Friday 16 May 2008

It's Another World

The Social Secretary arrived back just now worried that the car was low on fuel. "It's on the reserve," she said, "and that won't take us any distance, now fuel prices have gone up."

11 comments:

  1. Now I'm scared. There was something echoey and ironic about that laughter. Lucky I'm in Thurso. Or Penzance. Somewhere a long way from Kent, anyway.

    No, not Kent. I meant a long way from Kentucky, Kenilworth, somewhere like that. Damn...

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  2. Haha, bless!

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  3. Oh dear... but for a second I thought that made perfect sense so I can't talk.

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  4. Re the petrol price crisis, this may be of interest,

    See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it

    We are hitting 123.9 a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying 2.00 a ltr. Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

    This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the 'don't buy petrol on a certain day campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't
    continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT,whoever
    thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

    Please read it and join in!

    Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the market place
    not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not
    purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

    For the rest of this year DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.


    If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!!

    Now, don't wimp out at this point... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

    I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the
    message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and
    pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it... ..

    THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

    Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all.(and not buy at ESSO/BP) How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt,
    all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8days!!! Acting together we can make a difference . If this makes
    sense to you, please pass this message on.

    PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES

    It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons Jet etc. i.e. boycott BP and Esso

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  5. I'd love to believe it would work, although I gather this idea first started going round in 2001, aimed at Exxon and Mobil.

    The trouble is oil/fuel is fungible. This protest would initially push the price up in the remaining outlets, and the boycotted companies could then sell on their stock to the unboycotted ones at an increased profit to meet the supply shortfall. Winners, them. Losers, us.

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  6. Surely if the price of petrol has gone up and you bought it BEFORE it went up, you'd get further on the reserve...? I'm with the SS on this point of unlogic.

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  7. Um. Lucy, I think you and the SS probably would get further, by natural justice and sheer force of logic. But in my confined world the reserve would still only hold 4 litres, however much the 4 litres I'd put in it had cost, and those 4 litres would still only take me 30 miles. To be on the safe side, next time I'm running low, I'll try and make sure one of you is with me.

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  8. Worst case scenario - there'd be at least two of us to get out and push...

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  9. We'd expect an answer on the following:

    Does the "SS" refer to the "Schutzstaffel" or in English "Protective Squadron"?

    From - The Gestapo

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  10. Lucy - You've been on that kind of date before, by the sound of it!

    Foofy - I've always wondered what that sort of SS stood for. Schutzstaffel. Sounds like a Bavarian pudding.

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