In efficient utilities/businesses.

Boomerang · Apr 2, 2024

Open reach guy turned up today came 30 plus miles ,he was involved in "plant protection "" or otherwords checking telegraph poles are not rotting, took hour per pole..
Another guy who lives down road is travelling
To Birmingham every day 100miles each way, works for open reach. Inefficient madness.
Also had a chemical delivery today ,there's a satellite store 2miles away, yet chemical company send an electric van 47 miles from main store, driver said his delivery route was 315 Miles, range is 160miles on a good day.
Had to stop twice for 30-40mins charge up to get around his route..
It's green allegedly. But at what cost ,and guess who's paying. ( they have 10 electric vans )

delilah · Apr 2, 2024

It started with privatization and the tendering process. Talk to anyone who works on the railways, they will travel hundreds of miles to do the smallest job simply because they won the tender. Same across all utilities.

hoff135 · Apr 2, 2024

I know tradesmen up north here traveling 70 miles a day to work in Inverness. Then you get inverness based companies coming up to work here. Crazy

steveR · Apr 2, 2024

delilah said:
It started with privatization and the tendering process. Talk to anyone who works on the railways, they will travel hundreds of miles to do the smallest job simply because they won the tender. Same across all utilities.

Severn Trent Water were intending to carry out some maintenance on a main sewer here and needed flow rates monitored at regular intervals.

Subbies came down from Sheffield in the Van, 3 up, 2.5 hrs drive, spend 30mins here, then drove back. They were unable to get here the one time and got their Midlands team to come and do the job, 25mins from Wolverhampton

Madness.

Nearly · Apr 2, 2024

Northern Powergrid contractor travelling from Hexham to Northallerton to drill holes downwards into the base of a leccy pole to see if it's rotten.
I bet it is next time Einstein.

Top Tip. · Apr 2, 2024

Wife used to work in the local health centre, if a bulb blew they had to phone Inverness 30 miles away and two folk would come out to change the bulb.

kiwi pom · Apr 2, 2024

Usually a reason for most of it when you actually dig down into it.
Easy to see what look like inefficiencies with a casual glance, things may look a little different if you're the one actually having to do these things.

neilo · Apr 2, 2024

delilah said:
It started with privatization and the tendering process. Talk to anyone who works on the railways, they will travel hundreds of miles to do the smallest job simply because they won the tender. Same across all utilities.

Back home, in North Gloucestershire, we had a railway run through the farm with a couple of level crossings. We had a fella come up from Swansea (2 hours travelling?) annually, to check our level crossing phones were working.
Then they decided that they needed to replace all the creosote fencing, that had been standing for 50+ years, with tantalised softwood posts.

The gang that came to do that were from Cornwall!

teslacoils · Apr 2, 2024

Team of goodness knows came to put a kind of concrete roll mat over the spot where a gas main runs under a ditch. Ecologists etc. actual digging took half a day. Out of four days. When I asked them why the only covered one pipe rather than also doing the one next to it, got looks of confusion. Apparently that one is deep enough. So they've paid for the folk to be out, but would rather send a man on site every time we clear the ditch for the next thirty odd years than get a second roll of fancy carpet. Just haven't got a clue. "Land agent" must have only just been out of school and treated me like some kind of rural idiot.

puppet · Apr 2, 2024

Building development here had a leak over the weekend. Neighbour informed the company who sent a plumber - from Hull which is 4 hours drive (each way)

Muddyroads · Apr 2, 2024

Brother in law works for BT as an analogue engineer. We were having some kind of upgrade done which needed an analogue engineer to come out. He came to us from Cambridge while my BiL sat at home with nothing to do, 30 miles from us.

Clive · Apr 2, 2024

Boomerang said:
Open reach guy turned up today came 30 plus miles ,he was involved in "plant protection "" or otherwords checking telegraph poles are not rotting, took hour per pole..
Another guy who lives down road is travelling
To Birmingham every day 100miles each way, works for open reach. Inefficient madness.
Also had a chemical delivery today ,there's a satellite store 2miles away, yet chemical company send an electric van 47 miles from main store, driver said his delivery route was 315 Miles, range is 160miles on a good day.
Had to stop twice for 30-40mins charge up to get around his route..
It's green allegedly. But at what cost ,and guess who's paying. ( they have 10 electric vans )

thing is they all seem to make a hell of a lot more £’s than farmers !

something to do with being price setters and not price takers i reckon

kiwi pom · Apr 2, 2024

When I drove milk tankers, we used to travel empty an hour and a half up the road to pick up milk from farms that were within sight of a factory owned by another company and bring it back to base. On the way up we met tankers from that company heading down empty to pick up from within sight of our factory.
At the end of the year the payouts to farmers were very close to being the same

Top Tip. · Apr 2, 2024

Agriculture isn’t devoid of this type of inefficiency either. The one I like is the carrots grown along the Moray coast are shipped down to Lincolnshire for washing ,dressing and bagging. The bulkers carrying them south pass the curtainsiders carrying them back up north on the motorway.

Spear · Apr 2, 2024

Several years ago the BT internet backbone went down and tripped out our exchange. Took them 8 days to send someone down from Sheffield to Devon to press the reset button. Why did it take so long? They had to train him first.
Apparently H&S meant they couldn’t send in an ordinary engineer to press the button.

Kiwi Pete · Apr 3, 2024

kiwi pom said:
When I drove milk tankers, we used to travel empty an hour and a half up the road to pick up milk from farms that were within sight of a factory owned by another company and bring it back to base. On the way up we met tankers from that company heading down empty to pick up from within sight of our factory.
At the end of the year the payouts to farmers were very close to being the same

Logs are my fave on the road.

See empty trucks and loaded trucks going each way; it takes me a moment to remember they're going to save the planet in this way, because it just looks like going around in circles with half-loads of logs (on average)

sjt01 · Apr 3, 2024

We had some soil samples done recently for nitrogen in Spring. Catchment Sensitive Farming use ADAS for the sampling, so someone came from near Newark (about 100 miles) to sample one field. On top of that, as ADAS have new owners with their own rules, he had to be accompanied by someone trained in looking for pipes, wires with a CAT in case there were any where he was sampling (despite the field being in arable and subsoiled since we have had it 30+years). That person came from Yorkshire, Leeds I think. 450 miles travelling for one soil sample!

delilah · Apr 3, 2024

Top Tip. said:
Agriculture isn’t devoid of this type of inefficiency either. The one I like is the carrots grown along the Moray coast are shipped down to Lincolnshire for washing ,dressing and bagging. The bulkers carrying them south pass the curtainsiders carrying them back up north on the motorway.

You could write a book on the madness of today's supposedly highly efficient food system. In fact, people have.

kiwi pom · Apr 3, 2024

Top Tip. said:
Agriculture isn’t devoid of this type of inefficiency either. The one I like is the carrots grown along the Moray coast are shipped down to Lincolnshire for washing ,dressing and bagging. The bulkers carrying them south pass the curtainsiders carrying them back up north on the motorway.

What's the solution, let folks only farm within a certain area and only produce things that can be processed and sold in that area.
Buy inputs locally and sell everything locally, even if you can get a better price further afield.
Wouldn't work would it.

Top Tip. · Apr 3, 2024

kiwi pom said:
What's the solution, let folks only farm within a certain area and only produce things that can be processed and sold in that area.
Buy inputs locally and sell everything locally, even if you can get a better price further afield.
Wouldn't work would it.

They used to process them locally factory would be within 10 to 15 miles of where they were grown and then distributed from there. Worked fine, local jobs for local produce and then distributed nationally. Much smaller carbon footprint but then the accountants got hold of it and everything has to be centralised and the sometimes false economies of scale.

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100% I’ve had enough of farming!

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