The Hallowe’en Paradox

Posted: Sat 31 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Cynicism, Domestic, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

In some ways I feel the same about Hallowe’en as I do about The Festering Season. Mainly it’s the paradoxes that annoy me.

In the case of Hallowe’en, we’ll float past the crap about grown people dressing up like kids and so on.

But what gets me is this :

For most of the year (excluding the run-up to the Festering Season and Hallowe’en) children get told to not talk to strangers, not accept sweets from strangers, not accept anything, so forth, so fifth.  But come the Festering Season, they’re told to talk to strangers about what they want, accept presents and all that shit. And come Hallowe’en, all of a sudden it’s fine for kids to dress up, go round the neighbourhood and knock on the doors of people they don’t know and have never met, and get sweets.

Which is – to me, anyway – just really fucking weird.

Stating the Obvious (Yet Again)

Posted: Wed 28 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Charm School, Cynicism, News, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Monday’s verdict from the inquest into the death of three men in an RAF Puma helicopter was a perfect exercise in “No shit, sherlock”.

Apparently, “the pilot was attempting manoeuvres beyond his capabilities“.

Which is pretty obvious when you think about it. After all, the helicopter crashed.

The news coverage though was even better – and how they didn’t end up with a really rude answer, I don’t know.  It’s another of those situations where I’m glad I’m not involved in this kind of idiocy, because my response would’ve been rude, insensitive and many other things.

At one point the reporter asked “So was the helicopter flying too low?”. Of course it fucking was, it ended up flying into the ground.

Priorities

Posted: Wed 30 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Cynicism, News, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Today I’ve found myself repeatedly annoyed by news coverage.

There appear to be two main stories today :

  1. Tsunamis kill at least 90 people in Pacific
  2. The Sun newspaper changes allegiance from Labour to Conservative

Yet every media outlet I’ve seen today has those stories in the opposite order, and that annoys me.

Somehow, UK politics appear to have taken precedence over (at least) 90 people being killed.

Changing Plans

Posted: Tue 29 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Agency Idiocy, Charm School, Customer Services, Depression, Domestic, Thoughts, Work-related | 1 Comment »

Today I got a call from one of the agencies I’ve been dealing with, and all of a sudden everything changes.

The contract I was supposed to be starting on Monday has been cancelled. Apparently the directors of the company in question have decided that the project won’t go ahead, so they’ve pulled the budget for it.

And lo, no job for me.  All my paperwork had been signed, ID stuff sent and the like and now it’s all for fuck-all.

This is one of the things I hate about contracting over having a “proper” job – and that’s a pretty small list, believe me – that things like this can happen at the drop of a hat.  If it were a ‘proper’ job, the project decisions and budget would all have most likely been sorted well before it came round to getting someone to do the work. It’s something that seems to have been happening quite a bit this year, and it’s not something I’ve seen prior to this. Sure, I’ve had one contract come to an end before it was supposed to – and I’ve had plenty more extend well past when they were supposed to finish – but up ’til now I’ve not had to deal with ones that get cancelled before they start.

It leaves me at a bit of a loose end, as I’d already closed off the current contract to end on Friday so everything was ready for Monday’s start at the – now non-existent – new place.

So I’m back to square one. Sending out updated CVs, talking to agencies, going to interviews.

I won’t deny, it’s been a serious hit on me today – I’m not feeling great anyway, so this has just been kind of the last thing I needed. All told, it makes me want to chuck in the entire thing and head off to Pastures New (or at least Pastures Different) with a totally different job/career/work-life.

It won’t happen yet, no matter how much I want it to – but I think it’s something I need to start properly working towards.  (And I know, that’s not grammatical – I just can’t think of the grammatical way to put it)

In summary? Today’s bollocks. Next week ain’t looking good, either.

It’s Fucking September

Posted: Sun 27 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Charm School, Festering Season | 2 Comments »

Bah, HumbugI’m seriously thinking (allbeit for next year now) of getting some big stickers printed up that just say

For christ’s sake, it’s still only fucking September!

Where will I use them? In supermarkets, when they’re already selling Christmas cake, pudding, mince pies, and general Festive Tat.

I mean seriously, we haven’t even got the bloody Hallowe’en stuff out in some of the shops – let alone feckin’ fireworks – and yet there we are, all the food and tat for the Festering Season is on the shelves already.

One of the local garden centres even has on display all the chavtastic house-decoration shit.

It’s fucking September. I despair.

Killer Week

Posted: Mon 21 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Driving, Own Business, Stupidity, Thoughts, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »

This week is looking like it might turn out to be Not Fun.

I’ve got some pre-existing bookings during the week (I wasn’t expecting the contract to extend…) which means I’m working in the office on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This means that I’m going to be driving in to the office instead of using public transport. And I suspect that will not be fun.  It’s likely to be at least two hours each way – although I’ve done drives like that for work before, and at least I will have a break between each one, rather than doing three or five days on the trot, which would leave me looking like a stunned monkey by Wednesday (as it did when I did that for a week down to Basildon last year)

Needless to say, on those days the blogging content might be a bit thin on the ground.

Still, it’s only three days.  And then one more week entirely in London. And then I’m done.

Abandoned 2

Posted: Sun 20 September, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, BMW Drivers, Charm School, Driving, Parking, People, Stupidity | 5 Comments »

The same Tesco carpark as my previous post about arsewit parking, but this time it’s just *so* much more impressive.  In this case, I’ve left the bell-end’s number-plate in view too. Screw it, parking like this needs to be recorded and credited to the correct knob-head.

Of course, it just had to be a BMW driver, didn’t it?

So bad it's hard to believe

So bad it's hard to believe

Yep, not even just half-over the line – but parked up in a completely hatched off zone right next to the pedestrian crossing.

In this case I can’t deny it, I went in and spoke to the staff about it – the driver got a telling-off from them too. Seems fair to me.

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