Here at EDS we try and keep our fleet of vehicles and trailers updated on a regular basis so that we can hope not to let you down on the way to a job. Despite all our best efforts to have them all regularly checked and serviced, however, there is no accounting for “operator error”!
Have you heard the one about the workman who put his fuel card safely in the little slot on the dashboard just the right size for it – or so he thought? A brilliant invention I hear you say – that is until you try and play a CD and it won’t go in the machine due to the presence of….yes you guessed it….a fuel card! That one gave much amusement to the local Ford dealer who had supplied the vehicle brand new only the week before. Not so amusing when we were told that to retrieve it the entire dashboard had to be removed at ridiculous expense – surprisingly enough the fuel card is still in place and the driver has to rely on the radio!!
It’s not just our vehicles we keep up to date with either – we always try to keep our machinery and office equipment updated regularly. All works well in 99.9% of incidents – until the day when ‘operator error’ rears its ugly head again. Have you tried to buy a blank VHS tape in the last 20 years? Do some of you even know what a VHS tape is?!!!! Well, our original CCTV camera survey equipment used a blank VHS video to record its findings. All was fine until the end of the last Century when the CD/DVD began to replace the VCR. To keep ourselves up to date, we bought a machine to convert our VHS recordings to DVD so that we could look at old ones when necessary (a lovely way to spend a day, looking at blockages in drain runs!), and then later purchased a new camera that took DVDs. Yes, you guessed it – one day recently an engineer was going to do a CCTV survey in the back of beyond, and being in a rush, took the wrong camera. When he got there, he realised not only that he had the wrong camera, but there was (unsurprisingly) no blank tape in the case. So I ask again – have you tried to buy a blank VHS tape lately?!!!!