Tesco cancelled my delivery due to severe weather

[GingerBeverage]

It's not much of chat topic but Tesco just cancelled my delivery due in 1 hour - 'because of the severe weather'.

For the millionth time, these temperatures are not the norm in the UK, so we are not prepared for them. See also: heavy snowfall in the southern half of the British Isles.

Ah but we're British and our heat is worse than your heat (it's the humidity apparently- other countries dont have it). 🙄

In reality this is a country where people have little adversity in their lives, from weather conditions onwards. So they need to make a big fuss over very little.

Because you have the infrastructure in place to deal with them.
I lived in Madrid for 12 years. 36 degrees there is completely different to 36 degrees here.

Apologies for the spam Gif, no idea where that came from. Or why.

This.
In my youth as a backpacker I did landscaping in Australia, I helped re-turf a school footie oval in high thirties or forties. Where I am now it can get up to 45 and the wind heats you up rather than cooling and deliveries do not stop, schools do not stop, life does not stop. Pathetic

There is a difference. I've lived in Spain. I had air conditioning units in my house and my work place in Spain.

I now live in England. My work place does not have air conditioning. My flat Does not have air conditioning. England is very badly designed for the heat.

Because you're used to it and your infrastructure is designed to cope. It's not in the UK.

Like the European manufacturing company I deal with at work that built the same facility in northern England as it had in a hot European country and the first time we had a proper cold winter all the external pipes froze because temperature was a good 20 C lower than anything that the original European plant had experienced and they hadn't thought to include any insulation.

Why is there so little air conditioning in workplaces in the UK?

Because it's expensive to install, expensive to run and only really needed for a handful of days a year. More modern buildings might have it, but anything from 20th Century or earlier probably won't

Probably less expensive than

Having to Shut workplaces in the heat

Doesn’t really matter if they do have air con. People would still want to be off work as they claim it’s too dangerous to travel to the office.

Not checked the news in France recently then?

Most of the tube out in London. I lived in Spain for 13 years and this is just normal weather in the summer. They've just adapted to it. Schools close in June and don't open until September and all public transport has air con.

Well try to look at it compassionately. People are really suffering.

In my work place, my 60 year old colleague had to go home yesterday from the heat. I was talking to her. She was red in the face and struggling to breathe. There was just a small fan in her office. The room heats up to extreme heat.

Having lived in an extremely hot third world country I can assure you…no…they do not have the infrastructure!!

I was just reading an article of BBC news about the number of heat related deaths being reported this week in Europe.

My point is in response to your original point about why more offices don’t have air con. And I’m just saying air con wouldn’t make any difference to whether or not people want to go to their office. People who work in offices often think they should have paid time off for many reasons but people in essential jobs should go in no matter what. It’s what lots of people are debating on this thread.
I have two jobs. One has air con and one doesn’t. One involves travelling on the tube without air con for over and hour and one involves my car with (bad) air con. No matter which job I’m at I need to suffer heat at some point. But I work treating patients so if I was to cancel them all I would get many complaints. So I need to go in. And work with sweat pouring down my face and into my mouth behind my mask. The mask which makes it even harder to breathe. But I’m still expected to go in by the patients who would complain if I did not. Probably by those same people who took the day off due to it being too dangerous for them to travel to their air conditioned office job.

If they dont have the infrastructure, they will suffer similar issues. There would literally be the same problems if materials in buildings were used that cope at mid twenties and were regularly had heats in the mid thirties, thats why our railways have issues, they are not built for hot temperatures. A hot country will literally use different materials in the buildings, they are built for the climate. And if they arent, there will be issues.

How hard is it to grasp this? We arent a country that regularly has heat extremes or cold extremes so our infrastructure just is not ready for it, our buildings aren't designed for it, we ourselves arent acclimatised to it. Dealing with something regularly and having it happen as a rare occurrence is completely different.

We queued at standpipes for water in 1976. When are you lot going to get a grip?

Oh yes, absolutely it should be a race to the bottom. Who doesn’t want to win one of those?

What does one have to do with the other? How does getting a grip physically make things work when they fail due to hot weather? This is probably due to fridges and freezers failing, or vans breaking? How does 'getting a grip' make those magically work again because you have decided its not that bad so it should be fine? This isnt about whether you have decided we should collectively be able to cope or not, its things physically breaking.

Life is not going on in southern Europe. Southern France has had to shut a nuclear power plant due to heat. There are severe heat alerts in Spain and Italy with lots of impacts going on. I read in the Italian news that lots of restaurants are closed so you know it’s bad!

Caution needs to taken with some of those stats though.

Certainly a lot of the French numbers aren't down to people being overcome by high temps and dropping like flies, they're down to things like drowning / cold shock from jumping into relatively low temp water etc and other water associated reasons.

Sadly the casualties are often teenagers/youngsters, it's not simply the frail and elderly dying because they can't cope with high temps.

There's been a big push in some of the media here about this over the last few days and in places the police/Gendarmerie are upping patrols around high risk locations.

It’s not as cool in the vans as people think! I had my usual Monday shop delivered yesterday luckily, the driver said it’s really not that cool in the drivers area, I assumed it would be somewhat cool coming from the food storage area! They are usually in high viz too. The actual supermarkets are nice and chilled 🤣

Hmm what about combined with other factors. The lift in our work place breaks a lot.

I've been expected to walk up and down four flights of stairs, 10 times a day, in extreme heat. In a non air conditioned building.

I don't feel well after it at all