There are a variety of modern facilities in the works’ kitchen here at base number 2: fridge; hot water dispenser; microwave; dishwasher; cutlery; bin, to name but a few. For some reason, somebody keeps putting a plastic teaspoon in the sugar bowl – despite the fact that there are oodles of steel ones in the drawer. I put these nasty plastic things in the bin at every opportunity. Leaving things like that in sugar bowls constitutes a health hazard in my book, and if you need to leave something in the sugar bowl, why not use one of the hundreds of steel spoons? I just think that you use a fresh spoon to dole out your coffee, the same spoon to dole out your sugar and then you use the same spoon to stir your drink – the spoon should then go in the dishwasher (or sink) and not, not, NOT on the work surface or draining board.

Similarly, if you make a cup of tea, put the used teabag in the fucking bin – don’t put it in a used mug that’s been left on the draining board. Seriously, how difficult is it to put a used item in the bin? It’s the same as the sealing tags off the milk bottles – they never find their way in the bin either and they just end up lying about on the worktop. I’d like to find the culprit(s) so I could have the opportunity to interrogate them and try to discover their motivation and reasoning for this behaviour. There probably isn’t a reasonable explanation. To coin a phrase – some people are just complete fucktards.

Oh yeah, and tea and coffee spillages left to dry out on the worktop too. That’s just bloody lazy.

For some reason, I’ve found myself making exclamations in a weird Bob Dylan-esque whiny singing voice. I’ve found myself living in a Bollywood musical – without the Bangra, the bling and the dancing. Actually, it’s nothing like a Bollywood film, it’s just me being a twat.

People at shopping centres are ignorant fuckers. They walk along; 2, 3 or 4 abreast and they barge straight into me and shove me out of the way. Bastards. I wonder if it has anything to do with me being a 2 year old gypsy child.

Anyway, if you’re the type of person who walks along in shopping centres and expects everybody to get out of your way, you’re a complete tosser and the whole world wants you dead! Well, it’d be nice if you showed a bit of common courtesy. So think on and look sharp!

Having had a look at the postcards at the Postsecret site, I think I might start a service like that for readers of this blog (all 2 of ’em) to post any secrets they’d like to get off their chests. All posts will be treated in the strictest confidence and nobody will laugh at anybody. Of course, such a setup needs to be monitored by a suitable person who has no skeletons in their closets. So it’s only fitting and right that I should volunteer my services for that role.

whoohoo.co.uk – The British Dialect Translator
Thanks to Barbara for letting me know about this – I can see this one doing the rounds on Friday. I quite like the idea of the Jolly Well Spoken translator, wot, wot?

PostSecret
Wow, this is one of the best ideas I’ve ever seen.

Jesus help me. One of my colleagues is incapable of just having a conversation and then moving on; he has to follow everything up by Googling it and downloading anything connected with a subject. Another colleague has just been talking about hearing “Always look on the bright side of life” as somebody’s ringtone yesterday and as a consequence, I’ve just heard the fucking thing on loop myself for the past 10 minutes! He’s a really sweet bloke, but he’s obviously not busy enough. And yes, I realise that that’s coming from somebody who’s writing blogs in work time too – but I can multitask.

RARRRRR I’M A BLOG
Yep, he’s a blog alright! I like things like this, this is the sort of crap you get e-mailed on a Friday. Some of the scary album covers make up one of the best Powerpoint presentations I’ve ever seen – I may post them if I can be arsed. Let’s just say, “Julie’s 16th birthday” is in there with them.

Only complete nobheads forget to put their headlamps on while driving at night. Drivers and pedestrians use elaborate methods to draw errant motorists’ attention: pointing; flashing their own headlights; running after the car, mouthing “Your lights!”; and my own particular favourite is to turn my own headlamps off then on again.

My “Your lights!” method came about because of a scare story that was circulating Manchester about ten years ago. Apparently, it was a gangland ploy to attract motorists as targets for random (I’ve used “random”!) assassinations: drive around with your headlamps off, then track down and shoot the first driver that flashes their headlamps at you. For some reason, I thought that turning my headlamps off then on somehow disqualified me from being the recipient of a bullet to the head – I’ve no idea how I came to this conclusion, but there you go. Even more worrying was the fact that nothing corroborated the gangland assassination rumour and, an even more serious symptom of my paranoia was that I was living in Coventry at the time!

Anyway, only complete tossers forget to put their headlamps on while driving at night. However, a really ineffective way of alerting people to their forgetfulness is to flash your headlamps at them as they’re waiting to pull out of a junction that you’re turning in to – they just think that you’re flashing them to go. But anyway, I’d like to express my thanks to the nice Renault Laguna driver who flashed me as I was pulling out of Tesco’s petrol station this evening; I did eventually put my lights on as I got on to the main road. Tit.

Eye-hand coordination
Having just purchased a massive tub of olives from Tesco, I’ve discovered that somebody must’ve switched the garlic-stuffed olives with the plain, unpitted variety somewhere in between me spooning the things out of the bowl and them landing in the tub. How do things like that happen?

Your mind plays tricks on you, don’t trust it.

Getting a new mobile can be a pain when you have to learn new technology and also tell people that you have a new number. It’s so very irritating to have to change your number within 3 months of getting it because you keep getting phonecalls and messages for the last person to have that number. Apparently, no new numbers can be generated, so old ones are recycled – but only after they’ve been out of action for 2 years (allegedly).

Well, if your name is “Sam” and you used to have the number: 07976 938 365, thank you very much! You could’ve told your huge circle of associates (and I’ve heard from most of them) that you’ve changed your number. Thanks very much also to the muppets who want to contact “sexpot” Sam after over two years without being in touch. Dickheads. Thanks also to the mobile networks for providing second hand numbers; perhaps they should wait for a number to be out of use for 5 years before they fob it on to somebody else.

Some advice for our American friends. We British are pretty good at deciphering your odd spelling, grammar and punctuation, but I know for a fact that the Americans are pretty stuck in their ways when it comes to their quaint interpretation of the English language. Not only stuck in their ways, but annoyingly crap with it. So, a “mobile” is what those in the States would insist on calling a “cellphone” or even worse “cell” (dur!).

It’s the fact that they insist on continuing to use their odd spellings and words when in the UK that is rather tiresome. If an American was in France, speaking French, they’d speak French (one would assume). So why then do they speak American when in the UK? They throw in words that we don’t use here, use stupid spellings that make words look ridiculous. Arrogance, that’s what it is.

One of the most annoying things is computer software such as the Microsoft Office applications that always default to American English, no matter how many times you set the default to UK English. A frexample is e-mailing using Microsoft Outlook: you can set the default language to UK English, but as soon as you reply to a message or forward one on, it reverts to US English and changes the spellings of everything – making the author look a complete tosser.


Some may think this “analyzation” a little over the top (seriously, some Americans make up words like this and how they ever managed to sneak a “z” into analyse in the first place is beyond me), but it really does piss me off. It’s bad enough having their crap spelling forced on us in books and webpages, but us lot in the UK and the rest of the English speaking world accept it as them being too stupid to learn how to spell properly. However, when Americans tell us that we’re spelling things incorrectly or using the wrong punctuation because we’re using our own language? That really gets my goat up!

The bastards!

Bitching
This is an old blog, but I found it really very funny. It just shows the anger and hatred that can build up towards somebody who you really do not enjoy living with. The mental torture of whoever wrote this oozes from every paragraph. “I HATE HER, I HATE HER, I HATE HER!” Brilliant.

Actually, I just had to double-check the date on this to make sure it wasn’t from 2001 when I was giving my lodger a hard time (I ignored her for 2 months till she moved out). It’s all well and good having a bitch about somebody in a blog, but you have to remember that they could well be doing the same about you.

We’ve all seen lame serving suggestions on food packaging and in adverts, but I was rather stunned to see what Kwik Save (40 years of low prices!) was suggesting in their latest flyer:

I don’t think I’d be best pleased if somebody offered me a slab of raw beef or a selection of raw pork chops – no matter how much it was dressed up with fresh herbs! Very reasonable prices though, there’s no argument with that. And Christmas was never Christmas without the “Liquor saving Kwik Save” ads on TV.

Next door’s washing is still on the line. Unbelievable. I might go round and tell them that Birds Eye fish fingers and Kwik Save ‘steak’ cut chips are half price this week. It’ll save them eating from McDonalds or the chippy every night. Deep breaths and calm thoughts.

Wigs on fire
As I was drying my hair this afternoon (yes, afernoon, it’s SUNDAY!), I noticed either smoke or steam coming off it. No wonder the smoke alarm’s been going off.

True Romance
My sister has just noticed me writing this post and she asked “Have you got a bloke?”. Eh? Apparently she thought I was writing an e-mail to somebody “special” – well, I could do that, but I might get a court order put on me for stalking. She’s obsessed with finding somebody for me. Jesus help me, I might go and take holy orders. Saying that, I think I’d suit a wimple and I quite like navy. I know most of the words to the Sound of Music too, so I could do well.

Moustaches on women
It’s not attractive, but it’s something that starts to happen in women’s mid twenties. If we’re not careful, we get the full beard to go with it by the time we’re 35 too.