Ahhh, spring is well and truly sprung and all is good in Sniffyland. Well, nearly all is good, but it’s not worth bothering about the crap.

At the zoo
The problem with public places is that they attract members of the public, most of whom are utter shitforbrains, inbred, scumbags. There could’ve been no animals worth mention at the zoo yesterday, but I’d have still be fully entertained by the selection of lowlife that could somehow read a map and operate a car sufficiently to get themselves there.

As usual, the footpaths were overrun with chav mums and dads, pushing the hugest pushchairs, occupied by the ugliest, noisiest screaming little fucking whingebags on the planet. They walk three and four-abreast in order to ensure that they take up the entire width of the footpath; they look surpised and shocked when normal, proper people try to pass them without being forced onto the muddy grass verges. Fucking twats.

I was particularly thrilled when a group of teenagers and their pierced and scriking offspring stopped next to where we having our sarnies in order to smoke loads of fags and be really common.

There were some additional delightful examples of scumbag parenting in the beer garden of the pub where we’d hoped to find sanctuary from the whinging little bastards and their horrible parents (perhaps “breeders” is a more appropriate word).

Never mind, it was a lovely day out with Bomb and my girl-friend (makes me smile and go a bit funny to think about it).

What is there not to smile about?

Things I learned there:

• Bat poo is green and it gets everwhere
• You can get married at the zoo
• Termites are brilliant!

• Chimps are great

• Penguins are impossible to photograph underwater

• Lions are very lazy, as are jaguars

• Elephants seem quite happy

• Tigers get really annoyed with little kids who stand and growl at them

• Red pandas are smaller than I expected them to be and they never stop washing themselves

• There shouldn’t really be any zoos, animals should be left to live in their own natural environments. Unfortunately, if we did that, there’d be none of them left.

All in all, I had a lovely day out.

St George’s Day
It’s St George’s Day today – he’s the patron saint of England. Legend has it that George slayed a dragon or something. Anyway, to all you lot flying flags of St George and wearing roses, English flag deeley-boppers, England tops and shit? You look fucking ridiculous!

The English aren’t like the Scots, Irish and the Welsh, we don’t need to be all nationalistic like them, but this St George’s Day business is creeping in because of a perceived favouritism towards the smaller nations of the UK by the Scottish-dominated government.

Anyway, they were out in droves in Manchester as me and Jo had a wander about this afternoon. Nobheads.

It was sunny in town today. The sun makes you feel funny and you do stuff that perhaps you wouldn’t do normally. You end up finding yourself taking photos of the city…

I’ve decided that I love Base 2a again! After the despair of the firewall being reset and losing both Firefox AND Blogger access on the same day, today I find that they have come back to me. So here I am with a big fat YAY!

Things are looking up for Sniffy: I got my new phone yesterday and it looks OK – quite dinky, lots of features. Fair enough, it’s a bit toy-like and not as sturdy as some Nokias I’ve had, but IT’S A NOKIA and it means that I can finally get rid of the shiting awful Samsung.

Of course, when you get a new phone, you have to do all sorts of things like transfer your contacts from your old phone, change the settings so that it doesn’t default to Nokia Tune for the ringtone, that sort of thing. But this is usually a nice activity; it is essentially playtime with your new toy and you spend a bit of time messing about and having a few “Oooooh, look at that!” moments.

Of course my enjoyment was stopped dead in its tracks because I was dealing with the Samsung. But why? Well, there’s a slight problem in that you can’t copy the contacts from the phone to the SIM memory – an activity that would allow the transfer of contacts to the new phone by copying the SIM contacts to the new phone’s memory.

It just doesn’t allow it…

…..at all….

……under any circumstances.

I even tried screaming at it and it still wouldn’t do it. So what do you do instead?
You have to bluetooth each individual contact. I’ve just spent the last hour doing this. I am now well fucked off.

Fucking

Pile

of

SHITE

Lesson learnt: stick to Nokia. No doubt the new one will piss me off too, and ergonomically, the Samsung is nicer, but it is a shite to use and I can’t wait to be exorcised of it.

One good thing about the Samsung was the way the predictive text always gave you “bomb” when you keyed in “anna”.

Other stuff: going to the zoo
This time of year marks the start of Sniffy’s days out and I’m kicking off with the Zoo on Saturday. CAN’T WAIT!!!! Bomb is coming with me and my lovely love interest. They’ll be meeting for the first time. Love interest has already said how much she likes Bomb. Bomb may get left in the tiger enclosure if there’s any trouble.

Traffic
Even I am alarmed by my use of foul language when when people piss me off while I’m stuck in traffic. But not many of my outbursts actually make sense. It’d be quite good fun to ask foreign students of English to translate what I say. It’d be quite good fun to ask English-speaking people* to translate what I say because I haven’t got a friggin’ clue! All I know is that my mind goes sort of blank and I reach the end of my journey with a sore throat.

*I wonder if Vauxhall drivers know what is meant by: “USE YOUR FUCKING INDICATORS!” They’re all tossers**.

**There are some exceptions, but not many.

Typing
I don’t like listening to other people as they type, it irritates me. The worst type of typist is the type who really hammers the keys. Does my bloody head in, so it does. But what makes things even worse is when people wear bangles that bang on the desk as the hammer away at the keyboard. There is simply no need for this.

I’m loving my new phone. I will never forsake Nokia for another ever again!

Congratulations!
Many congratulations to Tom Cruise for his blatant abuse of his wife-to-be by his insistence on a crackpot Scientology birth for her (I doubt it’s his) child. Stupid fucker needs his head testing and she’s just as bad for having anything to do with the talentless, rat-faced dwarf.

What do you get when you cross a starfish with a hedgehog?

Well, if you’re me, you get agony.

I had a terrible toilet experience yesterday when I tried to pass something hedgehog-sized through my starfish – the fit is not good and I don’t seem to be very flexible in that department. I was left in a cold sweat, gripping the nearby radiator for support.

A truly terrible experience.

Makes you wonder why people are fixated by putting things up their arses that really shouldn’t go up there.

Numpties
Why do people see fit to vandalise things? On a couple of journeys to and from Manchester, I’ve noticed about 3 bus shelters and 2 telephone boxes that have had their glass totally destroyed in mindless acts of violence.

In cases like these Sniffy Justice would decree that the perpetrator would be forced to kick in their own windows, car windscreen and widescreen TV sets. Their mugshots would then be enlarged to poster sized and displayed in the repaired bus shelters.

Dickheads.

I’m not sure why this bothers me because I wouldn’t be seen dead near a bus shelter or in a phone box, but it just really gets my goat up.

I hate my colleague: part the millionth
I have this colleague who I hate, I won’t go into all the reasons why, but I just do. Readers of this blog will know that I am a well-balanced individual and that I don’t take a dislike to things easily, so you’ll agree that this person must be a complete cunt to have gotten me into this state.

She’s started to do this thing whereby she’ll do a “reply to all” to any e-mail that gets sent to all members of the team. It’s her way of doing a “me Miss, I know, this is what I’m going to do” suck up thing. I could slap her for it.

Today’s was regarding some national shite conference. An e-mail had gone around from our line manager to ask if anybody was going and colleague did a reply to all that stated: “Yes, I’ve already booked on, sent the study leave form and payment request off in January and had confirmation of booking – must have been keen!”

Yes, she must’ve been keen, but must she also be a prize fucking arsehole, suck-up, shitbag TIT?

E-mails get sent round for all sorts of things, she knows we all get them, but she sends them round to all of us again, just for good measure. Tis getting right on my tits.

Wanker.

Tomorrow

For the past six months, my motoring enjoyment has been ruined by a sticky accelerator cable. Everytime I change gear, the accelerator sticks, so I have to press really hard and over-rev the fucking thing and it jumps forward and it makes it seem that I don’t know how to drive.

Tis REALLY pissing me off! Here I am, trying to drive somebody special around and trying to look at least a little bit cool and there you are, kangarooing the car and revving it like a bastard.

Driving in queueing traffic is ever such a lot of fun too.

MUST GET IT SORTED

Easter egg day
Easter egg day was nice.

• Easter egg count = 4
• Arguments with family members = 0
• Weird men in Ford Mondeos = 0
• Fuckin’ delish lasagne = 1
• Italian Easter cake = 2 portions
• Outlaws introduced to = 4 (plus dog)
• Time spent with lovely Jo = not nearly enough

Fuck, I’m getting a bit soft. I need to lock myself in my room and generate some bile to spew out to the world.

Tell you what, people out shopping are right nobheads. They just wander around, really slowly in front of you while you’re trying to get passed (past) them, then when you make your move to overtake, they switch directions and block your path. It’s like they have an inner eye that knows the exact moment when you’re about to try to pass them and the move out to stop you. I think they are really alien species, and their commanders are the ones who push prams. Their mission is to floor people by just stopping without warning, or to separate couples with a clever turn and stop. They work in pairs in a pincer action to make it impossible to back track, go round them and catch up with the person you’re walking with.

Tossers.

Where’s my cattle prod?

This is good…

More and more, it seems that people are relying on technology instead of wit to get them from A to B. There appears to be a boom in the sales of in-car satellite navigation systems as folk toss away their road atlases and A to Zs in favour of electronic directions. Personally, I don’t see much wrong with using a road atlas and taking a look at where you are, looking at where you want to be and then making a note of the roads that join the two. Online routeplanners do pretty much the same thing for you.

But I suppose you can see the advantages of sat nav (especially if you’re stupid); it must be nice having an electronic voice telling you where to turn and the like. I might jump on the bandwagon and introduce….

Sniffynav
“Go straight ahead for a bit; oooh watch out for that car; turn left at the roundabout – indicate you fucking dick-brained tosser! Jezusss, what is it with this fucking morons? Where were we? Oh, you missed the turn! Can’t you read a road sign, dickhead? People like you shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Shitforbrains.”

Of course, satellite navigation doesn’t always help. I was following some shit car earlier and as I came alongside it at the traffic lights, I noticed that it had some sort of Tom Tom go thing on the dashboard. I instantly scoffed at the thought of wanting to drive a car like that anywhere since I’d be embarrassed to take it out of the garage. When the lights turned to green, we set off. Checking my rear view mirror, I noticed the super-guided vehicle swerve across a couple of lanes at the last minute. Tosser. Just because you’ve got a frigging toy telling you where to go, it doesn’t mean that can’t take your eyes off the road.

My journey to work yesterday was delayed because of an accident on the motorway. I don’t understand how this can happen when everybody is driving in the same direction. I suppose there’s quite a speed variable, but fucking hell, if you can’t keep your eyes open and leave a decent gap, then you shouldn’t be driving. I bet the crash was caused by somebody being told to swerve across 3 lanes of the motorway by their Sat Nav.

Hot cross bun day
Today is the wonderful Christian celebration of Hot Cross Bun Day. This is where we celebrate nearing the end of Lent by getting our stomachs used to food again in readiness for Easter Egg Day on Sunday.

Talking of eating. There’s something a bit odd about crunchin on cup-a-soup croutons when you’re listening to music through earphones. Like little explosions in your head.

Weirdo freak man
He’s there again. I’m starting to get paranoid.

Do you ever want to scream out at your colleagues and tell them to shut the fuck up? There are standard topics of conversation that have them engrossed for weeks on end, at least for a morning.

This morning, my journey to Base 2a was delayed due to an accident on the motorway. I got there about half an hour late, tutted to colleague 1: “Motorway accident. Late. Tsk” and this kicked off an entire morning of whinging about their delayed journey home the previous evening because of an accident. Jesus.

But I suppose this made a difference from:

1. Agenda for change (national pay restructuring programme and monumental cock up)
2. Base 2a being under threat from Base 2b
3. A particular woman at Base 2b being a twat
4. Everybody else being in the wrong
5. What’s for lunch at the canteen
6. What’s on offer at Aldi

They’ve been having the same rants for the past 2 years. It’s getting a bit tiresome now. This sort of thing is why people run into work with automatic weapons and gun people down at their desks while they pore over the latest edition of the local newspaper, biscuit stuffed in yabbering mouth.

One thing about the sunshine is when you’re trying to walk along and it’s in your face. You can sense an oncoming presence, akin to aliens leaving a spaceship, but all you get is a bit of silhouette, lots of bright light and a blinding headache. You don’t get to see people’s facial expressions and so you don’t benefit from clues as to which way they’ll step to try to avoid you. At the same time, your own face has the expression of a champion gurner: eyes and mouth screwed up. You’d think the oncoming hoards would try to avoid you, but instead they head straight in your direction, then tut when you won’t jump into the road to avoid them.

Fuckers.

I wish I could talk to people. I find it so uncomfortable discussing things that are bugging me, so they just get left and end up all twisted and sour. Then the things that are bugging me get blurted out when I write here instead.

Humph.

The sunshine of your life is supposed to be a person or a thing that lights up your existence, makes your life worth living. The sunshine of my life is that really bright and low bastard that gets me right in the face on the journey to and from work each day at this time of year. It’s a killer.

That weirdo freak man has been back again. That’s twice since the night time shots the other week.

Here he was today when I got home from work:

If you look at him in close up, it looks like he’s got a prosthetic nose. Fucking weirdo. I’m going to ask him what he’s up to next time I see him.

Crisis
I’m having a bit of a one at the moment. It’s sort of nice, but v stressful too. Families are weird, I never know how to talk to mine… They just shout at everything.

I fucking wish.

The weather has been bloody terrible here for the last God only knows how long. We’re currently suffering chronic “sunshine and showers” and the temperature is firmly stuck below 10°C. This means that you can’t dress for the weather. It’s better to stay indoors as much as possible.

Snot
I’ve got a cold. Having not had one for some time, I’d forgotten how thoroughly miserable they can make a person feel. This isn’t even a bad one: it started on Thursday evening with an overwhelming fatigue and soreness on the left side of my throat. This moved fairly rapidly into the left hand side of my sinuses, which became blocked immediately. After an uncomfortable night’s sleep, or lack of it, I didn’t feel fit to travel the 30 miles to work, so took a sickie and went back to bed. I’m sure most of feeling ill associated with having a cold is down to lack of sleep more than anything.

By Friday night, I’d lost half of my bodily fluid through my nose. This was compounded by having a rather hot curry at an Indian restaurant.

Status report, Sunday 9th April, 19.07 hrs: glands up; cough started; nose still congested; throat not bad; feeling exquisitely giddy about starting seeing somebody utterly lovely.

Calvin and Hobbes
My Calvin and Hobbes collection came. This is a work of absolute beauty and I’m about to take to my bed to start working through them.

Why do wagons and vans have audible reversing warnings? What difference does it make whether a vehicle is reversing or going forwards? Surely they can go faster going forwards and you’d have even less chance of getting out of the way if the thing came hurtling at you!

“Warning, this very heavy and big vehicle is coming at you REALLY FAST!”

And why don’t cars have audible reversing warnings?

I like motor vehicle associated warnings, hazard lights are my absolute favourite. On the motorway yesterday, the traffic came to a sudden stand still after a minor bump further ahead. I was travelling in the outside lane and noticed that the traffic up ahead had stopped, so I stopped accordingly, well over 100 feet from the car in front of me. After I’d stopped, the stationary car in front of me put its hazard lights on – or should I say, the dickhead tosspot driver of the car in front thought it was a good idea to put their hazard lights on to warn me that they’d stopped, despite the fact that I’d clearly stopped about 100 feet behind them.

Why? Why do they do it? It’s things like this that make me want to make the most of the runway I’d generated for myself and see how much speed I can build up before smashing into the back of the sorry little shits. Hoo wud win hout have a one tonne of big Nissan and a Vauxhall Corsa?

Dickheads.

Happy weekend (esp for Whinger)

Has she been arrested?

Nope!

Has she got a new job?

Nope!

Has she got a new cat?

Nope!

Has she been flirting with somebody new in her life??????

So yes, I’ve enjoyed a couple of social outings and have been slightly engaged with other stuff at other times. It’s quite nice, isn’t it?

Tap dancing: the return
In the tap dancing post, the fundemental thing that I forgot to mention – and thanks Jamie for reminding me – were those fucking annoying and utterly STUPID taps that you press down and they deliver water for a specified amount of time. Usually just enough time to get your hands one third rinsed and 100% scalded on the hottest water imaginable. Useless shite.

I hate my phone so much that I’m getting depressed
To those of you thinking of getting a new mobile phone (“cellphone”), a few words of advice:

Under no circumstances get a Samsung – EVER! Mine almost got thrown out of my car window as I was driving over the big motorway bridge this morning. It is the biggest pile of technological wank I have ever experienced in my entire life. I would gladly swap it for the first phone I ever had ten years ago; at least I didn’t expect anything much from that one .

For the past week or so, I have been receiving and sending a fair few text messages and yesterday, I discovered that my phone had decided to forget all the custom swear words that I’d taught it. Why? Why would it do such a thing? I use predictive text input, and it’s bad enough that you can’t go back and correct a word without deleting it and re-entering it, but to randomly lose the entire custom dictionary??? What the fuck is that all about?

This morning’s phonecall to Trillion was constantly interrupted by the fucking useless pile of shite constantly disconnecting the headset. WHY????? It’s not even got voice activated dialing, so you have to fart around, pressing buttons on the headset (if it’s talking to it) to get to make a call. I HATE IT!

The fourteenth of April 2006 is going to be a glorious day for me. On this day, I’ll have endured this thing for six months and the upgrade penalty will be reduced from £150. I can’t wait to get rid of the fucking thing and once I get my new one, I’m going to smash this thing up with a hammer and show the photos on this very blog.

Your days are numbered, Samsung!