Kent Arboreal

Congratulations mate.

A lizard is walking through the jungle when he smells the unmistakable aroma of someone smoking weed. The lizard is partial to a spliff and hasn’t had one in ages so he goes off to find out who’s smoking. He soon finds a monkey sitting in a tree chonging on the fattest bifta he’d seen since university. “Alright mate? Can I have a toke? I love a zoot.” The lizard asked. “Of course you can bro.” Replied the monkey. So the lizard climbed up and sat with the monkey, sharing a few joints of skunk and talking about how “it’s all connected, man”. After about half an hour the lizard was pretty fucking high and had a serious case of dry mouth. “My mouth’s so dry, man.” He said. “I need water. Where can I find water.” “A couple of hundred yards over there is a river.” Replied the monkey, pointing into the jungle. The lizard thanked the monkey for the weed then made off in the direction of the river. He got to the river and started lapping up the cool water, when suddenly a crocodile rose above the surface and snapped at him, trying to grab him in its jaws. “Whoah!”, Shouted the lizard. “Don’t eat me man. I’ll give you anything you want.” “I’m a hungry crocodile, all I want is to eat you, lizard.” Boomed the crocodile as he kept snapping at the lizard. “Wait! Wait!” Cried the lizard. “Do you like smoking weed?” The crocodile stopped and looked thoughtful. “Actually I love a spliff, but I haven’t been able to score any in months. Why do you ask? Do you know where I can get some?” “Yes.” Said the lizard. “If you go into the jungle, a couple of hundred yard in, there’s a monkey sitting in a tree smoking the best green you’ve ever had. He’s a bloody nice bloke, he’ll share a joint with you.” The crocodile decided that actually he was going to let the lizard go this time as he really fancied a spliff, and walked off into the jungle. Soon enough he could smell weed, and looked up. In the tree above him was the monkey, as high as a kite, smoking another huge joint. “Fuck me, lizard!”, Exclaimed the monkey, looking down. “How much water did you drink?”

This is the sort of pain in the arse job I always put in an eye watering quote for in the hope they say no, then the bastards say yes and I wish I’d just mugged it off.

Tip sites give you one after you weigh out , but I’m fairly sure if it’s used as a product you don’t need one. I take chip to a children’s outdoor centre who spread it over woodland pathways to stop them getting too muddy, it’s a huge site so they take pretty much everything we produce. Although no money changes hands I view it as producing a product which I send onwards so there’s no waste involved. I’m sure some sad little man with a clipboard and a job that produces nothing but ballache for other much harder working people would tell you otherwise though! That said I do get notes for stuff that goes to landfill.

Price on the doorstep confirmed in writing. That’s what I said. I may not be at my clearest right now though as I’m looking after my 5 day old son, hence being on Arbtalk at 4am.

This handsome old devil is the best liked member of the Kent Arboreal team. Largely because he’s the only likeable one. Not much of a climber though.

If you can give em a price on the doorstep and offer a date to do the work you are way more likely to get the work in my experience. I only email confirmations of the price I’ve already given apart from occasional jobs with added complications that need addressing. When I price a job, this is how I go about it: Inspection Risk assessment Do I need to bring in any special equipment? How many people do I need on the job? How long do I expect it to take? What’s the access like? How much space is available? How much are we tipping? How far are we from a tip site? Charge a good rate for good work. As a self employed person you don’t get pension contributions, sick pay, holiday pay, etc, so that needs to be factored in too. Tempting as it is to price low, it just means you sell yourself short and drive prices down for others. None of us are Tesco’s with turnovers of billions and able to survive on a margin of 2%, so don’t get caught in that mentality. If your business depends heavily on one quote being accepted then the problem isn’t your price, it’s your advertising. Don’t be all slap dash with it, and throw money everywhere, find out what works and focus on it. I personally find I can get work from local print advertising but not enough to justify the expense. But if I pay more for front page print ads I get a much better return on investment. Identify where most of your work comes from and strategise around that

I agree. You’re being paid for the fact you have the equipment and skills to do a job that the customer doesn’t. How long it takes is irrelevant as long as the customer is happy with the price. I personally price for what I think the job will be, plus a bit extra for “buggerage” when something unexpected crops up on some jobs and they over run. I’d rather know if I over run I’m still going to turn a profit, otherwise you’re basically paying the customer for the privilege of doing a job for them. I learned that lesson very early on.

We quoted a few of these but never got them. Craziest was a shit ton of work here there and everywhere around the village. 5 firms quoted for it. Four of us quoted between 17k and 22k. Our quote was 18k by the way. The contract went to the fifth quote of 2.5k. Never knew if they managed to do it all. If they did they were on about ten quid a day. Never bother quoting PCs any more. Only one I ever won I misread the spec and barely broke even. Fuck that. The building firms are as bad as others have already mentioned. I’m pretty sure a lot of them are just looking for a muppet who’ll cut down TPO’d trees so they can get on with a project without any ballache or liability for doing it. Had one this week ask us to tender for a polished concrete floor. Wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that. But more to the point why would anyone think we would?!

A bit of brash shredding back at the yard with the little Hyundai

Hahaha you’ll be a long time cutting with that

Nah, NFU, 2 years to pay out a £900 commercial claim (£400 after excess). I used to run a cleaning company in another life and one of our girls spilled some very strong oven cleaner on an oiled oak worktop which ate the wood alive. Photos to prove it, client vouched for it, got quotes for the work from 2 joiners, ended up taking so long to get it authorised that I just went ahead and had a guy replace it at my own expense and hoped to recoup the money down the line. Two years later after I’d long given up hope and changed insurance companies I call them on the off chance and they say “oh yeah, we signed off on the money, we just didn’t call to let you know, would you like us to send it to you?” Me...”of course I £&@@ing would!”

Just price it as normal that’s what I’d do. Every jobs different so I just price so I’ll definitely walk away with a profit even if theres a snafu. That way I never get shafted by the unexpected. People are prepared to pay good money for good work. And the ones that aren’t, aren’t worth working for.

Best moment has to be when his tape comes unstuck. Good luck popping that back on. Still, nice to see he’s cutting to spec anyway... [emoji23]

That ghost story has been reported all over the country not just in Weymouth. In fact I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago when the pubs opened at 730 am because the rugby World Cup final was on. Seem the spirits are more active that time of the morning.

The whole wing of the house. ?! That’s quite the apparition. my uncle used to tell a story of when he was a boy in the 1950s and walking across the fields near his house saw a big stone wall with a door in it and a woman beckoning him in. There was no wall there and he said he got a strong feeling that he shouldn’t go in and instead ran home. He swears this is true although it sounds bonkers.

I’ve had so many! I had a guy who thought being hung over was a fine excuse for being off sick. Sacked him in the end. I had a guy from an agency who on his first day had turned up on site and felled a 40ft 15 in diameter ash tree with a b&q handsaw before we’d arrived with the kit. Fuck knows how he managed it, no notch or anything, just cut straight through and thank fuck it fell somewhere safely! A few stormed off site over the years. And anAustralian guy who quit on the spot and never worked for us again after a digger driver from another firm took the piss out of him. Good people are hard to come by. Especially when you’re a small outfit and don’t have the time or resources to keep em in line with an HR department and all that jazz.

Trackers only go so far, once it shows up your kits with the Irish wombles and the hopeless fuzz don’t wanna go in and get it then it’s lost any way.

Now that’s a good one!

Oooh creepy! Canterbury has a lot of history, theres been a town for 3000 years. Bound to be a few ghosts there.

I know Halloween has just gone, but I wondered if anyone has any of their own ghost stories from jobs they've worked on. I've been in this business ten years and only have one. I got the idea as I decided to write about it in a halloween blog post for the company website for a bit of fun. I've copied and pasted it here, what do you guys reckon, and do you have any of your own? As it is halloween, we thought why not write a post about a local haunting. But this one is a post with a difference because it happened first hand to the Kent Arboreal team on a job in Hoath. To protect the privacy of the customer, we'll not mention their names nor the exact location. Hoath is a little village near Canterbury and Sturry, out on the old marshes that were once the Wantsum channel. A few years ago in 2014, Kent Arboreal were called to a job in a beautiful house there. The house was a converted barn and had been bought by the new owners who wanted some work to be done there before moving in as is often the case. So the first step was to visit the property and take a look to come up with a price for the job. There was a great deal of land surrounding the property with extensive gardens that had fallen into a state of disrepair. After visiting the property, Ben returned saying that the place gave him the creeps and that although it was empty and isolated, several hundred yards from the next dwelling, he felt like he was being watched. Obviously, we all laughed at him, he priced the job, which was a big one and would need us to be on site for about five days, and forgot about the whole thing. As it turned out, we were given the contract for the garden clearance and various tree works, and we booked in for a few weeks time. When we arrived on site, there was a crew of builders there already, who were working inside the house, and living there for a couple of weeks while they carried out the renovations. When we arrived, we said our hellos, and John asked what they thought of the house. The reply was; "It's a lovely place, but it's haunted to $*%^!" We laughed and asked why they thought that and they told us that all night they could hear banging coming from empty rooms, their tools were being moved around, they heard whispering, and one had even received a phone call from a distant voice that couldn't be understood, from the number 000000000. He showed us the call record to prove it on his mobile phone. Interested, but till not entirely convinced, we got on with our work. Joe told us that the back courtyard garden gave him the willies, but apart from that, day one was uneventful. On day two, it was quiet in the morning, then in the afternoon, I went inside for a coffee. While I was there, there was knocking sounds coming from one of the back rooms. Nobody was in there, but it could well have been someone in one of the garden areas knocking against the wooden walls from outside while doing some job or another. But then there was a sound like wallpaper being unrolled, or a poster falling off a wall, something like that. It came from the hall, then out of the hall, a shadow shot through the kitchen and out of the front door. I was alone in the house at the time, and after looking at every angle, the only way the shadow could have been cast was by the kitchen lights in the middle of the room, but there was nothing to cast it. I was starting to become a believer. On day three, Paul, one of the builders, was having an argument with somebody on the phone. When he hung up he said; "I can't believe that! The driver from the skip company says he won't come here to pick up the skip unless we can promise there's someone on site to meet him because he reckons he saw something here when he dropped the skip off before we got here and it's definitely haunted." When he did arrive, he said that when he dropped the skip off the first time, he knew the place was empty but he saw someone moving around in there, and while he was unloading the skip the radio in his lorry came on loud with a load of static. Day four was quiet apart from the knocking and banging which we'd all got used to by then, even though it was louder than before, and definitely not one of us messing about. On day five a guy turned up to put in a new tv ariel and that involved some wiring being fitted in the back room where most of the noises came from. A few hours in, he was having a coffee with everyone else in the kitchen, and said that he'd be glad when he was done, because that room was creeping him out. He said that he was sure he kept hearing someone walking around in there but there was nobody inside the house, let alone in that room. The final thing that happened while we were working there, was that another contractor turned up to do some light fittings, and parked outside the house. While he was in there, his van radio came on really loud with a lot of static, just like the skip driver had said happened when he was there before. A few weeks after we'd been there, the new owners had moved in, and John and I went over to visit them and settle up the bill one evening after work. John was curious, and asked the owner if he was enjoying living there. He obviously read between the lines a bit, maybe he'd already been asked about the place by one of the other contractors, and he responded by saying; "It's a beautiful house, but I must say, it takes on a completely different feeling at night. It's not such a nice place after it gets dark." We returned to work there a couple more times on smaller jobs, but as the clients were living there full time by then, we didn't spend much time in the actual house itself, but on one occasion, we were in the kitchen in the evening, having a cup of tea with the owner, when from the back room there was a huge crash, like a wardrobe being pushed over. The owner just put his finger up and whispered; "Please just pretend you didn't hear that. We don't want the children to be scared."

They’re all scams. Some begun as scams then tried to go straight. Some were scams all along. Some had teams of executives where not all of them were aware it was a scam. Some thought they were legit but actually they were a scam. Icos and crypto trading are a very easy way to spend lots of money and get a bunch of digital magic beans in return. But then this is an old thread, so you probably all know that now.

Beware of how it reads when you open the doors

Yeah, like the worlds most disappointing time capsule.

YES!!!! I’ve actually walked away from a couple of those. And another one, people who pick up dog shit in a plastic bag then chuck it on the floor. Surely that’s actually WORSE than just leaving it?!