Walking past a tram at the terminus near work I noticed the driver drop something out the window as he sat in the cabin. I was irritated by the littering and figured I’d report it to Yarra Trams so looked for the litter but couldn’t see anything specific beside the tram.

I looked a bit harder and realised it had been ash from the cigarette the driver was smoking whilst seated in the cabin. It was a cold day and evidently the driver had decided that he could not be bothered getting out of the tram and instead committed an offence which passengers would get fined for.

I’m not sure whether this guy should get the SPOTD award or something less flattering and more attuned to the complete lack of social awareness this cretin displayed. Fortunately I didn’t have to travel on that tram and breathe in the smoke which would have been present inside it.

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Attending a BBQ in the park near our house today with a group of friends, we noticed a young woman about 100m away doing a series of exercises (boxing, pushups, weight lifting, etc) in the park. No, before you go there - we were not perving on her - it was 11C so there was nobody in the park except our group so any activity naturally caught our attention.

The thing that really got our attention was that she had a personal trainer doing, well, not a lot. Most personal trainers we’ve seen really get into the activity with the customer, doing pushups at the same time and generally being quite participatory. This personal trainer was rather more aloof, standing off to one side a bit whilst the girl exercised. He didn’t even seem to be getting in her face, demanding to know how much she wanted to get fit, to push through the pain, blah blah blah.

We were somewhat bemused that she seemed to have picked a personal trainer who was getting paid to just go stand in the park and watch her without getting too involved. Perhaps it was just a long-suffering boyfriend who’d been dragged out into the park on a cold day and he was not enjoying the experience? It certainly did appear more likely to be a customer not getting her money’s worth out of the personal trainer and for that, we declared her to be the SPOTD - paying someone to stand idly by and watch her exercise when she could just be there by herself and save the cash.

Also, it was either give her the award or accept it ourselves for standing out in the cold to have a BBQ!

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Whilst putting together a document today I typed a sentence commencing with:

It is important to note that…

Microsoft Word immediately had a grammar fit and underlined the first portion of the sentence.  I checked their suggestion:

It is not important to note that…

You know, I’m pretty sure I still get to make some of the decisions around here but thanks anyway, Microsoft SPOTD grammar check programmer.

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An anonymous SPOTD award today for the person(s) who decided that the best place to eat seafood was on the tram. I boarded the tram for the ride home and was immediately assailed with the stench of room-temperature seafood. I had a quick look around and underneath one of the seats were 6 or 7 prawn heads, along with torn of strips of paper.

So far as I can tell, someone went to a delicatessen or market and purchased several prawns, sat on a tram and ate the flesh from the prawns by ripping them in half then discarding the heads and tails on the floor of the tram. The shreds of paper seemed to be the manner by which they had held the prawns during the consumption. Naturally, the only sensible thing to do at the end of their feast was throw everything on the floor for others to enjoy.

Lovely… So glad I got to enjoy that smell for half an hour - thank you anonymous SPOTD.

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Tonight’s SPOTD was the bedraggled homeless guy that was on my tram at the end of the day. I have very little interest in people begging for money and even less so after a very long day at work when someone who clearly doesn’t work wants me to give them my cash.

SPOTD: Excuse me, do you have two dollars?

Me (rummaging through pocket and fishing out a $2 coin): Hang on, let me check … Why, yes I do. Thanks for asking - I was kind of curious about the answer myself.

Moral of the story?  Be more specific when you’re begging.  You probably still won’t get any money from me but at least you’re not leaving yourself wide open to smarmy responses.

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And the award for “Shortest Time Between Buying Insurance And Having To Make A Change To The Policy” goes to me…

Today’s SPOTD award goes to the person who designed the my selected car insurance company’s online purchasing feature. After answering all the questions and providing the relevant information online I ended up having to call the call centre to sort out an issue discovered within 20 seconds of purchasing. I’d specified a future date for the insurance to commence, which was the day we’d collect the car from the dealer. However, whilst the system did book the correct date, the receipt page advised me it would commence at the same hour of the day I bought the insurance. Great. So I define it to commence on a certain date and then it starts at 11:30pm on that nominated date? Sigh.

A phone call to the “24 hour, 7 day” call centre proved fruitless - after a certain hour the relevant people go home so I need to call them during business hours tomorrow and sort it out.

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Another storefront sign with little attention to detail. Scarily, this is for a loan company. If they can’t get the two-foot tall letters on the front of the store correct, I don’t want to know how bad the fine print in their loan terms and conditions is…

Initially I thought it was a gimmicky name but I then realised it’s spelled differently on the main sign compared to every other instance on the storefront. The SPOTD who approved this sign gets today’s award.

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Today’s SPOTD award is some considerable time after it should have been awarded. Each day on the way to work I pass several stores with appalling spelling in their signs. Apparently nobody bothers to check spelling any more - either the person authorising the creation of the sign, nor the signwriters themselves.

There’s a Chinese medicine store in Coburg with two spelling errors in the same sign. For a couple of years it’s bugged me and today I took the camera so I could get a photo for the SPOTD award.

Is there anything worse than an irritated bowl? The pain is just cronic [sic]…

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Just loving those car salesmen at the moment…

Today’s SPOTD was the salesman at Preston Mazda who tried to take us for a ride and ended up losing the sale as a result. We were still undecided over the Mazda 3 vs the Dodge Caliber and had done the calculations on each to work out what we were prepared to pay and how one car offered advantages over the other. Each car forced us to make compromises so it was a matter of working out how much the price would move for us as to which we bought.

We showed up in the car showroom with a clipboard full of documents and calculations and initially struggled to get service. It seems no salesman wants to take on the more prepared customers… Anyway, we finally got one guy to deal with us and he attempted to dazzle us with all the “fancy technology we have here” - a laptop with a stylus pen so he could write on a simulated lined sheet of paper. Wow. We were underwhelmed, to say the least, since it was nothing more than a large PDA and made it actually worse for the customer because we couldn’t read the screen at all.

He asked what car we were interested in and since we’d done all the numbers ourselves and knew what we wanted, we advised him we just wanted the best price they could offer us. He wasn’t prepared to just do what we wanted though, starting at the top end.

SPOTD: This has a recommended retail price of $29,300. Would you be happy to pay that?

Us: No.

SPOTD: So what price do you want to pay?

Us: Better than that. Give us your best price.

SPOTD: Well, the best price is the one that is win-win. It’s the price you’re happy to pay and I’m happy to get. We run a business here so some people are happy to pay $29,300 and some people are not.

Us: We’re not.

SPOTD: So if I made it, say, $29,000 would you buy the car?

Us: I should imagine there’s more than 1% movement in the price. You can surely do better than that.

SPOTD: One per cent? It’s not one per cent. One per cent would be, like , oh. Well, yeah, it’s about one per cent. So what would you be willing to pay?

Us: Well, for starters, you have two of the exact cars we’re interested in outside in your yard. We can see them from here. Both what we want. Both the same colour. Both been sitting there for more than a couple of weeks. Both with a price of $28,300 on them so why would you think we’d pay $1000 more and be happy?

We went to leave and the manager suddenly materialised. Went through some of the same topics with him and said we were off to the competition. He told us to go there, get a number and come back because they could do better.

Us: How much better?

Manager: Better.

Us: So, give us an idea - we’re walking out the door to the opposition.

Manager: Come back and it will be better.

So we left and went to the opposition. The SPOTD at Preston Mazda started getting a bit frantic after a while, and called us seven times during our negotiations with the opposition. He kept offering to do better but we had to come back to their yard and so I asked for him to offer me something that would make me want to leave the opposition and come back to them.

SPOTD: I’m not talking $50. I’m not talking $100.

Us: I’m not interested in what you’re NOT offering. I want to hear what you are offering.

SPOTD: It’ll be worth it.

Us: So you know what it would be?

SPOTD: Yes. It would be good.

Us: So tell us what it is and we’ll come back. You have to work with us here. We’re in another dealer’s yard - give us some specific details to make us want to leave and come back.

SPOTD: No, come back and we’ll tell you.

And that’s why we bought the car from the opposition…

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Browsing websites to find some tyre prices this evening I discovered the good folk at Hankook tyres have a page with some information about the different types of tyres available. I was a bit puzzled by the image some SPOTD had added to the webpage though.

That’s the slowest looking motorcycle I’ve ever seen…

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