Nottingham Snow
Posted: Mon 2 February, 2009 Filed under: Advertising, Charm School, Cynicism Leave a comment »(via Mike TD)
Yet again, Nottingham shows its class in the snow. (Screengrab from the market square webcam)
Changing Passwords
Posted: Tue 13 January, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Geeky, Sweary 2 Comments »When faced with passwords that needs to be changed on a regular basis, one thing I always seem to forget is the relevance of timing.
After all, you don’t have to change it as soon as the stupid little dialogue box comes up to tell you to change it. At that point, you’ve still got (usually) a week or two to change it before everything goes tits-up.
So I need to remember that whatever else happens, don’t change it on a bloody Friday. Because then I bugger off for the weekend, and come Monday morning I don’t have a single bloody clue what I changed the frigging thing to. It usually takes about ten attempts to remember what the hell it was. Sometimes it also depends on what my mood was like when I changed it, which can have a knock-on effect in whether the password is sweary (which results in passwords like ‘cuntflaps’) or not.(resulting in words like ‘prestidigitate’) Both of those have been passwords in the past, by the way – but they’re not the current ones. (obviously)
I did remember it in the end (for once it was a non-sweary one) but it’s something I really need to learn to remember…
Chargeable
Posted: Tue 30 December, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts 1 Comment »How come people who call 999 for stupid reasons like these don’t get charged with wasting police time?
One would hope that having the threat of actually being charged and getting a criminal record for excessive fuckwittery might actually be some kind of incentive to these bell-ends to think before dialling.
Over recent times, I have actually called the police (or emergency services) three times
- One was for an accident that we’d just driven past, and that was obviously extremely recent. For that, I used 999
- One was to check whether I needed to report an accident involving a deer – I know some car accidents involving animals need reporting, I didn’t know whether deer were one of those. (They’re not). For that, I used the non-emergency number.
- The final one was to report the overnight theft of a neighbour’s stone horse-head wall statue things. Neighbour was away, we’d seen/heard nothing ’til the morning. Guess which number I used? Yep – non-emergency again.
I simply can’t imagine calling 999 because a pizza company has put the wrong toppings on my pizza, or to ask about shop opening times. I assume that some people are so self-centred that anything they need to do is “an emergency” so they use an emergency number. Bell-ends, the lot of ’em.
Open Letter
Posted: Thu 18 December, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Cynicism, Thoughts 3 Comments »To the gobby Australian at the Tracy Chapman concert on Monday night:
Look, in all honesty I just don’t care about how you feel so hard done by for having to work a late shift on your birthday, and an early the morning after. I particularly don’t care upon your fourth repetition of the same information. Equally, I don’t give a damn about whether you think that an accountant would be someone good to marry, “because they’ve got a boring job”. (Note, I don’t understand the logic of it either, but I’m working on not thinking about the idiot antipodean bint’s inanity)
As for your abysmal punctuation skills, I’m hard pressed as to be more gobsmacked at the fact you were quite happy for the entire back row of the Hammersmith Apollo to know you were that easy, or the fact that you can’t spell/punctuate, and thus don’t know whether you’ve upset your one-night paramour. The fact that he “thanked you for last night” by text message, along with a desire for a re-match post-Festering-Season was enough for me, regardless of your response of “No thank you”, when you meant “No, thank you!”. No-one cared that you were a) an idiot, and b) a slapper, but you still felt the need to broadcast both pieces of information at great volume.
We all noticed how hard-done by you are to not be able to return to Australia four times a year, the way your (obviously much more highly-paid) sister can, and yet not one person managed to summon up any sympathy. Hell, even the friends you were shouting at talking to didn’t care enough to do anything except let you carry on making yourself look like a shallow twat.
However, I suspect that I wasn’t the only one who found the irony amusing of your tale of your neighbour having been taken ill and the ward nurse telling you she couldn’t give information about a patient’s medical status as you a) weren’t family and b) it was unethical to divulge medical details – only to then tell everyone in earshot about how he’d had some kind of liver failure, and was on 15-minute observations, along with a large amount more information I can’t be arsed to recall right now. I assume you got the information through your work as a nurse – I think it was at Barts, but you mentioned so many hospitals where friends worked, I lost the ability to care or recall which was which – but to then be busy broadcasting it again in a public venue, well, it almost made me wish your supervisors were there too.
As it happened, some people were trying to hear the support act – not your Australian foghorn. No-one else cared about your life – much as you didn’t appear to care about anything resembling privacy, consideration, or any concept of “unsuitable conversations for a public space”.
In short, shut up and fuck off. No-one cares.