Parking Mad

Posted: Thu 24 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Commuting, Customer Services, Cynicism, Driving, Parking, People, Thoughts, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

At the moment, the BBC has a documentary series on about Traffic Wardens (Parking Agents, Collection Agents, whatever else you want to call them) called “Parking Mad” and it’s been pretty interesting.

What I find most interesting is the people who don’t pay their parking fines, then get all snotty and sweary about it when the costs for it go up and up.

No matter how paranoid you are, I think the great majority of parking wardens just give tickets to people who’ve overstayed their tickets, not bothered, or are parking like cunts in the first place. I’ve spoken to a fair few over the years (I’m a twat for talking to just about anyone) and haven’t ever really come across a bad one. I’m sure they exist, don’t get me wrong – I just don’t believe every one is a bastard, or hates every other driver.

So if you’ve got a ticket- and again I emphasise that this is In My Experience Only – the odds are that you’ve fucked up and done something wrong. The ticket is going to cost you £30 to pay in the next 28 days, or £60 after that (and with extra costs the more they have to do to recover it) – so just sodding pay it. It’s a fee for fucking up.

I think I’ve now had four parking tickets. Two in Cambridge (where I’d be the first to admit that I pushed my luck anyway, and/or forgot to renew the ticket at the end of its duration) and two in London when I was commuting, and had a brain-fart about paying the ticket. The London ones were a pain, because you couldn’t buy the ticket before 9am- not from the machine, not online. I *know* it was a plan to get more people to forget to pay it, and thus do the tickets. But in six months, I forgot a grand total of twice.

I just don’t get the point of not paying a ticket – you know you’re going to lose anyway, so you might as well get it paid while it’s cheap.  Even if I were going to protest it, I’d pay while lodging the appeal. (Unless it’s better to not do so – I don’t know, never had to do it)

The programme seems to specialise in these ball-bags who park like twats, make a mistake, and then blame everyone but themselves. Of course, they don’t pay, and then bitch even more when the bailiffs come round (or stop them in the road) and charge £500 for what could’ve been dealt with for £30.

I’ve said many times that there’s whole heaps of stuff about people that I simply don’t get. Parking tickets are just one more facet of that lack of knowledge/understanding.

Gabriel Again

Posted: Wed 23 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Getting Organised, Gigs, Music | Leave a comment »

Back in October, I was supposed to go and see Peter Gabriel at the O2. Tickets paid for, car-parking paid for, all prepared. And then my body rebelled, so I didn’t get to see the concert. Which was seriously bloody annoying.

Today, tickets went on sale for another concert, this time in December at Wembley Arena.

I’ve got a ticket.

I’m going to go. I am, I am.

Waiting For Pay

Posted: Thu 17 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Agency Idiocy, Domestic, Finances, Work-related | Leave a comment »

This current contract has had one major downside – the agency in question have the worst pay schedule I’ve ever seen.

Of course, there are also quite a lot of other downsides, which is why I’m not going to be extending or renewing the contract anyway. But that pay schedule is definitely a contributory factor to the entire thing.

It’s come through an agency I hadn’t previously dealt with, and while they did say that the job paid monthly (which is fine with me) they carefully didn’t explain quite what they meant. This tells me that they damn well know the pay schedule is insanely broken/dodgy, but can’t be chuffed to do anything about it.

Usually, a monthly contract is paid by dint of the contractor submitting an invoice and getting paid seven days later. All well and good. You have an invoice deadline of (for example) the 23rd of the month, submit by then and get paid for month-end.

Not with this agency. Oh no.

You submit your invoice for the end of the month. They then take three weeks to pay, *and* still send it BACS, so it takes three days to hit your account. So, for example, the invoice for March, submitted by the ‘March’ deadline of 4th April (don’t ask) doesn’t hit a bank account ’til 18th April. (Which is a bank holiday – something the agency only realised when I asked them what they were doing about bank holidays)  For me, because this one has gone through an Umbrella company, I don’t get paid ’til the next working day – the Tuesday after Easter.

My colleague who started on 31st March won’t get paid til the 23rd of May.

In short, that’s shocking. And I can’t wait to get paid (three days before my contract ends).

Skewing Perceptions

Posted: Tue 15 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Cynicism, News | 1 Comment »

This story from Business Insider contains one of the worst (or cleverest, depending on your perspective) graphs in history.

The story is about gun deaths in Florida, and contains the graph below, created by Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement.

florida_gun_deaths

Looks like deaths went down after the “Stand Your Ground” law came in, doesn’t it?

But no, look at that Y axis on the chart (or the bold ‘totals’). The scale is upside down – so gun deaths actually increased after that law came in.

I can hear Blue Witch gnashing her teeth about that graph already…

People Carriers

Posted: Fri 4 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, BMW Drivers, Charm School, Commuting, Cynicism, Driving, Travel | 1 Comment »

As has been noted before on here, I do a fair amount of driving on any given week, mainly for commuting. It’s about 400-500 miles per week at the moment – although I’ve had greater mileages, and lesser ones.

One of the things I notice during those drives is how drivers do seem to group up, and that certain groups are infinitely worse than others. There’s always the usual culprits – BMWs, Audis, and White Vans, but there’s another one I notice more over time. MPVs, or people carriers.

I don’t know if it’s because BMW et al don’t actually do people carrier vehicles, but it does seem that MPV drivers are on a par with BMW drivers. In particular it seems that Citroen Xsara Picasso (now renamed the C4 Picasso, I think) are a breed of shit drivers. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen these vacuous bell-ends approach roundabouts in the wrong lanes, cut across lines of traffic, cruise across busy roundabouts, stick their cars into the flow of traffic, weave across multiple carriageways, and generally act like cunts.

So yes, welcome to the ‘shit drivers’ group.

  • BMWs and Audis
  • White Van drivers
  • MPVs – and Picasso drivers in particular.

Jargontastic

Posted: Wed 2 April, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Work-related | Leave a comment »

At the current workplace, I’ve heard more jargon and bollocks than I know what to do with.

The one today was “onboarding” – which is apparently another word for “starting a new job”. I suspect it’s only used by cunts and idiots – but really, Jesus Christ, “Onboarding”?!? Fuck me.

Mislaid

Posted: Fri 28 March, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Films, Finances, Getting Organised, Kindle, Reading, Stupidity | Leave a comment »

I am, on occasion, a bloody idiot. Last night was a prime example of that.

I went to the cinema to see the new Captain America film, and also had a meal. Because I was out like that, I took my Kindle, and because it was chiffing cold, I also took a jacket. (I’m normally pretty immune to cold, and don’t bother with jackets or coats at all)

When I got to the cinema, I put the jacket down by the side of the seat, with the Kindle in its inside pocket.

When I left the cinema, I also left the jacket – because it’s not in my mental software to get it, I completely forgot about it. I am, in short, a complete fucking idiot.

I went back this morning first thing (I had a day off anyway, for a number of reasons) to see if they’d found it, but no-one had handed it in. I’ll check again, just in case it’d been held over somewhere, but the odds are that the jacket and the Kindle are gone.

Of course, things could have been so much worse. It could’ve been an expensive coat/jacket, I could have left my wallet in the jacket as well. The Kindle could have had my payment details in it, or personal information. A couple of years ago, the loss of something like this would have knackered me, would have led to some financial juggling and so on just to replace it.

Now though, I’ve already registered it as lost, ordered a replacement, and it’s really not a big problem. It’s annoying – and of course a reminder that I’m a fucking idiot – but it all could have been so much worse. Indeed, it’s gone some way to showing me the changes that have happened over the last year or so, and in that, it’s no bad thing.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →