Yesterday afternoon was spent in the delightful beer garden of a Balmain pub. The weather was cool, but not wet, and the beer garden was enclosed in a big plastic tent and had a gas heater every few feet, so it was quite pleasant.
The smokers however were banished to a small area outside the tent. Funny that, given that if they continue, they might end up inside an oxygen tent in 30 years time.
There were not a lot of smokers there - 3 or 4 max. Someone mentioned that pub trade has crashed since the smoking ban was introduced. Well, that might be the case, but the slack is being taken up by families with kids. The beer garden was only half full, but everyone there was a family with kids from about 12 months up to 15 years. The pub itself was almost completely empty - even the pokies area was bereft of patrons, which is something that I never thought to see in my lifetime.
Whether this trend continues is something to be seen.
The shitful thing was that when we got back to the car, I found my wing mirror had been half knocked off by a passing car - or a bus more likely. We were parked on one of the main arteries of Balmain, but it was a narrow and well choked artery. It was one of those streets where traffic going one way would have to stop so that traffic going the other way could proceed past the parked cars. A bus must have taken liberties with the space available and banged up my mirror.
It wouldn't matter if everyone in Balmain drove Smart cars - the streets are still too narrow for two Smart cars to pass abreast.
The annoying thing is that the mirror itself is not smashed - it's the mounting bracket that is broken. I decided to do the modern thing today and Googled Landrover suppliers in Australia. I found four, and had a quick look at their web sites.
Their websites were rooted. Absolutely amatuerish and completely lacking in catalogues and useable search engines. I tried searching for "mirror" on all of them and they returned nothing.
One of them said, "If you can't find the part in our catalogue, contact us using this online form".
To start with, I went through the entire site and was unable to find any further reference to a catalogue. There wasn't even a page that said, "We don't have an online catalogue, but if you rng this number, we will post you one".
They did have a "contact" page though that you could use to submit a request for a part. I filled it in and submitted it and got some sort of apache server error. "mail server not found". So I guess my request was never properly submitted either.
Tomorrow, I'm going to have to track down this part the old fashioned way - pick up the phone and start making calls. Some people just don't get this while internet "revolutionise your business" thingy. But then again, a lot of people are boneheads.
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