Focus and Parking

Right next door to the depot here in Torquay is a Focus DIY store. Nice big car park in front and a big store behind. Usually when I get to work the car park is pretty full. Not this morning. At first I thought they must be going out of business. ( Note: They aren't) Then I remembered the notice that went up in the sign on room last week. What had happened was this. There is room for 35 cars to park in the road out side the depot and for years the manager at Focus has not minded that some of the bus drivers have parked their cars in the Focus car park. There are, on any weekday over 100 drivers on duty at some time between 5 am and 12:30 am. The first controller gets into work at 4:30 am and the last controller goes home at about 2 am. The place is only closed for 2 1/2 hours. Recently a new office block and a block of flats have been built on the other side of Regent Close and there is not enough car parking space in the grounds of those buildings so people from there have also been parking in Focus. To the point that customers of Focus are finding it hard to get a parking place. The area manager went in one morning and counted 42 cars in the car park, there were only 4 customers in the store. The other problem was non customers were using the parking spaces close to the entrance to the store so Focus customers had to stagger a long way back to their cars with tons of DIY materials. So no more free parking for anyone but Focus customers. Me, I believe the bus company should give all the drivers free bus passes so we can get a bus to work. Just like I do. OK. OK, we do have bus passes but not everyone can live some where on the 12 route and as close to work as I do. even travelling by bus it only takes me 20 minutes to get to and from work. The moral of this story is bus travel is great if you live and work on a bus route. If you don't, it sucks.

Talking of cars, I watched the Channel 4 program, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" this evening in which a lot of people put forward arguments that both insisted Global Warming wasn't all it is cracked up to be and interesting reasons for the strength and power of the argument for climatic change. That is the Global Warming movement has now become a powerful industry in it's own right employing hundreds of thousands of people. Speak against Global Warming and you instantly have hundreds of thousands of people with a vested interest in getting you to shut up.