Overtaking
Posted: Fri 7 September, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, Driving, Travel, Weirdness 3 Comments »Over the last few weeks, as I’ve said before, I’ve been doing a lot of driving – commuting between home and Cambridge, roughly 110 miles per day. In that time I’ve also seen a huge dollop of bad driving. I’m not saying I’m a perfect driver – Gawd knows, I’ve made enough mistakes as well in that time. But there’s a couple of things that drive me mental every time I see them, and they both involve overtaking. Just for reference, this is usually done on motorways and dual-carriageways, rather than single-carriageway roads.
First, I don’t get the entire thing of starting an overtaking manoeuvre and then indicating. It drives me potty. OK, it’s slightly better than the tosspot BMW drivers who all appear to have their indicators turned off by default.
Second – and this is the big one – is the people who pull out to overtake, and then either stick at 5mph above whatever vehicle they’re overtaking (and so take forever to do it) or even worse, slow down! Why? What’s the fucking point? Well, except for being the sort of selfish festering bell-end who enjoys blocking up lanes and screwing things up for other road-users, of course.
Slack Service
Posted: Thu 6 September, 2007 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Weirdness 2 Comments »One thing that’s beginning to get annoying about living here in Norfolk is the way so many of the inhabitants seem to be utterly incapable of simple tasks like replying to emails, or picking up a phone.
Recently I’ve been trying to talk to the local bike shop about getting a service for the bike I bought a couple of years ago. I’ve slacked off on this, but I do want to get back into using it, but before I can do so, it needs a good service. So I’ve been trying to get hold of the CycleLife shop in Attleborough to get them to service the poxy bloody thing. Do they answer the phone? Do they bollocks. Do they reply to messages on the answerphone? Do they bollocks. In short, they’re a bunch of tossers.
We’ve also been trying to get some response out of the poxy plumber, who we’ve asked to do some work. I’ve called him three times, and emailed him twice. Herself has called him two or three times. And so far? No response at all.
I don’t know if it’s just people being rude, or if they’re too busy to take on new work, or if they’re just tosspots. What I do know is that it’s incredibly bloody annoying.
Bizarre
Posted: Mon 3 September, 2007 Filed under: D4D™, Weirdness 1 Comment »I’ve got a post on this site where I was writing about my old hosting company, Easyspace, and their slack-arse technical support team. Fair enough. It was written back in November 2002 – so about four and a half years ago, now.
And today, I’ve had two comments on that one post. Maybe it’s being linked to from somewhere. It just seems bizarre to be getting comments on a post that old that don’t appear to be from spammers…
Grass Cutting
Posted: Thu 30 August, 2007 Filed under: Weirdness Leave a comment »It seems like last weekend was grass-cutting time in the village where we live. And yes, we did ours too – it’s just that it wasn’t part of any planned activity.
But over the last two evenings while out walking Hound, I’ve noticed that the grass has been cut in a whole range of locations around the village – not just the gardens, but also the edges to the fields where we walk Hound, in front of the duck pond, the area around the main crossroads, it’s all been cut.
Most bizarre.
Spammers
Posted: Thu 16 August, 2007 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Weirdness 3 Comments »This morning, I opened up my email to discover over a thousand returned emails to my business domain name. Ah, not good.
Turns out, some darling spammer had decided to use my domain name as the ‘from’ address. It’s not the first time it’s happened (although that one was from the old D4D™ email address) and they’ve all been deleted now – along with a change to the server settings to stop me seeing them again – but there’s very little else I can do about it, unfortunately. It’s just one of those things.
Mind you, the bit that did amuse me was that I also received one of those spam emails to my normal email address.
Historical
Posted: Wed 15 August, 2007 Filed under: D4D™, Weirdness Leave a comment »Yesterday, I did a search – yes, OK, I was bored – for Lyle D4D in Google, just to see what came up. And wow, there’s a lot of stuff in there. Not all of it connects to yours truly, of course, but at the same time there’s also one hell of a lot that does – including some bits I’d forgotten.
For instance, there was all the kerfuffle when Wileys made me change the site name from “Destruction for Dummies” for legal reasons (Sadly, the initial takedown notice disappeared when I moved away from Haloscan comments – another long time ago, now)
But among the bits I’d forgotten was the “How to Swear” post that I guest-wrote over on Uborka back in June 2004. And I have to say, I’ve thorough enjoyed re-reading that one!