I told him I didn't have it, I knew I didn't have it but I wanted him to give the supplier a bollocking. I then told him that because of his supplier selling me a crappy bag, I was going to take my custom to Carrefour to do my entire week's shop there. This was potentially a lot of money - he's not to know I had done a big shop last week, and only needed to top up... and I stalked off to his apologies wailing plaintively in my ears.

My youngest and I then tackled shopping - bleh - and I came back determined to print off 200 odd pages of my book with the generic cartridges I had had delivered, eventually, from Toner Services (.com). Can you imagine my fury when I fitted the new cartridge in, could see it sitting there all sparkly new and full, and yet the printer (Brother) flatly refused to acknowledge its existence? Not only that, but when I plonked the old Brother one back in, it told me repeatedly that there was no cartridge inserted.

Conclusion? Printer buggered.

I was trying not to grind my teeth to powder, but really, it's a disgrace! I then had to take my youngest to a footie tournament for the afternoon: won 3, lost 1; after which I had to dash into Darty to buy a new sodding printer (HP). The cartridges are nearly 18Eur a piece. I used a whole one to print off the two hundred pages... You can see why I wanted to try generic cartridges, which cost a mere 7Eur, but I wasn't expecting to have to fork out another eighty odd for a new printer! My book has 389 pages to date. That makes printing it a luxury, and way pricier than the cost of a printed book with cover, photos, interview, review bites and kitchen sink.

Actually, come to think of it, you have to be quite rich to write a book in this day and age. I definitely must not give up the day job yet!

Ideas Wanted

I was watching the Apprentice last night. It's compulsive viewing because the candidates are mostly awful, and as time goes on, might prove to be all awful. Some have not yet stuck their head above the parapet so have avoided the wrath of Sir Alan, although I'm sure he's looking carefully at how each one does all the time.

I was thinking about next week's task. Apparently each team will be given £200 and told to go out and make some money. Sir Alan tells them it's more than he had, but he did start out 40 years ago. He also had more than a couple of days to get started.

Thinking about it, it's incredibly difficult coming up with a money-making venture. If it was easy, of course, everyone would be doing it. You have to consider elfansafety so any food idea is out. Services are difficult to sell without doing a lot of PR work to build up clients over time, and that's something they don't have. They also have very little time to actually invent something, make it and sell it; no business offices or transport.

If they were in France, they could try to set up a car-washing service in supermarket carparks. Although I've seen young men doing that at Sainsbury's, I've never seen it outside Carrefour. Likewise, they could try to set up a nappy-cleaning business, visiting maternity wards to convince young mothers of the ecological benefits of using the provided cotton nappies. There again, though, it would take a while before the service became known. Word-of-mouth works well, but not at the speed of light!

There are already lots of small businesses in the UK that provide specialist services which makes it tricky for anyone wanting to start out. In France it's much easier on the ideas front, but must be more difficult administratively. If it were easier, surely there would be more small businesses.

I remember trying to make some pocket money back in 1992 by making shopping bags out of waxed provincial print cotton. I could make them well enough although the waxed cotton was hell to sew even with a sewing machine, but selling them was another problem altogether. I went to business start-up meetings and realised that either I was deadly serious and wanted to have a proper business, or there was no point; the charges were astronomical and the paperwork had to be seen to be believed.

In the end, I left them in a shop in Aigues Mortes where they sat in a dusty corner, from where I retrieved all of them at the end of the season. If only Ebay had existed then!

I have not come up with any ideas for the Apprentice groups, so I will be watching with interest to see what they decide is good a business project.

Any ideas as to what you would do?