Pot Pourri

A bit of a mixed bag today with I hope I good smell.

Firstly if you look at my blog of about a week ago you will see that I recommended a policy of abolishing Non-Dom status. Where Sheppard’s Ramblings lead the mainstream political parties follow. I am confident that by the middle of next week one of the mainstream parties will have joined the SNP in recommending the scrapping of the British nuclear deterrent. Don’t say that you did not hear it here first.

Today we have been undertaking the final clearance of my mother’s house. The logistics of this made me think in the way of a major consulting firm, like McKinsey or Boston Consulting. By making a very simple change to the process that we are utilising we have saved a whole heap of time and made life so much easier. So much so that we believe that we will finish almost a day ahead of schedule.

So the problem is that we have a lot of stuff of varying sizes that are surplus to requirements and needs to go to the tip. Much has been packed in black sacks; other stuff varies in size from a metal trunk to gardening tools. The house is approximately four miles from the refuse tip. The problem is that you have to drive along a very busy trunk, they are building a by-pass but it is at least a year off. So it can take anything from thirty to sixty minutes particularly in the outward direction.

Ok now all you consultants what is the most efficient means of doing this. Previously we had used our car, but the limited capacity meant that multiple trips were required. Thus much time was wasted just driving. An unintentional eureka moment, because we had one lengthy item, an oar, to transport back to Scarborough we hired a Transit van. So there was only one loading and unloading cycle because the van had at least six times the capacity of the car. Thus although the loading/unloading took longer, maybe one hour we saved almost a day in driving time. I am sure if I was a consultant I could reflect this in a formula, I will leave that to the mathematicians amongst you.

Now the irony, I took the oar from the garage and placed it in the van, it was too long. We moved it round all at all sorts of odd angles but it would just not fit. So the end of the oar had to be sawn off. This just proves that it you solve one problem you create another!!!!