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.

Be mindful of door step selling regs.  I find customers (almost) always ask for a price or an indication of a price at the earliest opportunity, normally during the site visit, and I always say I will consider all of the details and follow up by email.
 
Takes minutes to send a formatted quote which includes initial RAMS and it forms part of the contractural arrangement.  
 
 

Door to door sales - GOV.UK

WWW.GOV.UK

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Doorstep selling, regulations, written notice of the right to cancel, exemptions, penalties  

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.

I would like to update you all in the progress and the outcome of the pricing up of this Laylandi tree removal. I have given the customer a price for the removal of Laylandi and the trunks being cut into logs and left for the costumer's own use and the removal of all the brash. 
As for the pricing of the job and the price I gave to the customer, which I did take into account all the advice you have gave me.  I phoned the customer with a price and he said he would give me a call back within a few days to say whether he wanted the job doing or not.
I have since received a call from the customer and he don't want the job doing, he has not given me a reason why.
I know you win some and you lose some but the less I lose the more my buisness will grow. 
Thanks Paul

Again why? Ben please don’t think am being funny cause it’s not in my make up but I did just say we all have our own way of pricing work,I personally price the job and how long I think it will take etc obviously comes into it...but at the end of the day a tree is a tree and apart from how long it takes to remove it will very it still takes the same amount of time to get it down.this particular tree has 2 options but because one option is drop it close and the other option is to drag it 100yrds why mess about with the price,option A same money job easier option B same money takes slightly longer but in each case it’s still good money for either scenario..that’s my way of thinking and it works for me and most importantly as long as the client is happy with the price and agrees it really doesn’t matter.

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

Petrol Chainsaw | Scheppach Chainsaw | ALDI UK

WWW.ALDI.CO.UK

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Keep your garden in top shape this summer. Buy yourself a new Scheppach petrol chainsaw and make quick work of cutting...  
Can anyone see what's not quite right about it? 
Would be quite entertaining to see a video of it in use!

Hastings Direct.
I was in the car with wor daughter driving, yesterday evening when she got rear ended by a bloke in aVW Passat, who drove away, on the M1 in Dublin.
Lydia got his Reg, which married up with her description of the make and colour, and I nabbed the Reg colour  and description of the next car behind as a witness, so she duly reported to the Gardai, no mysteries, then this afternoon she phoned her insurer, Hasting Direct.
Lord God!
1 Hr and 15 minutes on the phone to an Indian call centre.
No legal cover
No courtsy car
etc
etc
And £350 excess for a just sub £1,000.00 repair.
 
An expensive lesson in cheap insurance learned for wor daughter!

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.

Never experienced anything at work but a few years ago I was living in Weymouth. One bright and sunny Sunday at about twelve noon I nipped into a nearby pub which was a great rambling Victorian building.
I had a quick pint and bought a box of matches but when I came out it was dark. The town was deserted and it had suddenly become very cold. When I tried to walk some unseen force had me about the knees and I stumbled and fell. When I opened my mouth to speak the voice that came out was not mine and it spoke in tongues.
I must have been in some kind of trance because I have no memory of getting home and when I woke up I felt terrible and was covered in ectoplasm.
Fecking weird. Never went near that place again. They've since knocked it down and rightly so. 
 
 

The new owner deserves the Thug Life treatment!
 
I've got one, not me though, happened to a friend of mine. He was on a roofing job somewhere in Wales, on an old vicarage or sumsuch, not a stately home as such, but an old, large and rather well to do property...anyway, one break time (frequent joint breaks) he took a walk in the grounds, and noticed a wing of the hose he had not seen before, which was weird, because they had been all over the building for days.  As his mind was trying to compute  this information, he saw a little girl, about five or six, in a white dress with long blonde hair standing looking at him. He figured she was the child of someone on the grounds, and as he looked at her he noticed her hair was kind of floating slowly about, though there was no wind. Instantly, he felt overwhelmed by fear and ran back to the lads. So he mentioned this event to the owner, and apparently there was a wing of the house many years ago that was demolished. The daughter of the then-occupier, had a bedroom on the top floor of the wing, and she had a pet grass snake. The story was her father found the snake one day in the garden and stomped it, whereapon she went into depression and jumped or fell out of her bedroom window and fell to her death....

Been working with a workmate on and off for 6 yrs or so .but today I almost lost it big time and fell out . intrested to hear how others in the same situation would feel 
I was suppose to be helping him on a job today and arrangement was pickup at 9
called me at 8.20 saying 5 minutes away and I said not ready I will meet you at the job site at 9
as it turns out he told me completely the wrong area / road and sent me on a wild goose chase for nearly an hour 
after several callls later still wasn’t much help and didn’t make it obvious where he was .
when I finally arrived at gone 10 he wasn’t apologetic as expected but rude and patronising.
stayed for the day but still pissed off and thinking don’t bother again with such people even if they are old mates
I said I will finish the job tmr but totally gone off working with him
rant over 
 
 
 

For plant surely trackers are the answer.

Personally never seen anything I’d definitely say was supernatural. But..

I used to be a fishing ghillie on an old sporting estate with castle and three private graveyards. We used to fish at night for seatrout from beginning of May until August. Only started after it got dark but nights are short in a Scottish summer.
I had about four miles of fishing to look after so there was a lot of strimming of paths and trimming of trees. One young lad of about 16 was a part of a group of 6 fishing for the week. Sensible lad. Since he was the fittest I showed him where to go which was the most remote but promising pools to fish. I went with one of the older gents to a dam some mile upstream of where the young lad had to go.
The lads best chance of some fish was a round shaped pool surrounded by cliffs with one narrow access route in. Out the same way. At the neck of the pool was a rock promontory from which he could fish. The walk to the pools are down well worn paths through beech trees about 150 years old and lots of Rhododendrons.
So while standing alongside the older gent at the dam we suddenly notice a figure at the other side of the dam. It’s the young lad who staggers none too quietly across the dam wall. When he gets to us he’s shaking and in a bit of a state. He’d got to the main pool and clearly spotted a chap out on the promontory in the half light. He’d looked down to get down the two foot drop to access the promontory and looked back up to see no sign of the visitor.
I asked him for a description of the bloke. He perfectly described the previous ghillie who had died four years earlier but who he’d never met.

Think I’d definitely sell the place if I lived there.

I’ve not had any personally but my dad was on a job coincidentally I think that was Canturbury a good few years ago.

Anyway they offered a tea he went in then heard loud banging upstairs like some one was running.

Apparently it happens frequently but if you go upstairs it then moves to the loft. They said no one was brave enough to then go in the loft to follow it.

Needless to say my dad didn’t offer too look in the loft [emoji23]

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

Anyone leaving it on the floor , well its up to them indoors . Anyone leaving it on the ground in a bag is a twat .  Its better off not in a bag . Slugs and beetles etc etc deal with it eventually . Preserving it in a bag is stupid .

A customer knows you are coming but can’t be arsed to remove dog shit from the garden!!