Failure

I tried, God knows, I tried.

M&S for a flying visit to grab a sandwich and go back to work. Shouldn’t have been difficult. Except there’s fuckwits everywhere, dithering about, abandoning trolleys any old place, and generally just being a bunch of tossers. Still, I get what I want and go to the tills. The “Five items or less – Food only” queue. Ha.

When I got there, the queue had five people in front of me. It took fifteen minutes to get through those people. The two in front of me were obviously work colleagues, and kept on and on and on talking – loudly. I don’t need to know about what their office party was like last night, nor why Donna is – apparently – “mental” and “crazy”. (Although it turns out she’s “mental” and “crazy” for the disgracefully original stunts of a) photocopying her arse, and b) flashing her tits at the barman in order to get served. Barking, eh?)

Then they got to the till. By now I’ve done OK, haven’t said anything, and any obscenities and swearwords have been kept on a firmly internal basis – I’ve been good.

They start asking the till person why one tub of biscuits is discounted. She doesn’t know. Frankly, no-one cares. “Oh, it’s just that if any more of them were discounted, I could’ve bought them all and taken them to the office, because the lads there will be able to eat them before they get past the sell-by date, no problem. So, is there any chance you’ve got any more anywhere? Because I’m sure I can take them to the office and there’ll be people there that’ll eat them.” Till person doesn’t care, and isn’t going to fucking look. Blood pressure is rising.
Oh look Tracey, you’ve only gone and got me the wrong crisps. I know you’ve scanned them already, but can you go and get me the right crisps? I don’t like those ones. You don’t mind, do you love? (at the till person) She’ll only be a minute. And while you’re there, Tracey, can you have a look at those biscuits, see if there’s any more on offer? Because then we can take them back to the office, and the lads there’ll eat them

It’s too much, I’m afraid…

For fuck’s sake! No one cares about the biscuits. No-one cares about the crisps. You’re obviously too fucking thick to read the fucking label yourself. You’ve been in the sodding queue for at least ten bloody minutes, and you didn’t notice. There’s people behind you who want to just get their fucking lunch, and go back to work.

Now would you please shut up, pay your money, and fuck off?

They did.


Travel Error

Herself’s feeling ill today, and I’m feeling pretty ropy too – but not to a level where I can work-dodge just yet – so I took the car.

Knowing how busy the standard route in is, I thought “I know, I’ll miss that lot, and go the back way, which’ll be easier”. Oh how fucking wrong can one person be?

The road was rigid – and by the time I was on it there was no turning back. I’d already avoided one jam, so this one was going to be the one I was in. Sod.

In the end it took half an hour to get out of Bracknell. The “quieter” road had had a five-car shunt on it (well, four car, one motorbike), so there were police and ambulance all over the place, and only one lane of traffic moving at a time due to Traffic Duty Trainee Plod. Having an Audi-driving numpty in front of me who was obviously not used to new-fangled inventions like clutches didn’t help – the knobber managed to stall it on every attempt to pull away. Impressive, when you’re in a jam of traffic and regularly getting overtaken by slugs, snails, and tortoises.

(And yes, I know I twice failed my own test by stalling the fucking car, but that hasn’t happened in a while now, and didn’t happen at all today, so bollocks, I’m just going to go with it)

Anyway, once we’d got past that little lot, it was plain sailing, and the rest of the journey took about ten minutes all told. And even found a car-parking space no worries, which I figure is quite an achievement after 9am…


Baggage

Shopping in a very busy Waitrose today, I was walking down one of the aisles when I got whacked in the face by a handbag. No thought at all, she’d just flung her bag over her shoulder while not paying any attention to anyone around her.

The icing on the cake though, was that having been smacked in the gob by a fairly fast and chunky dollop of Gucci Leather – and if I didn’t wear glasses I’d have had the fucking badge/clasp/fastener/whatever-the-fuck-it-is in my eye – she tutted at me, as if it were my fault.

It’s at roughly that point when all niceties and tact take the day off.

“Oh, excuse me, was I supposed to apologise for getting in the way of your fucking handbag? Did I cause you a problem by being as inconsiderate as to obstruct your handbag’s path with my fucking face?”


Pavement Parking

Last night, I was walking home, and the path I was taking was blocked by some numpty who’d decided to park on it. There was maybe two feet of room to go through. Being rather more than two foot wide, I went through it.

*crack* went moronicus’s wing-mirror. Not broken, just bent back (in the way it should do) against the car’s window.

Driver : [getting out of car] Oi! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
Moi : Walking home. Only some twat’s decided that the path is a driveway.
Driver : Well you could’ve walked round the car.
Moi: Onto an unlit main road? At night? Wearing all black? Don’t be a fuckwit all your life.

At which he shut up, got back in his car, and fucked off, wheelspinning away to show how tough and macho he really was.

I wasn’t impressed.


Pedestrian Mind-Control

Have I missed something? Are a large proportion of the population actually telepathic?

Every day I have to cross the road near my workplace, and I (generally) use the pelican crossing in order to do so. For those not in the know, this is the crossing with the “walk/don’t walk” red man/green man lighting system, that tells you when it’s safe to cross the road, because the traffic light has been set accordingly.

This system is not intelligent. It can’t – to my knowledge – detect when people are stood there waiting to cross. In order to tell it, you have to press the button, at which point a light on the box goes on, effectively the crossing saying “Ok, I know people are here, so I’ll get working on changing the lights”. It’s not difficult.

Every day, there’s at least one person just standing waiting for the lights to change. It’s not always the same person, but it’s always the same scenario – they’re the only person at the crossing. Now, I get to the crossing and I admit, I tend to make an assumption. I shouldn’t, but I do. I assume that the person has at least one brain-cell of their own, and has pressed the fucking button. But no – they seem to be assured of their own telepathic abilities, and think that the crossing will just know that they’re there and waiting. Occasionally common sense will suddenly strike them, they’ll look at the control box, and then press the button – even more occasionally looking sheepish at being such a twat.

More often, though, it’s down to someone else – usually me, in the end, when I’ve realised that my assumption has again been proved wrong. So they’ve waited – and still someone else has had to activate the crossing. Maybe they’ve all got servants, and are used to not having to do anything. I don’t know. But it’s certainly bloody annoying…

Corollary : By the way, the button only needs pushing once. To the fuckwits who stand there continually pushing the sodding button – it doesn’t make it work any quicker. It doesn’t think “Ooh, there’s lots of people pushing me, I’d best do it quicker”. So just press the bastard thing ’til the light goes on, then fucking well leave it alone!


Trick or Tr-bzzzzzzzzzt

Ah joy, for tonight is

  1. All Hallows Eve, when darling little munchkins wander the streets done up in fancy dress, knocking on people’s door to chorus the jolly inhabitants with the traditional cry of “Trick or Treat!”
  2. bloody Halloween, when snot-gobbling little chavvy tosspots stalk the streets done up in cheap tat masquerading as fancy dress, bashing on doors to yell “Trick or Treat” when people open them, in the method known to all and sundry since the late 80s when ET made the fucking festival popular across the Atlantic
  3. Hallowe’en, when all (in)decent witches and pagans go out and sacrifice goat/child/dog to the gods of all that is unholy
  4. I tend to be of the attitude that b) is the way to go. It’s not enough that Hound is currently stressed by fuckwit arseholes setting off fireworks at all hours of the day/evening/night, and is currently making use of vet-prescribed sedatives. No, we’ve now got to have the fucking doorbell going off to stress her out even more, closely followed by shit-for-brains hellspawn in sheets demanding sweets. Well, bollocks to them.

    I’m considering linking the doorbell to the mains for the night. That should be an ample Trick to see the little sods off crying into their goody bags…


One step forward, two steps back

Recently, my bank‘s online banking section finally took a turn for the better, and made use of a lot of accessibility and usability recommendations. Halle-fucking-lujah, I hear you cry – about time one of ’em did.

Last Friday I upgraded my installation of Firefox up to the latest 1.5 beta release, which in many ways is utterly stonking, and great to use.

Today I went to the online banking and got back the same message I used to get…

The Internet browser you are using is not supported by Digital Banking. Use the link below to see the complete list of browsers we support.

  • Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 5 and 6
  • Netscapeâ„¢ Navigatorâ„¢ version 7.1 and up
  • Mozilla 1.5 and up
  • AOL 8.0 and up (AOL subscribers only)
  • Firefox 1.0

For fuck’s sake – so it’ll work on 1.0, but not on 1.5? Useless bastards…