Blue and Brown's Page of Rage

Idiots trying to explain something they don't understand

2006-10-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Particularly when they think that they DO understand.

You have a query about something. You ask an idiot. Not deliberately. Let's say this idiot holds a position of authority. Maybe they work on a helpdesk. The idiot gives you the worst explanation you've ever heard in your life. It's garbled, ill-informed and contradictory. They look at you with pity and say something like: "I don't know how else to explain it. You're just not getting it, are you?"

Of course not. For one thing you've answered an entirely different question to the one I asked. One that you wanted or expected me to ask. You didn't bother listening to what I was actually saying. This was probably because you don't actually know what you're talking about and have just one set answer for any query directed your way. Please put your head in that drawer and repeatedly close it on your neck until the welt glows like a beacon.

Pop/rock stars telling us about how meaningless modern life is

2006-09-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

We know. We know because we have to live that life. We know that people aren't meant to spend their time working in cubicles because we get 40 hours a week in which to think about it. We know that we're just slaving away to earn money. Of course we are. We have to get the money to buy your records somehow.

If you're going to muse about how miserable modern life is, at least have the decency to lead as miserable an existence as the rest of us. Otherwise it just comes off as boasting.

Skinny kids who are really tentative at eating

2006-09-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

Who takes a bite out of a crisp? Eat the thing. It's not that big. Stupid scared-looking skinny bastards thinking about where to bite into a sandwich next; picking at it and staring at it intently. Eat it!

Some people look like they've never eaten before in their lives. You have to do it every day, you retards. You're biting into a burger. You're actually eating an animal's flesh. Put your fucking back into it. Show some gusto. Show some intent. You don't have to bite off so much that you choke. Just look like you're enjoying yourself. Just look like you're hungry, at least. You are, aren't you?

We should just rip food out of tentative people's hands, knock them to the floor and then devour whatever it was they were toying with, while pinning them down with a foot to their throat. That's how you eat. That's how you have to eat or you'll die out.

Bush isn't like that - I just couldn't find a suitable photo.

Everyone having loads of money

2006-09-01T00:53:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or is everyone minted these days? Maybe it's because I have less money than I used to.

"Andrew and Jemima have a budget of £400,000".

Why? Where did they get it from? They're only thirty? What have they been doing with their lives?

"Unfortunately, Andrew and Jemima have gone £80,000 over budget".

How? What the fuck's a budget if you can go over it by that much? £80,000 is a staggering amount of money. You can't 'find' £80,000. The only way you can get £80,000 is by killing your wife or husband and duping Columbo, yet they're both standing there, so they can't have done that.

But everyone's like that these days. Everyone's swanning around going: 'Oh. It was only a hundred quid'. A hundred quid's loads. Did I miss something? When did a hundred quid become not much? The danger is that all these people for whom a hundred quid's nothing will start paying that much for a drink in the pub. Then where will we be? We'll be sat in the gutter smoking crack - that's where. Or we would be if we could afford crack. All the money-people will be dropping wads of cash for us crack addicts and it'll drive the price up. Bastards.

The problem is to do with percentages. Let's say I earn a pound a day and Mr Fin-Haircut earns a hundred pounds a day. This is an exaggeration, but you'll get my point. Now we both get a pay rise. Hurray. We each get a 10% pay rise. Now I earn £1.10 a day and Mr Fin-Haircut earns £110.

Let's say the same happens again. Now I earn £1.21 a day and Mr Fin-Haircut earns £121. And again. Me: £1.33. Mr Fin-Haircut: £133. In the course of a year, I've gone from earning £260 to £345.80. Not bad - an extra £85.80. Mr Fin-Haircut, however, now earns £8,580 more than he did before. More importantly, he used to earn £25,740 more than me and now he earns £34,234.20 more than me and the average wage has gone from about £13,000 to £17,000 and I've slipped further and further behind. It carries on like that until I die surrounded by rats and he dies surrounded by gold-digging hangers-on.

Basically everyone's earning more and more and more and I'm pissed off about it because I lost my job. Okay? Fine? I'll feel a bit better once I publish this, even if the previous two paragraphs are competely wank. The rich are getting richer. The end.

Early Christmas displays

2006-08-08T01:12:00.000-07:00

It's August the eighth. Apparently Harrod's have brought out a Christmas display in order to steal a march on Selfridges whose display will appear the day after tomorrow.

Christmas, people, is one day in the year. You can't look that far ahead. It doesn't warrant that level of attention.

It's. One. Fucking. Day.

Obviously there's a degree of preparation required, but is Christmas Day really so much more important than the 150 days that precede it? Is it? Why is it so much more important that you're happy on that one day than any other? And will you be?

Surely nobody's happy about this. If we set fire to every Christmas display from now until December, then the marketing men will learn. It's a midwinter festival. That's what all the lights are about. Whether it's Christian, Pagan or whatever in origin, it's a winter thing. You can't start it in summer.

E-mail three

2006-07-25T05:08:00.000-07:00

I decided that I should start asking direct questions in the hope of a response.

ME:

I had two interviews in the middle of last week. As I currently work through an agency I am not entitled to time off work for interviews, so I had to take a day's holiday. This is fair enough, albeit a tad galling. However, I do hold the company responsible for taking up some of my time prior to the interviews.

Firstly, I had to have a shave. This is not something I would ordinarily do.

Secondly, due to the 'bolt from the blue' nature of my redundancy, I was not adequately prepared. I have recently moved house and my suit was at the back of a room that was floor to ceiling with furniture etc. It took me a full hour to recover it.

Can I invoice you for one hour's unexpected suit retrieval?

HE:

Unfortunately not.

ME:

How crushingly disappointing. It's just one thing after another with you.

How about you could pay me unofficially. Like you could turn a blind eye while I steal one-hour's-work's-worth of cardboard boxes or something. Maybe some batteries. No, not batteries. I don't want those. I don't know. You think of something.

HE:

Perhaps we should have a chat.

How does 09:30 sound tomorrow?

ME:

I thought it was only a legal requirement for members of staff to have the weekly 'chat' prior to redundancy? Ie, not agency staff.

HE:

Doesn't preclude us from having a chat.

[At this point I politely declined on the grounds that we had nothing to sort out.]

E-mail two - the day after

2006-07-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

ME:

My mate suggested I come in this morning and say to you: "Actually, I'm going to make YOU redundant. How do you like them apples?"

Unfortunately, this is flawed on two counts.

1: I have never wielded sufficient power to decide on the fate of a worker. There was one time when I pointed out to a superior that a co-worker was 'maybe a bit racist', but this merely confirmed said employee's fate. The decision had effectively already been taken.

2: Even if we did follow some idealised, non-hierarchical, egalitarian business model, you still got in first. I was too slow off the mark.

The first point's the clincher, really.

HE:

Interesting comments. Is there something you would like to discuss?

ME:

I'm merely concerned that the aforementioned employee who was 'a bit racist' has a head start on me in the job market.

In a fairer world I'd be dicing swedes (lower-case 's' - I've nothing against Scandinavians) at Morrison's already and he'd be training his replacements.

I don't know why I described him as 'a bit racist' - he was advocating genocide one day.

HE:

[No response]

E-mail one - the day it happened

2006-07-19T00:53:00.000-07:00

This was the first e-mail. You read from the top downwards. These will all be real by the way.

HE:

All,

Please find attached a Company announcement.

ME:

Lower-case 'c' for 'company'.

Any jobs for proofreaders going?

...No?

HE:

[No response]

The redundancy e-mails

2006-07-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

I've been made redundant. I didn't like my job, but it's still not very pleasant. The worst part is that they rob you of the opportunity to say:

"Yeah, well you can take your job and stuff it right up your arse."

I worked for the company for five years, but never had any kind of contract (not through lack of trying). The upshot is that I don't get any form of pay-off. The axe-wielder is also hoping that I will be professional enough to do my job for the next four weeks and also train the company to whom my job is being 'outsourced'. Hilarious. Unlikely.

So what do you do? Well if you're me and you're petty-minded and also not that bothered about being branded 'immature', you write weird e-mails to the person who made you redundant and publish them on the internet.

E-mail one
E-mail two
E-mail three

Helpdesks

2006-07-03T12:50:00.000-07:00

Any helpdesk. Any helpdesk at all. They’re all as equally shite as each other. Not helpdesks that have been moved abroad – if anything they’re better, because at least the staff aren’t complete morons. All helpdesks. Every last one.

You phone. You’re in a queue. Nothing’s getting done. You’re getting charged for the privilege. One day someone will answer. This helpdesk operator will be responsible for fielding such a wide range of queries that they aren’t even a Jack of all trades, they aspire to being a Jack of any trade whatsoever. They are an incompetent of all trades and they’re just about to prove it to you.

Any query remotely out of the helpdesk operator’s sphere of familiarity will be perplexing. They’ll put you through to someone totally inappropriate who, in turn, will put you back to the start of the helpdesk queue.

Every helpdesk operator has to put up with a million people as annoyed as you every single day. As a result, they’re sick of taking shit off people and are incredibly short-tempered and unhelpful. These are not the kind of staff that you would like on a helpdesk.

Finally, on about the second or third attempt, you will get through to a helpdesk operator who has withstood the pressures of the job for more than a month and they will solve your problem, reimbursing you the £5 that you are owed or whatever. It will have cost you £10 to get this done.

In future, you vow never to try and reclaim such sums of money as it ends up costing you. The business served by the helpdesk can therefore routinely overcharge you, safe in the knowledge that they’re immune to your complaints.

You could tell a newspaper how laughably shit the company are, but there’s so much competition in this field. Nope. There’s only one solution and it’s clearly a dirty protest round at head office. The dirty protest is much underutilised these days.

Buildings being described as ‘properties’

2006-07-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

It’s a house. It’s a house. It’s a house. It’s a house.

Okay, so sometimes it’s not a house, maybe it’s a flat, or a villa or an apartment, or a condominium or a barn, or a shed, or a shack, or a mansion. But if you’re standing in it, you know what it is. Call it by its real name. Don’t call it a ‘property’.

The Nivea Q10 Advert

2006-06-19T01:16:00.000-07:00

I think it's the Nivea Q10 advert anyway. They've probably stopped showing it anyway.

Basically, they ask some women what they use to keep their skin soft. They ask a pair of women first of all. One woman, who seems a little bit French, answers fairly sensibly. Then so does the other one. Then the first one screams at the top of her voice. I think she says 'la belle amour' or something like that. That's not the point though. The point is how loudly and inappropriately she screams. Why? Why does she do this?

I spent so long trying to work out why she did this that I've kind of started to like her. When she first appears and answers the quesion like a normal person, I can maintain that opinion. Then when she screams like a harridan, I just want to punch her lights out. I really do. Stop being so mental, you demented banshee.

After that they ask a couple more women the same question, neither of whom are particularly obnoxious. Then you get an answer to the question 'what do you use to keep your skin soft?' from this woman in a jewellers. She's holding a diamond in a pair of pincers. She says. And I quote: "Diamon."

That's not a typo. She doesn't pronounce the 'd'. I've watched the advert a hundred times. It's not a soft 'd' or a particularly quiet one or anything. She just doesn't say it. She says 'diamon'.

Two tremendously annoying people operating independently in entirely different annoying ways in one advert: It's face cream marketing gone mad.

KPIs

2006-04-27T03:29:00.000-07:00

Key Performance Indicators, of course. The idea is that you can measure an employee's worth through one particular aspect of their job. Whether that aspect of their job takes up all their time or just a fraction of it, all decisions about this employee should be based on this one figure. Most pertinently, their salary. They may do twenty things well, but if they do this KEY aspect of their job wrong they'll probably get fired. So what do you do? Well fuck everything else, obviously. Get your KPI right.

Sometimes a KPI might be dependent on something else. No, wait. It's always dependent on something else. It doesn't vary solely according to the performance of the employee, so you can't actually measure a person's worth through it. Here's an example:

Back in the day, over in China, Mao Tse Tsung measured the growth of the economy according to a few Key Performance Indicators, one of which was steel production. The thing with steel production is that it's dependent on how much iron ore you have at your disposal. If you don't have any, you can't make steel. It's not your fault.

However, because this indicator was Key, with an upper-case K, steel mill workers hit upon an ingenious solution. They would simply use old steel as their raw material instead of iron ore. In fact, sometimes it wasn't even that old. Whisper it, but sometimes it was new. They were effectively achieving nothing as they were repeatedly melting down the same metal over and over again, yet their 'production' was through the roof.

This is what happens when you don't trust people to do their jobs and instead keep tabs on them with a flawed system. People are cleverer than you give them credit for and people who devise these monitoring systems are nowhere near as clever as they give themselves credit for.

People Who Sing In An American Accent

2006-04-27T03:03:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this one for a while. It's not specifically an American accent, if we're being pedantic, it's the mid-Atlantic accent as used by Robbie Williams and any of those sickening twat-bags on Pop Idol or the X-Factor or any other carnival of musical shame.

I held off from including this because I noticed that Richard Ashcroft affects this tone when he sings and I'd always quite liked Richard Ashcroft. However, once I realised this I took an immediate dislike to any of his subsequent murmurings, thus proving my own point to myself.

It's an affectation. People adopt it because either they think it makes them sound cool or they think it makes them better singers. It makes them blander singers. The adoption of this accent to seem cool is even more moronic.

When I was about three I thought that being American was cool. That was because at the age of three, children will believe anything you tell them and Americans love to tell the world how cool they are. When I reached the age of four, I saw the folly in this way of thinking and amended my world view accordingly. I was a precocious child.

To me, the subtext of singing in a US accent is that the singer subconsciously (or consciously) wants to be American. This makes them as stupid as a three-year-old and if there's one thing that pisses me off, it's stupid people. People who are so stupid that they don't even know how stupid they are. Sing properly or I'll garrot you with the stars and stripes, you insecure, fawning pile of hair and shite.

Radio Pranksters

2006-04-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Radio pranksters like to upset people. You should always ‘be’ someone when you perform a prank. Then there is less chance that the victim will know that they are being tricked. In fact there should be absolutely no way that the victim can see through your prank. You can’t give them a chance. That would be no fun.

A sample radio prank would be to phone someone up pretending to be their doctor:

Victim (answering phone): Hello?
Prankster: Hello. This is Dr Wood, your doctor. I’m phoning you back about your test results.
Victim: Oh, yes?
Prankster: Unfortunately, I’ve got some bad news.
Victim: Oh dear… Go on.
Prankster: I’m afraid you’re going to die.
Victim: What?
Prankster: You’re going to die. Quite soon by the looks of it.
Victim: …
Prankster: How do you feel?

This is the funny part. The victim actually thinks they’re going to die. They’re actually sitting there coming to terms with their own mortality.

After a suitably hilarious interlude where the victim cries uncontrollably, the prankster reveals the truth. “We got you there, didn’t we? Had you going.”

Yes. Of course you did. The poor bastard didn’t have any reason to disbelieve you. They were expecting test results from the doctor and the doctor phoned with test results. Plus, who in their right minds expects a joke about something like this?

It’s not really that extreme an example. Any radio prankster’s joke is essentially the same thing. It’s a way of saying: “Look at me. Literally my greatest strength is an acute lack of empathy. That’s my defining characteristic. I can’t be clever. I can’t be funny. I don’t have anything to contribute to the world in any way, so instead I offer you the chance to marvel at my inhumanity. Have you any idea how many things I have to be shit at before I resort to this? It’s billions of things. I am shit at just about everything a person can do.”

That’s a picture of radio prankster, Steve Penk. He’s a twat.

Names Of Phones

2006-03-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

Time was, it was just a phone. Now it’s got to be a ZX128, only not that, because that’s a computer from the Eighties. It’s got to be some seemingly random combination of letters and digits anyway.

Has everybody got some sort of operating system installed in place of a brain nowadays? How do they remember the different names? I sometimes get caught near conversations which seem to contain no nouns.

“I’m getting the FD350.”
“No. You don’t want that. You want the DF530. It’s got ‘dinobot’ functionality enabled.”
“The DF530? Are you having a laugh? You’re living in the past.”

The stupid thing is, despite appearing to weigh up technical pros and cons, what the two people in this conversation are actually saying is as follows.

“I’m getting a silver phone.”
“No. Silver looks shit. You should get a black phone.”
“I think black looks shit. I’m getting the silver one.”

I still don’t know how they remember which combination of letters refers to which phone though. I’m going to start talking in binary code to see how they like that.

People who recycle jokes

2006-03-21T10:38:00.000-08:00

There are certain joke standards. I don’t mean that there is a certain level of quality in the world of comedy, I mean that there is a canon of supposedly ‘humorous’ comments known by all. These are jokes that everyone has heard – and quite possibly said – a thousand times over. Nobody finds them funny because they’re so familiar, but still they survive.

Have you ever said: “Who’s strangling a cat?’, or some similar phrase? Have you? HAVE YOU? I bet you have. Well don’t say it again.

For some people this ready-made joke is such a reflex that they find themselves making it even when it isn’t applicable. The point is that someone sounds so bad that they sound like a distressed feline, but for some people any singing at all is an excuse to play the funny man. I’m not a singer and I don’t particularly enjoy my colleagues joining in with the radio, but not everyone sings badly all of the time. You don’t have to make the cat-strangling joke. Just bite your lip. Is everyone going to literally die of laughter? Is anyone going to be even the slightest bit impressed at your witticism?

And if you don’t have sugar in your tea, but someone asks you if you do, for the love of God, don’t say: ‘I’m sweet enough, thanks’. You’re not agreeable enough. Shall I put something in your tea to rectify that? Like arsenic?

You could say that these hackneyed one-liners are a means of social linkage; a way of maintaining communication with those around you and identifying with them. You could say that the underlying meaning is of a shared culture. But that would be to overlook the fact that the clearer message – the message that’s being forced into your ears in the form of tainted air from a halfwit’s lungs – is that this person talks bollocks.

People who drink lager, but don’t like lager

2006-03-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

Are there such people? Yes. This is how you can tell: They like the most tasteless lager available on the market and they like it as cold as is possible without it turning solid.

When something’s that cold, you can’t taste it. It doesn’t taste nicer. It tastes less. When you discard the last of your drink because it’s warm, it’s not because of the temperature – it’s because you don’t like it.

They also say 'give us a head on it' when lager's not supposed to have a head. They complain that their beer's flat if it doesn't have a head.

Of course they can’t drink anything else because the adverts on TV tell them they’ve got the best there is.

Eastenders

2006-03-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

It’s unremittingly miserable and it’s on just about every day as well. Every single character is physically repellent and bad-tempered and nothing nice ever happens to anybody.

Just catching a glimpse of it ruins my entire week. Essentially, everybody in it is trying to make everybody else unhappy in some way. They do this in a variety of ways, sometimes it’s straightforward and obvious, sometimes it’s subtle and devious. Occasionally two or more characters unite in a bid to somehow ruin someone’s life. Their cooperation is usually short-lived as any unified team quickly turns in on itself and tears itself apart from within.

What this programme says to me is that life is miserable now and it is only ever going to get worse and worse and worse. Everyone in the world is untrustworthy and dedicated to the pursuit of sending others into despair.

Sometimes they produce a ‘special’. This is even more awful than an ordinary episode and you will most likely die of a frozen heart by even entertaining the idea of watching it. But watch it some people do, which is just incomprehensible. What could anybody possibly get out of watching increasingly miserable made-up people?

Hard Butter – Soft Bread

2006-03-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

That’s pretty self-explanatory really. Just what do you do? Sometimes I chance my arm. The butter’s kind of softish – it might be okay… No. The bread’s in pieces. I’m losing my temper. I’m stabbing the bread. That doesn’t help. Now there are just lots of small knife-shaped holes in the bread on top of the butter-clogged tear.

People Who Like Chris Moyles

2006-03-14T05:15:00.000-08:00

Not Chris Moyles himself, I’m sort of ambivalent about him these days. He’s like some sort of mystery skin blemish that you’ve got. One that serves no purpose and isn’t particularly pleasant, but you aren’t going to be able to maintain any sort of displeasure towards it, because it’s just not worth it.

What I do hate are people who really like Chris Moyles or ‘Moylesy’ as they usually call him. How do they get so worked up about him? He’s rarely funny, he’s frequently unpleasant. What’s the appeal? Why object to radio station A which plays bland music with a bland DJ, yet actively cajole colleagues to ‘put Moylesy on’?

I think it’s just that people like to go along with everyone else and being as he has a big listenership they worry that they might miss something. They won’t. There’s nothing to miss. Maybe if I smother them with Chris Moyles’ gargantuan, bloated belly they’ll feel satisfied.

Tying shoelaces

2006-02-27T04:04:00.000-08:00

Let's be honest. I tie my shoelaces like a child - like a child with below par motor skills.

When I was a kid nobody showed me how to tie my shoelaces until Matt. Matt was in my year at school and had only just mastered the art himself. The demonstration I received was a ham-fisted rendering, but this is my template. This is what I aspire to. If I tie my shoelaces to the best of my abilities, then it's as good as Matt when he was five. Matt probably got better, but I can never attain such heights being limited by a sub-standard 'ultimate'.

The other day I went to buy some running shoes. I listened intently to all the talk of shoe engineering and joined in gamely. I convinced the assistant that I was a proper runner and a serious athlete. We eventually established the correct shoe for my running style.

Then I had to try them on.

He watched.

Sandwiches that think that they're better than they really are

2006-02-15T05:17:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are starting to think I'm a sandwich fetishist - you're right.

I want the maximum quantity of food for the minimum financial outlay, as I have previously explained. I want cow and spud sandwiches or somesuch. I don't want crab and avocado with balsamic vinaigrette.

Note to sandwich marketing people: Not all posh fillings go together. Sun-dried tomatoes and organic honey are uneasy bedfellows for example. At least pretend to put some thought into your 'luxury' combinations.

Handbags and Gladrags by The Sterephonics

2006-02-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

This is the kind of abject shit I started writing this page for. It's not current, but I've just heard it and it's no less annoying the millionth time you hear it.

Who does it appeal to? What is it trying to do? Just what is it trying to achieve?

It's just miserable. It's virtually identical to the Rod Stewart version too. Why did they cover it? Why didn't they just re-release Rod's version and put their stupid, FHM faces on the cover? Just WHAT were they trying to do? Sorry to keep asking that, but I'm driven crazy by incomprehension. Did they literally have nothing else to do? Could they not have just gone and sat in a park and punched themselves in the face for a while?

So many questions, so little point having answers. We should make their lives as miserable as possible so that they ask 'why all the misery?' instead of us. First I'm going to steal all of their pillows from the tour bus. Take that Stereophonics. Try boring me senseless with really bad cricks in your necks.

People who don't read

2006-02-08T01:29:00.000-08:00

Not people who can't read, you understand. You know where you are with them. No. People who choose not to read. Here is a recent e-mail conversation I had with someone. For argument's sake we'll call him Mike (because that's his name).

Him: You still owe your subscription for this year.

Me: I will write a cheque and leave it behind the bar.

Him (a month later): You still owe for your subscription. It is now a month overdue.

Me: I left a cheque behind the bar. Did you not get it?

Him: Great. Thanks a lot.

Him (another month later): Your subscription is still overdue. It is now two months late.

Me: It is behind the bar. Incidentally, I think that you have incorrect contact information for me. Here is my address and phone number...(and I include this information).

Him: My records show that you have still not paid your subscription for this year. I have tried phoning you, but I think it's the wrong number. Do we have the right contact information for you?

This conversation climaxed with him essentially calling me a liar. How he would know that I was lying when he clearly hadn't read a single thing that I had written is beyond me. Either that or he has some problem transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Mostly it's just a problem with him being a tosser though.

Dermot O'Leary

2006-01-11T01:19:00.000-08:00

I'm sure he used to be all right, but now he's so redolent of a mundane Sunday that it's as if he's actually infused with the essence of misery.

Now where's my wrist knife?

Faulty Tea

2005-12-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

Wow. Look at that: Pictures. Blue and Brown enters the 1990s. There’s no stopping us now. But look a little closer…

At first glance, there is nothing wrong here. It’s the Rhinolast mug, which means it’s my tea. That makes me happy. But what is this? I haven’t drunk any of the tea and already the mug is a third empty. Plus it’s too milky. I hate milky tea. I don’t drink black tea, but overly-milky tea is vile stuff. Warm milk is just too flavoursome. A bit too straight from the teat in a way.

Agh. There’s a sugar in it too. My tea does not have sugar in it. Not even the granules stuck to the wet spoon that you used to make Tommy-Twelve-Sugars’ tea. No sugar at all.

Before you think that I’m overly fussy about tea (heaven forbid), I should make myself clear. My anger is not directed at the tea itself. It is merely a weapon of the true criminal here: The person who asks you how you want your tea and then blatantly ignores you.

I often get asked if I want a cup of tea. I tend to say ‘yes’. I am then asked how I have my tea. I tell them and no, I don’t go into the milk and volume of liquid aspects. I just say: ‘Milk, no sugar.’ Ten minutes later I will get a tea with a sugar in.

I don’t know why this is. I have tried several approaches. I say: ‘Milk, NO sugar.’ I say: ‘JUST milk.’ But all is to no avail. The only sure fire method for getting the brew you want, is to make it yourself and that’s no good.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had conversations with the same people who make me tea every week, where they say: ‘I thought you had sugar.’ No. No, I don’t. I didn’t last week. I didn’t the week before. I never did. The only reason that you think I have sugar is because you’ve now made me tea with a sugar in on forty-five consecutive occasions. Why you started doing this, I don’t know. Why you can’t hear me when we have this EXACT SAME conversation every week is beyond me. Don’t you dare say I’m ‘sweet enough’. Don’t you dare. I will run you through with a teaspoon, you extra-sugar-adding piece of shit.

Being Made To Dance

2005-12-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

Now I’m not one of life’s dancers. I’m one of life’s standers.

When I’m in some sort of social situation where there is music playing, I don’t walk up to people on the dance floor and drag them off, saying: “Come on. Stop being so demented. Come and stand with me. You’ll look less ridiculous”. So why do people do the reverse to me?

I don’t want to dance. If I did, I would be dancing. Furthermore, I would have danced regularly in the past. Have I? No. Why? Because I hate it. What do I hate most of all? Being forced into doing something that I hate.

Dancing is something that you can only pull off if you are relaxed. If you are relaxed, you go along with the music and people don’t really notice that you’re basically just flailing around as if you’re having some sort of fit. You blend in. On the other hand, if you’re feeling a little tense, you stick out like a sore thumb sporting flashing lights on a pedestal. You’ll be the only tense person dancing, because anyone feeling tense won’t be dancing. You will also be aware that you are the only tense person dancing. How will this make you feel?

As a result of this, you will be lucky to remain on your feet. The combination of a full-blown panic attack and the necessity to move in an unconventional manner will ordinarily cause you to fall, so factor in a few balancing manoeuvres and you start looking monumentally stupid. At this point, the sadist who dragged you onto the dance floor will say: “See. This is fun, isn’t it?”. They will usually only escape by dint of the fact that your mind will be fried by the conflicting emotions of panic, desire to eat their internal organs and the urge to break down and weep.

Never dance. It sets a precedent.

Having Danced

2005-12-08T12:03:00.000-08:00

There is no way of describing the disgusting feeling that comes of having danced the night before.

Try as you might, it is impossible to take your mind of it. You dwell on every little detail, every ill-advised shuffle and finger point. You put it to the back of your mind where it lurks – a dark shadow colouring and poisoning every over thought in your head.

I imagine that this is how it feels to have killed someone and to regret it. You try and go about your life, but you always know that something is deeply wrong and that it’s too late to undo it.

James Blunt Again

2005-12-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Blunt releases one of the most abominable audio defecations in history and then manages worse with his follow-up.

How long must he have honed it to reach such a low? It’s like he’s performing some sick experiment on the public, seeing just how poor he can be and get away with it. We must stop him people. We must rise as one in a show of united apathy and renounce his putrid offerings. It really shouldn’t be that hard. They’re abject shit.

Childlike Egocentrism

2005-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Up until a certain age, children think that you experience and know everything that they do. Children are stupid. There’s no news there, but they are still developing, so we have to let them off. Usually this ends at about the age of three. Occasionally it continues into later life. This is not forgivable.

Once upon a time I had a telephone conversation with a woman from Preston. The details are unimportant, but I wanted to arrange a convenient time for something with her and was negotiating this. For a start I suggested – and ‘suggested’ is of great importance here – that 2pm might be suitable. She was incensed. She was one step away from hanging up, driving over and beating me with a club with nails in it.

“Two o’clock? Er, no. I don’t think so love. What do you want me to do about the pie delivery, eh? How are we supposed to do two things at once? Am I supposed to just refuse the pie delivery? It’s no problem for you. You don’t give a shit. It’s me who’s going to be here trying to sort out both.”

I didn’t know there was a pie delivery at 2pm. I didn’t work in the same shop as her. I didn’t even know that the 2pm pie delivery was such a big deal that it required an hour or more to complete. She seemed to think everyone knew this.

I explained to her that I didn’t know that there was a clash in her schedule and would later be all right?

She talked to me like I was an idiot, as if I should have come up with this idea first. She couldn’t believe that I hadn’t factored the pie delivery into my thinking. As I was putting the phone down, I could hear her telling someone else that I had wanted to do something at the same time as the pie delivery and they were laughing about how stupid I was.

I couldn’t convince her she was being stupid. She was too stupid to know that she was stupid.

Office Microclimate

2005-11-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

People’s attitudes to it, really. In winter or summer, the temperature in the office is exactly the same. Technically, you should be all right wearing the same clothing year-round. Why do some people not experience temperature in this way?

If it is a cold day, they will come inside dressed in coat and scarf and mutter about being cold for seven hours. On a hot day they will come in exposing all of their flesh and go on about how they can’t bear the heat until you stuff their mouths with thirty-six ice cubes. This is despite the fact that the temperature inside the building is identical.

Why are they so stupid and why are their bodies so stupid as to agree with them? In winter they adjust the thermostat so that the temperature is three degrees higher ‘because it’s so cold’. In summer they lower it by three degrees ‘because it’s so hot’. You’re not making it three degrees hotter or cooler than outside, retards. Centigrade isn’t a fluctuating measurement dependent on outside temperature, it’s a constant.

Peope Who Can't Argue

2005-11-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

Now I’m not one to argue. I’m more the bottle it up and then diss you on the internet type, unlike Destiny’s Child, who are ‘better than that’ and consequently better than me. Still, there are people who like to argue. Not all of them are able.

A poor arguer will often use ‘er’ to demonstrate that something is obvious, as in: ‘Er, I don’t think so’. This ‘er’ is used aggressively. Normally ‘er’ falls into the background. Here ‘er’ is the focus of what is said.

They will always disagree without a reason, like you did when you were seven: “Er, no it isn’t’, is seen as a worthy contribution to a debate. Or: ‘Actually, I think you’ll find it is’, if they’re arguing the opposite point of view.

Here is a sample argument between two people who can’t argue. You will notice it isn’t about anything, because these arguments never are:

A: Oh, you like them do you? I hate them. (‘A’ probably doesn’t hate them, but he likes to argue.)
B: Why?
A: Why not?
B: Give me one reason why you hate them.
A: You give me one reason why I shouldn’t hate them.
B: So you just hate things without knowing anything about them?
A: Yeah. What’s wrong with that?
B: Well, most people have to have a reason.
A: I don’t.
B: (Silence)
A: I win.

You will notice that A, the victor, announced his triumph. In stupid arguments you have to claim victory, because often the result is not apparent. At this point B can challenge A’s assertion of triumph by saying: ‘No, you didn’t’. If A feels that the challenge is unjustified, he can respond with: ‘Er, I did’ and the stakes are raised. Before long no-one knows what they are arguing about and nor is anyone going to give an inch.

Company Rewards

2005-10-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

Seriously – could you patronise me any more?

A free T-shirt, a CD holder, some jelly beans, a nylon football shirt, a bottle of Bacardi Breezer, a calculator – just some of the dazzling gifts used to ‘incentivise’ me as an employee.

A pension, sick-pay, a holiday entitlement, overtime rates, job-security, an annual bonus – just some of the things I am not entitled to as a non-contract agency employee of five years’ standing.

‘We’, ‘together’, ‘all of us’, ‘team’, ‘pulling in the same direction’ – just some of the words and phrases that make me scream ‘fuck off’ at my PC upon receiving a ‘motivational’ e-mail at work.

Talking to Car Mechanics

2005-10-21T00:25:00.000-07:00

It’s not that I’m ashamed or that I think that I should actually know something about engines. It’s just that it makes conversation so uncomfortable.

I can usually keep up for a short while. I make an appropriate ‘oof’ sort of sound when I can discern bad news, such as when something has ‘gone’

‘The dymanator’s gone’, he says.
‘Oof’, I reply.

Sometimes I will add the question, ‘big job?’ The answer to which I can never comprehend. Mechanics tend to think that the question relates to mechanical difficulty as opposed to duration. If it takes over twenty minutes then, to me, it constitutes a big job. To a mechanic, it’s not a big job unless it’s complicated. I don’t have to do the work, so that’s of no consequence to me.

The answer to ‘[is it a] big job?’ should, in my mind, be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It never is. It’s usually a barrage of jargon, involving ‘trimpling’ things and ‘quadrinating’. The best I can do is nod, look serious and hope that he doesn’t test me on anything he’s just said.

Ordinarily there is a lengthy list of car flaws that the mechanic will reel off to me. This is where it gets really tricky. In an ordinary conversation that I comprehend, I can react naturally. As I have no idea what’s going on in this situation, I react inaccurately and I am also unable to make any verbal contribution whatsoever. The conversation is out of my hands and it is full of potential pitfalls.

So as not to seem like a strange automaton, I usually progress through a series of reactions. At first I adopt a serious facial expression and acknowledge each engine defect with a low ‘okay’. After a few repetitions this starts to sound strange and perhaps even threatening. To lighten the mood I move onto a series of reactions which I like to call, ‘isn’t it funny how we non-mechanics let our ancient cars get in this condition’.

The purpose of these reactions is to indicate to the mechanic that the situation is beyond serious. The car is in such a terrible state of disrepair that you have to laugh, don’t you? Unfortunately, this is ludicrously inappropriate. The mechanic will be totally baffled as you laugh hysterically at each costly fault in your car. I really don’t know why I do this.

Finally, I try and just guess how serious each fault is and react accordingly. By this point the social pressure has got to me and I’m so demented that I can’t comprehend even the most straightforward sentence. I will look back on the conversation later and wonder quite how I reacted with a roll of the eyes and heartfelt ‘oh my God’ when the mechanic told me that I needed more screenwash.

Destiny's Child's 'Independent Women'

2005-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

It’s the sentiments that get me: That they’re so independent and they don’t rely on men. Nothing wrong with that, but they’re kind of bullish about it.

For the majority of the song they go on about how they have bought all of their own stuff. They bought their own jewellery, cars, houses, shoes, cat food, toilet paper, frozen peas, writing paper, pints of mild, pipes, slippers, trilbies and monocles. Well, big deal. I’m glad you bought all your own stuff and didn’t steal it or have it bought for you, but is it worth – literally – making a song and dance about it? It’s not, is it?

Western society has moved beyond lauding women for actually earning money and buying things. I, for one, expect women to earn money. I don’t try and stone them in the streets for getting above their stations. I don’t write to family members to tell tales of this strange new creature: The woman with a salary.

Members of Destiny’s Child, we know that you’re all millionaires. Don’t rub our faces in it through song and pretend you’re celebrating female freedom. Besides, it was the theme tune to Charlie’s Angels. The apostrophe indicates the possessive – one guy who ‘possesses’ or ‘owns’ three women. Disgraceful.

Corporate VIPs

2005-10-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

The amount of times I have asked someone: “Who’s that”, only to get the response: “You don’t know who that is? He’s only your Chief Executive”, or something similar. Why should I know that’s who he is? He’s not on telly or anything.

These people come to visit occasionally and for some reason they can’t see us working properly. Rather we have to impersonate mannequins representing ourselves doing our jobs. It is very important that we not do anything, but look far more like we are doing something than if we were actually doing it. Are you following this?

If I were working, there would be work paraphernalia around where I work. If we have a visitor, the sight of the tools of industry would cause their eyes to combust, so I have to keep them tucked away in drawers. As a result of this, I can’t actually do anything, but that’s okay, because my primary focus when fielding a guest is to be totally in awe of them for their ability to drive a grey car and to create empty slogans with which to aurally beat their workers.

I should probably try and engage the dignitary in conversation (albeit briefly) utilising part of the company motto: “So, how are we doing in terms of new geographies?” ‘New geographies’ is quite genuine, by the way – studying the Earth’s surface is passé. We’re going to revolutionise it in some unspecified way.

So our leader is given a guided tour of the building during which they will have the impression that everyone is happy and everything is fine. No matter that most of the staff are bitter because the apparent ‘belt-tightening’ that pertained to salaries did not apply to the purchase of hundreds of luminous pink chairs to match the branding. Far better to spend a fortune on surface gloss to give the appearance of a happy successful workplace than to spend the same amount of money on creating a genuinely happy and successful workplace.

What I hate most is the blind assumption that you will want to impress this visitor. What are the consequences? Will our great leader not speak to me any more? Will I not get a promotion? These things will never happen anyway. Will the efficiency of the company be damaged? It will if I spend all my time polishing monitors and hiding coffee mugs rather than working. And what do I care if productivity is damaged? I might miss out on the e-mail from further up the hierarchy saying: “Well done everyone” at the end of the year. As rewards go, it’s right up there with the death of a beloved pet.

Under-filled Sandwiches

2005-10-06T00:26:00.000-07:00

You can tell a lot about a person by how they make a sandwich, like whether they should live or die.

You know the situation: It’s the morning. You have to go to work and there’s a choice to be made. Either make some lunch to take with you or have and extra five minutes in bed. You go with the extra five minutes and boy, do you regret it later.

Lunchtime comes around and I head to my local sandwich shop, already annoyed that for some reason all of their sandwiches are four-fifths-sized. Really I want to buy two of these minuscule sandwiches, but they are always priced in the assumption of one sandwich per person. I’m not a fat bastard, but I don’t eat the same amount as an eighteen year-old girl. There is another option though and I’m going to take it. The baguette.

Three people work in this fictional sandwich shop (it’s not fictional really). One member of staff is generous with fillings, one is about average and one is downright mean. It’s almost like a modern parable. I am in the queue and I am trying to manipulate it so that I don’t get Mrs Rationing. It looks like she will be serving me if the three of them continue to produce sandwiches at their current rates, so I go and pretend to peruse the fridge for a second before rejoining the queue. It’s okay now. I’m going to avoid her.

Suddenly, one of the customers remembers three more things that he has to buy for a friend and delays Mr Average-Filling. I’m landed with Mrs Rationing. I place my order for an egg mayonnaise and salad baguette.

Rather than cutting me a third of a baguette, Mrs Rationing first allocates me a quarter. She then takes one spoonful of egg mayonnaise from a bowl and smears it along the baguette, willing it to the edges of the bread. It’s clear to everyone that a second spoonful is required, but no – eggs are a priceless commodity in a sandwich shop. They don’t throw half a tub of egg mayonnaise away at the end of every day or anything. With such a generous thickness of filling already, there’s no real room for salad, so two slices of tomato and a piece of lettuce should do the trick. One slice of tomato at each end of the bread – how can she look at that and think it’s acceptable?

“£2.50, please”.

I am the proud owner of one quarter of a forty pence baguette and it has cost me a mere £2.50. I bite into the sandwich and can literally taste nothing. It is the most crushing disappointment imaginable. A fellow customer gives me a look that says: ‘You poor bastard’. Maybe he will help me make Mrs Rationing into a sandwich.

People Who Return Mystery Phone Calls

2005-10-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

What possesses them? They dial the number to find out if anyone has phoned while they were out. They don’t recognise the number. They call it.

Where I work there is a switchboard system and unfortunately all outbound calls appear to come from the same number – my number. I am forever answering the phone to people who start a conversation: “Hello. You phoned me”.

I respond in any number of ways. Sometimes I just say ‘no’ and leave it at that. They usually start shouting that I did call them almost immediately. Sometimes I point out that they have phoned me, rather than my phoning them. This never seems to make sense to them. Again they usually just start shouting about how I did call them.

Even when I persuade the caller that it was not me who has called them, they still can’t let it lie. They accept that I don’t know who called them, but they think they can work it out from what little information they have. They ask why they were called. Bearing in mind that I don’t know who they are or who called them, I tell them that I don’t know. They ask who my company are. I tell them. They’ve never heard of us and still they won’t hang up. What do they think is going on? That we’re that mystery company who phone people at random and hand out diamond encrusted space-ships if they call us back? They are always concerned that it might be ‘something important’. I work for this company. I can assure them that whatever it is can wait until the next ice age, but they are so thirsty for human contact that they will remain on the line to be abused by someone who clearly hates them. Me.

You may think that my antagonistic attitude exacerbates these situations, but it doesn’t. I have experimented and the end result is always the same. If you are nice, they think you can help and it merely prolongs the irritation.

Robbie Williams' 'Tripping'

2005-09-28T02:34:00.000-07:00

It’s the first verse:

First they ignore you.
Then laugh at you and hate you.
Then they fight you. Then you win.

Then what Robbie? Then what? He sings it as if this is a familiar situation for all of us: The old ignoring, laughing, hating, fighting before ultimately losing treatment, eh? Well I’ve seen that before and I’m ready for you.

He seems to be glossing over things a bit as well. Where are the details Robbie? Who is ignoring you? Why are they laughing? What form did the fight take? Was it a war of egos – is that how you won?

These are lyrics of a remarkably low standard. You might have written something similar in a school exercise book when you were fourteen, only you would have read them back and torn the page out and burnt it and then eaten the ashes and then buried your shit through gargantuan embarrassment. I don’t know whether Robbie wrote them, but he does sing them. If I’m embarrassed at the idea of having written them when I was fourteen – when I didn’t – why isn’t Robbie hiding his face for reading them out loud? And why hasn’t anyone laughed him out of town?

The verse ends:

When the truth dies, very bad things happen. They’re being heartless again.

Once again, you’re being overly specific here, Robbie. Need you have specified that the ‘bad things’ were ‘very bad’? There are likely to be children hearing this stuff, you don’t want to keep them from sleeping at night.

Razors

2005-09-23T00:56:00.000-07:00

Essentially, this is the same point as for pyramid tea-bags, but that’s not going to stop me. Razors work – what’s to improve? Another question is: How many blades can one razor sport?

The answer is, of course, an infinite number. I have looked into my crystal ball and seen the marketing men’s plans for razors and their plans are these: More blades; stupider names; thinly disguised lies; and yet more blades.

Once upon a time shaving was practiced using what is now known as a cutthroat razor. It was all in the name really, so subsequent razors were developed in such a way that it was relatively difficult to cut oneself. Instead, the razor blade would glide across the surface of the face unable to deviate from its skin-skimming path because of the plastic in which it was set. Ingenious.

Nowadays they would have you believe that they can do better than that. The plastic surround now acts in such a way that it lifts hairs in order that they can be shorn even shorter. They can send electrical pulses into your flesh causing the hairs to practically leap out of your face. Modern razors can even suck testosterone from your body and replace it with oestrogen, meaning you will never have to shave your face again, although you may develop breasts.

In conjunction with all these shenanigans, the razor developers have been steadily adding blades. Having a single blade razor is like wearing a toga or fashioning rudimentary tools out of flint. Hell, the single blade razor is a sibling of the rope-bound flint axe. Even Luddites have twin blade razors. Triple blade razors are standard.

I’m not a great student of market trends, but I can see that there’s definitely room for improvement here. I wouldn’t stop until it was the done thing to take a facial cast of every man which would then be manufactured into a sort of attachable beard following the exact contours of the subject’s face, consisting entirely of razor blades. You would attach the razor-beard, press a button, whereupon the entire contraption would pulse imperceptibly removing every last hair right down to its source. Then they could change the attachments for each of these blades, causing you to buy a new one.

Exclamation Marks

2005-09-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

The exclamation mark: A mark indicating an exclamation. Multiple exclamation marks: A series of marks indicating mental dullness, insecurity, an irritating personality and perhaps impotence on the part of the writer.

You have to leave yourself room for manoeuvre. If you end every sentence with an exclamation mark regardless of whether it is an exclamation or not, how do you indicate an exclamation? By using upwards of thirty of the bastards – that’s how. Some people’s writing is so exciting that exclamation marks outnumber other characters by three-to-one. Ordinary comments like: ‘I’m tired’ are lifted to new levels of meaning through the repeated use of the exclamation mark. Sometimes I count them to find out how deeply felt this tiredness is. On one occasion, the author had slipped into a coma.

Any publishers or news editors out there in search of the next Graham Greene or George Orwell – you need not read any more. Merely ask those with potential to send you a photograph of their keyboard. If the ‘1’ key is brown and illegible with ancient sweat, this is your writer.

For an amusing hobby, why not change the default keyboard settings on workmates’ computers to those of an unusual nationality and watch as they litter their work with dollar signs or inverted commas.

Loan Adverts

2005-09-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

“Pay us £25,000 and we’ll give you £15,000 absolutely free”. Such is the nature of the loan, if you take time out of the equation. Loans are sometimes necessary. Nobody would own a house if they had to pay for one up front.

Loan adverts now appeal to more than those for whom a loan is necessary. They attempt to lure people into taking out loans for things that they want, but could wait for.

“This guy on our advert keeps pumas as pets and all his clothes are made entirely out of gold. Why should he have all of the pumas and gold? Take out a gargantuan loan today and purchase all the big cats and impractical clothing you desire. This lady is indulging in her new hobby of incinerating bank notes. You too could literally have money to burn. No. You SHOULD have money to burn”.

They always try and trick you into thinking that what everyone else has should be yours by right. The thing is, your workmate with the lilac sports car has taken out a loan to buy it and now his family are reduced to sharing a single oatcake while huddling round a nightlight for warmth. If you can’t afford to have your house carpeted in ermine, then you can’t afford to have your house carpeted in ermine. It doesn’t matter if someone tries to give you enough money to do so. Here’s the important point. I’ll italicise it. They’re not actually giving you the money.

Another relatively recent phenomenon in the land of the loan, is the loan to cover your loans. Consolidate your loans, they always say. What this amounts to is: “If you can’t afford to pay us back what you have borrowed, then you can pay an additional £3,000 for the privilege of paying us back over a longer period of time”.

Secret Weather

2005-08-31T05:06:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, someone you know will make an outlandish prediction about the weather. They will say: “It’s going to be 40 degrees on Thursday.” They will state it as a fact.

Bear in mind that this person is talking about the United Kingdom. In modern times the temperature has not reached 40 degrees centigrade once in this country. It’s not always hot weather – this is just an example. Sometimes it’s: “Three feet of snow are going to fall tomorrow”. Or even just: “It’s going to be 20 degrees” during the depths of winter.

To return to the 40 degree prediction, your only possible response is: “No, it isn’t”. Try as you might to remain mute. Their statement is too ludicrous to let slide. They will then respond with the age-old, childhood argument: “Yes, it is”.

At this point, you have a choice to make. Maintain the yes–no style of debate and wear them down or delve for more information with: “Where did you hear that?” Omitting the ‘...tremendous pile of shite’, end to the sentence. They will say: “They said on the weather.”

What weather? What meteorologist worth his weight in toenail clippings predicts 40 degree heat in Britain? With our climate they’re going out on a limb by saying ‘occasional sunny spells’ or ‘mostly showers’. To resolutely prophesise temperatures exceeding that of the human body would be a sackable offence.

On Friday, when you have shivered your way through the hottest day since records began, you will say: “I see it didn’t quite make 40 yesterday.” To which they will answer: “I know. The weatherman got it wrong again.” Hardly surprising really. Is he wrong when he tells you what to say? Is he wrong when he tells you to steal things? Was he wrong when he told you to set fire to the job centre?

H

2005-08-24T00:46:00.000-07:00

In theory, I believe that there is no right and wrong in language so long as you are understood. In practice, the eighth letter of the alphabet is my bête noir.

I’ll clear this up once and for all with reference to the dictionary:

“Aitch – the eighth letter of the alphabet.”

What do you notice? Nothing? – Well done. The fact that some moronic dictionary-writer has omitted the initial H? – Strike yourself firmly in the eye with a sharp object.

It is not ‘haitch’. Even writing it makes me sneer and practice stabbing movements with both hands. Of course it’s ‘haitch’, you say. Why wouldn’t it have the letter that it represents at the start? What kind of an argument is that? You mean like W?

Be wrong to your heart’s content, defy the English language whenever you wish. Just don’t get it wrong and think that you’re right. Face it – you spend your whole life dropping Hs from words. That’s fine. Why do you feel the need to suddenly insert one? Are you trying to prove a point? You are doing.

Pyramid Tea Bags

2005-08-24T00:45:00.000-07:00

There are circumstances where innovation is redundant. The tea bag works. There is no need to change it. Its sole function is in the creation of a cup of tea – a duty it fulfils without fail. Making a tea bag pyramid-shaped is of no conceivable benefit. The tea is identical.

Those who market pyramid tea bags would have you believe that the infusion is more rapid. Who are you who can’t wait for a cup of tea? If you do struggle with this Job-like test of patience, then scrunch the bag with a teaspoon.

Jamiroquai

2005-08-17T02:46:00.000-07:00

Mostly it’s the singer, JK, but I’ve included the entire band due to their unjustifiably self-satisfied music.

I am both bored with their songs and boiling over with hatred for them. You might think that these emotions are mutually exclusive. They’re not. I hate how bored of them I am and I’m simultaneously bored of how much I hate them. It’s a rare feat to be that objectionable. I can’t even work it out myself, but I don’t need to as there’s no danger that I’m confusing any of these feelings for love. They say it’s a fine line between love and hate, but frankly that’s balls. I hate the music of Jamiroquai.

To cap it all off and to lower themselves below those guilty of war crimes, Jamiroquai’s musicians recruited the world’s most arrogant fawn as their singer. There is only one reason why JK could possibly be so pleased with himself and remain convinced of his talent – that reason is monumental stupidity.

With the physical build of a bipedal vole, the well-spaced teeth of a child’s drawing and the beard of a child, he yelps, pirouettes and side-steps his way through the realms of our collective purgatory. The only thing worse than a prick of such phenomenal magnitude is one who is ignorant of his own pointlessness. And he uses initials instead of a name. Who does he think he is that he doesn’t need a name?

Maybe we can get some satisfaction from his dancing by chasing him all the way to Johannesburg with a pointed stick. A very pointed stick. Then we could leave him twirling the keys to his sports car before seeing if Johannesburg’s street crime fraternity are won over by his antics.

Acronyms

2005-08-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

I’m not going to mention any acronyms by name – that would only mean that they have won.

The principle of the acronym is relatively sound. Make a new word from the initial letters of a commonly used term. It saves time and you can also marvel at the outrageous fortune whereby these initial letters form something pronounceable rather than a casualty from the Russian dictionary. Unfortunately, the world has gone acronym mad.

These days there are a number of ways in which an acronym can be tainted by its creator. They can name an organisation or activity specifically to create an acronym. This is unforgivable as the organisation’s proper name is so unwieldy and non-descriptive that only the acronym is used.

Another technique in creating a catchy acronym is to bend the rules and sometimes use the first two or three letters of one of the words in the term instead of merely the initial letter. Well I’m sorry, but there is no bending of the rules here – just breaking them. If it’s not just initial letters, it’s not an acronym. Get out and take your pathetic excuse for an abbreviation with you.

The other factor counting against acronyms is their ubiquity. Every tin-pot three-membered organisation or society has an acronymical name for a start, but within each of these, every action, every policy, every job has been given some ludicrous upper-case title. Never mind that nobody understands it and what it actually stands for has been lost in the dark pages of the grim spiral-bound rulebook. Whenever these organisations are forced to communicate with the real world, they litter communication with these abbreviations as if they’re real words and treat you like a half-wit for not recognising them or remembering all ten thousand of them.

I read an article in the paper the other day where a borough council member turned the titles of every council report into an acronym. These are reports with titles like: ‘External investigation into traffic-flow to and from Whateley Road.’ This kind of thing makes a bad acronym in the first place, but worse than that, he listed a series of reports while making a point, all of them in the form of acronyms, not one of them explained. I don’t work for the council. How do I know what they are? I was less than convinced, so I have written him a letter countering his assertions, citing a number of fictitious reports produced using a random letter generator. As far as anyone outside the council is concerned, my argument is equally as strong as his.

Actioning

2005-08-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

It is becoming increasingly common in management circles to use nouns as verbs. There are many nouns which do function as verbs (‘function’ being one) and it has always been one way in which new verb forms have entered the language.

‘Text’ is one such word. Up until relatively recently ‘text’ was just words on a page. Nowadays, you can ‘text’ your friends or Mick Hucknall or whoever’s telephone number you know, provided that you have a mobile phone. This expansion of meaning to become a verb is acceptable as it is the best option available. You can’t just start saying: “Yeah, I marmed my friend”, with ‘marmed’ meaning ‘texted’ it just doesn’t work like that. ‘Text’ as a verb serves a purpose. It filled a niche.

What is unacceptable – and by ‘unacceptable’, I mean, punishable by the forced removal of a hand – is the use of a noun as a verb where there is already a verb available for use. Now why would anyone do this? Why would anyone say: ‘Please action the following,’ before giving a list of instructions? Why? Because they’re a twat – that’s why.

Whenever anyone uses the term ‘actioning’ they are doing so to sound smarter than they are. What they are actually doing is showing everyone that they struggle to eat unaided. You perform an action. You don’t action one. All they mean is ‘do’. Nobody’s fooled. Just because we can’t read your instructions doesn’t mean that we’re dense. It means you can’t write and are trying to make simple things sound complex. This is because you’ve never achieved anything complex, like retaining drool through the ‘closed mouth’ technique.

Please take care when:
Actioning the readage of the above textualisation.
Actioning an enwalkment circumferating the municipal parkery.
Actioning a defecatory relinquishment of anal surplusness.
Actioning the extractification of one’s cranial appendage from encasement within one’s rectalment.

James Blunt

2005-07-28T05:17:00.001-07:00

Mostly it’s just the first two lines of his number one single ‘Beautiful’, which are both: ‘My life is brilliant’. Yeah? Well your song isn’t.

Fish As Food

2005-07-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

Put a fish on my plate and pretty soon I will get frustrated. When hungry, I am ill-tempered. When taunted by a complex morsel containing approximately one mouthful of food guarded by an almost infinite number of tiny bone-shaped militia men, I am smash-your-own-skull-and-eat-your-brain incensed.

‘It’s easy’, people always say. ‘Just eat to the layer of bones and then pull them all out whilst they’re still attached to the spine.’ Then they add, ‘there’ll be a couple left, but probably only small ones’.

In reality there are perhaps five percent of the bones remaining hidden in the flesh. On your average fish, this equates to fifty-thousand pointed surprises waiting to either drive a hole in the roof of your mouth or, more likely, lodge in your windpipe making you gag. By the time you’ve fiddled round with every mouthful, dissecting it and removing the bones until you’re left with a pea-sized lump of mashed flesh, fish have evolved to have even more bones to ward off predatory humans.

Fish aren’t food.

Materialistic Boasting

2005-07-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

It always comes completely out of the blue, or almost as bad, with the most tenuous link to the current conversation. It is of course the materialistic boast.

One person will be talking about how they’re taking up cycling and a second person/arsehole will suddenly offer a statement such as: ‘My dad’s just got a new car’. Never mind that nobody knows this person’s father, this comment just isn’t relevant. Everybody stops for a second, dumbstuck. Then, either they add to this comment or they wait until the born-again cyclist recommences their story before butting in a second time with: ‘Yeah, it cost fifteen thousand pounds’.

I always like to think that I would do something at this point, like have some witty sarcastic response that cuts to the core of their insecurities and renders them uncomfortably self aware. What I actually do is say nothing, obviously. The confusion and anger seem to be neutralised by the overwhelming urge to sigh and the desire to stop my heart beating, so I remain mute.

Everyone usually musters some sort of complex facial expression in place of words. A sort of: ‘Do you know how obnoxious you are? Please stop talking and start looking embarrassed’ look. These people can’t interpret something so complex, though. They continue to hijack the conversation and say: ‘He earns sixty thousand now’. Only they don’t say ‘thousand’, they say ‘thou’ or ‘k’ or something.

It never fails to amaze me, how long they’ll carry on while everyone else remains silent. If it were you, you’d run away it would be so uncomfortable – they just list objects and prices unaware of the boredom surrounding them. What are you so proud of anyway? It’s not you, it’s your dad. What’s that got to do with anything? It’s always crap stuff as well, like a watch. What do you honestly say to someone who’s proud of an expensive watch? ‘Well that’s a tremendous waste of money for what is, essentially, just a tool.’

I don’t go round saying: “Here’s my new screwdriver. It cost eight hundred pounds. Aren’t I a moron? It doesn’t matter, though, because I’ve got so much money. Seriously. I had to decorate the other day. Didn’t paint. Stuck fifty pound notes all over the wall. Hired Elton John to do it for me. Then I hired someone to resurrect Elvis and paid him to smear shit all over the fifty-pound note wallpaper. That’s how little I care about my money, which I love and would do anything for, but have so much of that I can waste it on any old shit so that you all know how much I have. Only you don’t seem to notice, so I have to tell you and then you’re still not interested, so I have to make it even more obvious by just going on and on about it”.

Gwen Stefani's Rich Girl

2005-07-28T05:14:00.001-07:00

Specifically the line: ‘If I was a rich girl, then I’d have all the money in the world’. Richness is all relative. Compared to the average third-world resident, I am rich. Compared to the majority of the first-world, Gwen Stefani is rich. You do not need to have all of the money in the world to be classed as rich.

By the same token, if you are rich, you have a relatively large amount of money. You do not, under any circumstances, have all of it. If you did have all of the money in the world, Gwen, you would be paradoxically poor as without hard currency, people would have to revert to a primitive barter system and your wealth would be meaningless. More to the point, it is very unlikely that anyone would wish to trade food with you in exchange for your lamentable services as a 40-year-old woman dressing as a cheerleader.

Dental Floss

2005-07-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

If I ever do manage to get the damn stuff between any two front teeth I don’t have the dexterity to perform the necessary forwards-and-backwards dechunking motion. All I can do is lacerate a gum. Back teeth? Has anyone ever managed to perform a successful floss back there?

People Who Think They're on Diets

2005-06-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

They spend half of their time going on about how good they’ve been and how they’ve only had two-and-a-half points over the whole weekend. They spend the other half of their time eating Caramel Aeros and Double Deckers, saying: “I was good all weekend and only had two-and-a-half points, so I can treat myself”.

You should treat yourself to a walk once in a while, more like. Just when did you last get up from your desk? To go and get some crisps at lunchtime? No – Karen brought you those. You just sat there.

They say: “Fruit, eh? Are you on a diet?” No. I’m not on a diet. I’m just eating fruit. You can do that you know. Just because you think that three bags of crisps and a Mars Bar is a normal meal, doesn’t mean I do. Sorry, I know that you eat lots of fruit over the weekend, even though I’ve never once seen you eat anything other than crisps, chocolate or occasionally, to treat yourself, chips or a bacon butty.

If you want to eat complete shite all the time, feel free. Have the exact same two meals every day of your life – that’s fine. Just don’t go on about how you’ve got fat. When? When you were three? Don’t claim to be on a diet when you clearly aren’t capable or don’t even know how – Coke is not a drink for the weight-conscious. And don’t celebrate when you’ve lost a pound, or at least do it in private if you do. A pound isn’t a lot –especially for you. It’s pure chance that you managed it. You probably ran out of deep-fried suet pastry over the weekend.

Patrick Kielty

2005-06-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

What is he? Where did he come from?

As I remember it, he was a stand-up ‘comedian’ in the nineties, I could be wrong, but that’s hardly the point. The next thing you know, he’s got his own chat show on BBC1 on Saturday nights. It took Jonathon Ross years to get into that position and here’s the thing – Jonathon Ross is quite funny.

Kielty? He makes me want to tip him into a coffin-sized tank filled with box jellyfish and then bury it. They say that if a tentacle of a box jellyfish lightly brushes your skin, it’s like having a cigarette held there for maybe thirty seconds or more. Imagine an entire tank full of them and now imagine Kielty writhing around amongst them. He’d still be smug, though. I’ve never known anyone look so self-satisfied. Maybe it comes from hoodwinking a nation, but that doesn’t come close to justifying it. Tony Blair doesn’t look anywhere near as smug and prior to Kielty, he was the epitome of smugness.

You can laugh all you like at reality TV contestants’ doomed fantasies of becoming presenters. It’s perfectly reasonable. If Kielty can rule the airwaves then why not them; or one of the doctors from Casualty; or one of the patients from Casualty who’s unconscious for the entire episode? Why not my neighbour’s cat who fell asleep standing up the other day? Why not one of that cat’s craps?

People In Grey Cars

2005-06-23T00:33:00.000-07:00

If I’ve just gone round a roundabout or set off from some traffic lights and you’re directly behind me, then there’s a chance that I might not be driving slowly, but in fact, accelerating slowly. So instead of feeling around with your front bumper to see if my car’s equipped with a tow-bar, back off just a touch and stop rolling your eyes and leaning on the inside of your car door whilst rubbing your forehead.

Problem is, I don’t drive a Mercedes Bigprick, or whatever you’re in. It takes me a while to get up to the speed limit. You can’t buffet me along with on a cushion of air in front of your car. I can only accelerate so quickly. Normally this isn’t a problem as if you’re driving at any speed there are ordinarily a couple of lanes. Occasionally though, I too need to get past some traffic.

If I’ve been trapped in what you no doubt call the ‘slow lane’ by a fleet of grey cars – and they are always grey, why don’t you guys ever buy blue cars or red cars? Are you worried that all your besuited mates will be all, ‘here he comes in his blue car’ and laugh themselves to even earlier graves? If you think that you’re not offending anyone with a grey car, you are – me.

Anyway, if I’ve been trapped in the ‘slow lane’ as you guys all whistle past, I’m inevitably behind something slow moving, like a tractor or a milk float or your brain. I need to pull out into the ‘fast lane’ in order to overtake. So I wait for a space and then indicate (flashing orange light on the side…doesn’t matter) before changing lanes. Now here’s the problem. I’m only travelling at 40mph and the speed limit’s 60mph. I can either drop down a gear to third – yes, third – and let my engine leap out of the bonnet, or I can floor it in fourth and overtake the tractor over a period of hours. Actually it’s seconds, but you guys don’t seem to have the same appreciation of time as the rest of us.

Here’s where it gets annoying. I’m alongside the tractor now. It’s been approximately two seconds since I left the safe haven of the ‘slow lane’ and the speck on the horizon behind me, is now a vast grey car, driven by a wide-eyed nutcase. He’s probably flashing his lights. It’s going to be another fifteen seconds or so until I reach 60mph, but those fifteen seconds feel like a lifetime. Finally, I’m past. I return to ‘my’ lane and he overtakes, narrowly missing me in his impatience.

The only event that tops this is when I have found myself in the ‘fast lane’ on a dual carriageway with a central reservation and we approach a speed camera. Grey Car Man One, who is in front of me slams on his breaks and passes the speed camera at 60mph or even 50mph. I’ll only say this once – being as I silently scream it whilst imagining stoving someone’s head in with a BMW drivers’ manual on a daily basis – but a dual carriageway with a central reservation is a 70mph limit. Do you know how long it takes me to attain the speed of 70mph? Well you’re going to if you’re Grey Car Man Two.

Grey Car Man One breaks. I break. We crawl through the speed camera as traffic in the other lane undertakes us. Then he roars off leaving me stranded. There’s solid traffic inside me, and Grey Car Man Two is right up behind me and he’s about to use his horn and his lights. Well, he’ll just have to wait.

Britney Spears

2005-06-12T02:21:00.000-07:00

She has one eye on the side of her head; one eye in the middle of her forehead and she's fucking stupid.

People Who Have Strong Opinions About Everything

2005-06-12T01:53:00.000-07:00

You may think it hypocritical for someone with a Page of Rage to criticise people who have strong opinions about everything, but that is not so. I only hold strong opinions about things that make me apoplectic. There are any number of things in my everyday life which peeve me, but I let pass. There are any number of things which I like, but I don’t tell you you’re wrong and force-feed you statistics to back up my spurious claims.

If someone at work offers me a drink, but gets my request wrong, I utter not a word. The way I look at it, I would have nothing but for that person, so I should be grateful. If I trip over a raised paving slab, I don’t berate the gods – everyone trips at some point. But there are some people – some people who seem to feel the need to shout out about absolutely everything. All they are saying is, ‘look at me, listen to me – I’ve got such interesting opinions on everything’. But they haven’t. They haven’t at all.

You know these people. If they can’t find something of theirs for five minutes, they stop everyone, call in the police and practically break down in tears. If somebody does something slightly incorrectly, like leaving a door ajar, they shout (to themselves) about ‘how hard is it to shut a door’ and make a weird angry, disapproving sigh sound. A kind of forceful exhalation that lets everyone know that they’re all incompetent door-openers and that this person should have their arse kissed my God.

I know someone annoying. There is always a radio on when I’m with this person. Occasionally on this radio, they report the news. I dread the news. Every item is an open-armed invitation to this person to say something moronic and needless. One headline concerned the kidnap and rape of a child. There is nothing more despicable than that and there’s the thing – everybody knows that. Who on God’s green earth feels it necessary to open their mouth and say: “That’s disgusting”, in a sneering tone of voice. “I can’t stand things like that”. Of course you can’t. What are you trying to tell us?

What they’re actually trying to tell you is not that child-rape is disgusting, that’s just the way they paint it. What they’re trying to tell you is that they are an amazingly moral person, inhabiting a moral plain far above us mere mortals – a plain where child abuse is frowned upon.

If you don’t have anything to say, don’t open your mouth. Are you telling us that child abuse is bad? If so, we know that. There are going to be news items like that on a regular basis. It’s a sad fact, but it’s true. Please don’t comment on them.

The person with opinions about everything doesn’t stop at commenting on head-stabbingly obvious events though. Oh no no. They have strong opinions about things of which they don’t have the faintest grasp and they’re just daring you to haul them up on it, so they can unleash more of their deranged and ill-thought-out wisdom in an argument. They love arguments. Don’t let them trap you. They don’t deserve the vindication or the attention.

Another sample case: The news item concerned a suicide bomb on a police station in Baghdad.
“They complain about us, but they’re bombing themselves.”
Sometimes I try and deduce whether there’s any aspect of that that doesn’t annoy, but all the blood runs straight to my rage-vein in the side of my head and prevents me from thinking clearly and non-aggressively.

What do you mean? Just, what… do you mean? Are you trying to say that all Iraqi people – that is, every last one – has some collective Borg-like conscience whereby they only have one opinion about things between them, be they Sunni, Shi’a or otherwise? And on top of that, that they have some communal urge for self-harm? Are they enjoying bombing themselves? Who would bomb themselves, you retard? Finally, since when has complaining about British and American troops meant that you can’t engage in any violent practices? I have a couple of questions that I would like answering about the Abu Ghraib facility. Does this mean that I can’t hole-punch your eyelids whenever the news comes on?

It’s enough to make you seek out their house, break in and put shit in their shoes before they get dressed in the morning.