Current Mood:
Aggravated
Thought of the day
Tag: dealing with idiots
Note to self..
Never do business with Zenith Staybrite. The end product is good and the installers are ok, but the business side of thing stinks to high heaven.
Current Mood: Aggravated
Never had to do that one before
My shiny-shiny smartphone that I love so much suffers from an annoying hardware defect.
It’s been ok for a while now, but this morning – just as I’m expecting an important phone call – it’s gone into a reboot cycle.
So now it’s cooling down in the office fridge.
Oy.
Current Mood: Aggravated
Come on, NHS, pull the finger out!
Normally, I can’t complain about the NHS. It gives a very acceptable level of service and I’ve never been disappointed so far. The only downside of it, as far as I can see, is that it’s too bureaucratic and the left hand doesn’t even know the right hand exists at times.
I’ve been waiting for my post-vasectomy fertility test results. I’ve called the GP surgery twice and they’ve not gotten anything back. I was told by the cell path lab that it would take about 5 days to get the results back. That was 10 days ago. After calling the GP (twice), the Saffron Walden community hospital where the procedure was done in the first place (and being transferred to the coivemail of somebody who is on holiday until the end of August), the Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow (twice, and once after doing a Google search to get the phone number of the cell path lab from some random press release, because it’s not on the main hospital website) and finally being bounced around 4 or 5 people in the outpatient clinic of the SWCH again, I finally found somebody who could tell me that, yes, they have the results but, no, they can’t give them out to me because they need to be reviewed by a doctor. They’ll fax the results to him and get back to me sometime this week.
Oy.
Current Mood: Aggravated
Sometimes, I really hate people
People, en masse, are whiny and selfish. You give them free wine, and they complain about the lack of choice or where it comes from. You give them free movie tickets, they complain about the fairness of how you’re handing them out. However, if you ask them to participate in the organisation of events, the silence is deafening.
Current Mood: Aggravated
Yay, home ownership!
Ever since we bought this house, it’s been fighting us when we try and improve it. Wiring in a breaker board was fun. Upgrading the boiler was more fun. Each time, we realize that at some point in its past, a real cowboy DIY “enthusiast” left his mark on this house and we’re still discovering just how loony he was.
We had a periodic electrical inspection done to certify the breaker installation and it turned up some gremlins in the wiring.The bad news is that it took a full day to work through them. The good news is that I thought it would take significantly longer! And to top it off, we only had to rip up a small portion of the floor. I had visions of the whole upstairs being torn up and trunking running down all the walls. All in all, it would seem that we’re going to get away with only 10 hours of electrical work. I can live with that.
Current Mood:
Horny
Canada, what the fuck have you done to yourself?
From the CBC: With 99 per cent of polls reporting, the Conservatives won 167 seats, followed by the NDP with 102, Liberals with 34 and the Bloc Québécois with four and the Green Party with one. A party needs to capture 155 seats to win a majority in the House of Commons.
Canada, seriously! He was the first prime minister to lead a party that lost a vote of non-confidence with contempt, and you vote him back in with a majority government? What the hell were you thinking?
Current Mood:
Cynical
An open letter to the landlord of the Crocus Tavern
Sir.
For the last few weeks, I have been taking my two year old son to nursery using the shuttle service that my workplace provides. There is a stop just opposite your pub. It is a short walk from our house, situated in The Glebe, in the mornings. However, in the evening, my wife picks me up from the pub parking lot because the side-walks can be very slippery at this time of year and are generally poorly lit. She has been in the habit of parking in your car park for generally no longer than 10 minutes while she waits for the shuttle bus to arrive (unfortunately, the shuttle schedule tends to be a bit chaotic, hence the longer-than-expected wait).
At no time during those recent weeks has your car park ever had more than a handful of cars in it, including ours. Considering that your lot can reasonably handle several times than number of cars, we never considered this to be a problem. However, last night, you or one of your staff came up to the car while my wife was waiting and informed her that yours was a private car park and that she should not park there to wait for us in the future.
While you are entirely within your rights, I believe that this shows a stinginess of spirit that is not appealing for our continued custom. It’s not like your business is exactly booming and heaving at that time of night, and it doesn’t cost you anything to let my wife wait 10 minutes in a near-empty car park. If anything, it might give the impression that there are actually people frequenting your pub.
In any case, you will be happy to note that we will refrain from using your car park and we will also refrain from using your pub, in general. My wife will park in a lay-by further up the road. You can take your precious parking and shove it far, far up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Have a nice day,
Rc
Current Mood: Aggravated
What bunch of poncy idiots thought up this one??
I’m sorry. I’m going to rant a bit now (even moreso than usual). Xmas is supposed to be all pap and tack. It’s all about gaudy. It’s not supposed to be tasteful, and clinical, with everything in its place and no speck of glitter in sight. People who buy two trees are in the same league as the idiot woman who bought £50 rolls of ribbon for her presents.
The rise of the 2 Christmas tree household
Children’s badly-made decorations and gaudy flashing lights are, for many, the true essence of Christmas. But it would seem an increasing number of parents are banning garish decorations from the family tree. Instead, children are being bought a tree for their bedroom to decorate themselves, while the adults ensure the main Christmas tree is kept more tasteful.
Leading retailers have reported that they have seen customers buying more than one tree, with their research suggesting that the second, smaller one is being bought for children’s bedrooms, in another sign that the recession has failed to dent parents splashing out on their offspring at Christmas.
The phenomenon of the two-tree household is also the culmination of a long-running trend that the family Christmas tree has become a status symbol and a design feature, rather than merely the main traditional decoration during the festive period, according to one expert.
B&Q, which said it will have sold more than 250,000 real trees by the end of this weekend, calculated that a quarter of all of its customers buying a tree were also buying a second one – invariably a sparkly, fake tree. Annette Hill, assistant buyer in horticulture at B&Q said: “There appears to be a growing trend for households displaying more than one tree, giving parents and kids a chance to stamp their mark.”
Tesco, too, said that 25 per cent of small fake trees that were being sold were being bought alongside larger more tasteful versions, with the supermarket pointing out that the small versions were ending up in people’s hallways or children’s bedrooms. A spokesman for Tesco said: “It’s part of the trend to splash out on your children, regardless of the economic conditions.”
Part of the problem with allowing children to make their own baubles, angels and stars is that they while they may have charm they can ruin an otherwise tastefully-decorated sitting room, said Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, the interior designer and television presenter. The lack of sophistication of preschool glue-and-glitter efforts are compounded by being clustered on just the bottom two branches of the tree, with young children unable to reach the higher branches, leaving the top half naked, and the bottom covered in bright lights and tinsel. Mr Llewelyn Bowen said: “I think the whole two-tree phenomenon is about controlling your environment. Things have changed enormously from when I was growing up and you put up the tree and got out the box of old decorations you used every year. Now we are very keen to show off our lavish side at Christmas and have a tree that you can impress the Joneses with. You are never going to do that with it covered in Barbie glitter. As far as I am concerned buying your children a tree for their bedroom is a case of the parents indulging themselves.”
Current Mood: Aggravated
God will protect us from climate change.
Praise the Lord and pass the bacon, Cletus!
U.S. Representative John Shimkus, possible future chairman of the Congressional committee that deals with energy and its attendant environmental concerns, believes that climate change should not concern us since God has already promised not to destroy the Earth. Shimkus, an evangelical Christian and a Republican, signalled his desire to become chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The Energy and Commerce committee is among the most powerful in the U.S. Congress, with a wide-ranging purview over legislation touching on energy policy, environmental initiatives and public health.
During a hearing in 2009, he dismissed the dangers of climate change and the warnings of the scientific community by quoting the Bible.
First, he noted God’s post-Flood promise to Noah in Genesis:
“Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”
“I believe that’s the infallible word of God, and that’s the way it’s going to be for his creation,” Shimkus said. “The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a Flood,” Shimkus asserted. “I do believe that God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.”
Current Mood:
Depressed