Category: venting Page 3 of 5

Always Rings Twice? It’s A Miracle If The Postman Rings The Once

On 12/01/2009

In London, Personal, Uncategorized, venting

It’s probably fortunate that I didn’t have a blog at the time, but a few years ago, the local sorting office decided to start telling lies about me. I’m sure of this, because various bits of post – including test items that I sent to see if my suspicions were true – were returned to sender with a sticker on saying ‘Gone Away’. It was annoying (especially as it was just before Christmas), and ultimately a serious problem, as the bank (not entirely unreasonably) saw the ‘returned Gone away’ on my statements and suspended my account. Thanks Royal Mail, I hope you enjoyed the money that you were paid in advance to perform a service.

Anyway, that eventually stopped – though not without a lot of hassle from my end – but in recent weeks it appears that the local postman has found a new way to not do his job properly but still take home the pay. A fortnight ago, m’wife was home and went to check the post at about 11am, and saw that there was a ‘Sorry You Were Out’ card on the mat. However, not only had there been no buzz on the buzzer (and she wouldn’t have missed it, ours is very loud), but the ‘attempted delivery’ was noted as having been at 11.45am. Being one who enjoys a touch of sarcasm, she immediately called the local sorting office and asked if our postman was the owner of a Tardis.

They made suitably apologetic noises, and confirmed that yes, the parcel was waiting to be picked up – given that we’re nowhere near the end of the route, it seems probable that the parcel never actually left the sorting office, and that the postman had decided to drop the card in without trying to deliver so he didn’t have to carry the parcel (not a large one, incidentally). I mentioned the above in passing at work the next day, and a colleague agreed this was likely to have been the case – he’d heard a card being dropped through the letterbox (without any knock or ring of the bell), and run down the road after the postman and asked for his item, to be told that er, um, actually the parcel’s back at the depot.

This morning, we received another Sorry You Were Out card – again, with no buzz at the door – and after Mrs Soanes and I had grrred and ground our teeth a bit, I Googled to see if other people had experienced the same level of non-service from Royal Mail. I expected a few matches, but there were literally dozens of people who’d received You Were Out cards with no attempt to establish if they were in fact out. Startling.

Those people, mind, were strangers, and so I’m keen and eager to know if you good people, who actually have names and some of whom I’ve had the good fortune to actually meet in person, have had similar experiences. Have you chased a Royal Mail employee down the road to be told they don’t actually have the item? Have you had cards dropped through without the doorbell being pressed or a knock at the door? Or are you a Royal Mail employee who could disabuse me of the notion that sometimes the post staff just write up the Sorry You Were Out cards in advance, and leave the items at the depot so they’ll have less to carry? Like the Jeremy Kyle research team, we want to hear from you (though you won’t get shouted at ).

Advert Spotted In A District Line Tube Carriage

By John

On 10/01/2009

In Link, London, Uncategorized, venting

One of the recently-announced atheist / humanist adverts – and which, I see, has already been criticised.

Mind you, given that the complaints come from Christian Voice, I think we can probably assume it’s not necessarily a view shared by most reasonable religious folks.

You know the ones – they tend to have their beliefs and try to live by them, rather than verbally or literally attacking others for having differing ideas in their heads. Much like the founders of their religions asked them to, in fact.

A Fairy Story (Or An UNFairy Story – You Be The Judge)

By John

On 06/10/2008

In Fish In A Barrel, Link, Uncategorized, venting

Once, a boy was playing in the garden with his older sister.

The boy had a red balloon, and he puffed and puffed into it. Soon, it was as big as his head.

“That’s good,” his sister said, “but be careful you don’t burst it.”

The end of the balloon still in his mouth, the boy nodded, but nonetheless, he inhaled and blew again. The balloon swelled, and was soon as large as a space-hopper.

“Wow! That’s huge!” said his sister, and she turned and shouted. “Mum! Dad! Come and see this!”

Their parents came out of the house, and their eyes widened.

“That’s incredible!” said their mother.

“How is he doing that?” asked their father.

The boy couldn’t answer, because he still had the end of the balloon in his mouth. He just shrugged, and then gestured to let the others know he was going to blow some more air into the balloon.

“Oh, don’t,” said his sister. “You’ll burst it. Just tie the end off now, don’t blow again. It’ll burst and you won’t have your balloon any more.”

“Yes, it’s not designed to get this big,” said his father. “I don’t know how you got it this far. Best to quit while you’re ahead.”

His mother said nothing.

The boy frowned for a moment, thinking, then took a big breath in through his nose, and blew more air into the balloon. It swelled and inflated even more, and soon it was huge – bigger than the boy, and bigger than either of his parents.

“That’s incredible!” said the sister. “How did it get that big?”

“I really don’t know,” said the father, “it shouldn’t be able to expand that much. I -“

Suddenly, the balloon burst, with a BANG which they could all feel in their stomachs. The boy was shocked – at first by the noise, and then as he realised what had happened: his balloon was ruined, and lay in tiny pieces on the ground all around him.

Tears filled the boy’s eyes, and he began to cry.

“Oh,” said his sister. “That’s a pity.”

“Yes,” agreed the father. “Still, it was amazing while it lasted, wasn’t it?”

The boy couldn’t hear their words over the sound of his own sobs, and he ran crying to his mother. He clung to her legs, and she reached down and stroked his hair, trying to calm him.

“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I’ll buy you a new balloon.”

“But -” said the sister.

“I don’t know about that,” said the father. “I mean, he knew what he was doing, and the balloon – “

“Shh,” said the mother, “not now. Can’t you see he’s upset? If we don’t do it, it’s pretty obvious that he’s going to be really miserable for a while, and that’ll cause problems for us too.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” said the sister. “It’s like you’re rewarding bad behaviour. I mean, Dad said that he should stop, but he kept on doing it.”

“She’s got a point,” said the father.

“We can talk about that sort of thing later,” said the boy’s mother, “at the moment, how and why it happened isn’t really the problem.”

And with that, she took the boy’s hand and led him into the house. The father and sister watched them go, not sure what to say.

“I bet…” said the sister thoughtfully, “I bet that he just gets a new balloon, and that’s the end of it. We won’t talk about how and why, will we?”

The father said nothing, but the look in his eyes said no, he did not expect that there would be any discussion.
——————————-
And the moral of the story is… er, well, you tell me.

My Wedding: Pre(r)amble

By John

On 20/08/2008

In Personal, Uncategorized, venting, Wedding

I got married last Saturday, and it was a fun day, and I want to post about it (as regular readers will imagine, I’m unlikely to be able to tell the tale in one post, as my logorrhoea increases with my excitement about a subject).

However, before I do that, I feel I ought to refer back to this post, in which I said that my bride and I had been unimpressed to receive a short-notice notification that someone was pulling out of attending the wedding via Facebook.

In that post, I ranted slightly about how it was a rubbish way to decline the invitation to attend, and a rather cowardly one at that… though, my ever-faithful readers, it’s my sad duty to report that someone decided to raise the ante – by telling me they weren’t going to attend at 10.30 on the morning of the wedding, via text message.

I’m fundamentally optimistic about human nature, and like to think that, if they’re given the opportunity and not backed into a corner in any way, people will tend to act in line with the more impressive standards of human behaviour.

Receiving a text message declining the invitation, just over four hours before my wedding ceremony, when guests had been given over a year’s notice of the date and venue, is the sort of thing which makes even an optimist like myself begin to wonder if maybe people aren’t as fundamentally decent as I’d like to think.

Sigh.

Anyway, this frankly infuriating behaviour aside, the day was a great one, and in the next three posts I’ll describe why it was so much fun – including a few hints on how, if you’re planning a wedding, you might be able to make it go more smoothly – but I just wanted to get this grr out of the way first. A metaphorical clearing of the throat, as it were, before I get to the nub of my gist.

Oh, and I don’t have any pictures to share yet, but I’m confident our photographer did a great job, and I’ll share some choice snaps as soon as I can. Honest.

Thanks, by the way, to people such as Steve and Stu, for their kind wishes both before and after the wedding days, it’s much appreciated.

Wedding Rubbishness: For Grooms And Guests

By John

On 14/08/2008

In Personal, Uncategorized, venting, Wedding

Bridegroom, but can’t be bothered to write a speech for your big day? Well, just download a Groom’s speech template from the internet! Some people might think that this, in itself, shows a lack of commitment to the day, but what do they know?

Guest, but not going to attend? Don’t let the people organising the wedding know too early – instead, do it the classy way, by waiting until a week or so before, and then sending a message over Facebook*! All the effectiveness of saying no, but with none of the messiness of having to actually communicate with human beings.

Oh, the fleshy humans, how we all loathe them.

*I don’t have a link for this one, but as you can probably guess, it’s just happened to me and my fiancee. Imagine how impressed we were.

Oh, For Faulks’ Sake

By John

On 20/05/2008

In Pictures, Uncategorized, Unintelligent Design, venting

So, this book comes out next week – Sebastian Faulks (whose work I must admit I haven’t read, though people whose opinions I trust speak highly of his writing) has written a new James Bond novel (with the blessing of Fleming’s estate). All very well and good, but what’s that in the bottom right-hand corner?

‘Sebastian Faulks Writing As Ian Fleming’, it seems.

Now, maybe I’m just exacting to the point of pedantry, but you can’t really claim that, can you? Oh, sure, when Virginia ‘Flowers In The Attic’ Andrews died the family got another author to be cover-credited as ‘The New Virginia Andrews’, rather bewilderingly, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the phrase ‘writing as’ used (by which I mean misused) in such a way.

‘Writing as’ is, you see, used when you’re writing under a pseudonym, not trying to write something in the style of another author. There are high-profile authors who’ve ‘written as’ – Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman or Norah Roberts as JD Robb , but that’s because those were made-up names and not real people they were seeking to emulate (given that Bachman allegedly claimed his religion was ‘rooster worship’, that’s probably for the best in Steve K’s case).

For crying out loud, when Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond book, he did so under a pseudonym, but the editions of that book which state his true identity say it was ‘Kingsley Amis writing as Robert Markham’ (as you can just about see if you peer at the bottom of the cover here).

I’m guessing it’s not Mr Faulks’s fault; he seems to be a genuine fan of Fleming’s work, and is trying to emulate the style of Fleming – but then again, so was Raymond Benson, the previous author who wrote authorised Bond novels, and his cover credit wasn’t that he was writing as Ian Fleming, it was just his name. Unlike Faulks, who’s well-known in his own right, Benson could probably have used that kind of promotional push. And marketing is where I think the idea for this bizarre bit of branding probably originated, to be honest – I just wish that they’d put something like ‘After’ or ‘In The Style Of’ or… I dunno, maybe come up with their own set of words to describe it, rather than using a phrase which already has a meaning.

Unless, of course, this is the way the popular kids are using the phrase ‘writing as’ now. That being the case, this post is by John Soanes, Writing As Charles Dickens.

The Truth Isn’t Always A Beacon That Lights Our Way, Sometimes We Stumble Upon It

By John

On 13/05/2008

In Personal, Uncategorized, venting

Me, ranting on Sunday afternoon:

“I really don’t get it when people are so keen on Sex And The City, I really don’t.

I mean, it’s totally phony and unrealistic, and seems to suggest that if you go out and buy some stuff, your life will be perfect, which has to be unhealthy.

And the worst thing about it is that people seem to take it seriously – a worrying number of women I know quote from things in it as if they’re real situations and as if you can learn from it, despite the fact that half the things they say sound cool or seem to make some kind of sense at first, but when you actually think about them, they’re meaningless, and total breakdowns in logical thinking and… oh my god. I’ve just realised.

Sex And The City is Top Gear for women, isn’t it?”

Health And Safety In My Workplace

By John

On 01/05/2008

In Fish In A Barrel, London, Pictures, Uncategorized, venting

Spotted in the kitchen in my place of work.

Microwave energy? Emanating from a microwave oven ? No! Surely you kid!

*whimper*

Not That I’m Actually Watching It, Mind – I Think I’ll Wait For The Repeats

By John

On 16/04/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, venting

As you’ve probably seen by now, ITV has decided not to show the second episode of the imported drama, Pushing Daisies, as they only allocated eight weeks in which to show the nine-episode series.

According to the news report linked above, ITV claim that the decision was due to the US Writers’ Strike, which meant that only nine episodes (as opposed to the usual 22 or so in a standard US season) were made.

Could they possibly insult their audience’s intelligence on any more levels if they tried?

Leaving aside the arguable idea that you can cheerfully drop a chapter in a series and it have no effect at all (especially given the increased serialisation in US TV shows in recent years), the first episode of Pushing Daisies did really well for ITV when it was shown last Saturday (beaten only by Casualty on BBC1, I think). As it’s fair to say that ITV have struggled to maintain an audience on Saturday nights in recent years due to the success of the revitalised Doctor Who and the ongoing draw of Casualty, you’d think they might be pleased about actually getting some eyeballs. Apparently not.

But the fact that ITV are attributing it to the Writers’ Strike is just nonsense – if the strike hadn’t gone ahead, there would have been 22 episodes for them to schedule, as opposed to nine, which would surely have been worse? Nine into eight almost goes, but 22 into eight? Duh. And, you know, given that they’ve been playing trailers for the series for about a month with the tagline ‘coming soon’ (to the extent that I kind of lost interest, after initial curiosity), could they not have started showing it a week earlier? Or maybe they should have a double-episode ‘finale’ – obviously, they might be reluctant to forego an episode of the not-at-all-padded-out-at-an-hour-long ‘All Star Mr And Mrs’, but I’m sure they could figure something out.

It’s frankly bewildering that ITV would shoot themselves in the ratings foot like this, and then compound it with a statement that is so utterly implausible. Such obvious idiocy reminds me of the old Monty Python line “I’d like to be in programme planning, but unfortunately, I’ve got a degree”…