The Wheel is Turning, but the Hamster is Dead » General Madness

Tazers and Concrete Flossing…It’s Just A Normal Day

Sy — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:11:12 +0000

A couple of weeks ago there was a slight accident at my house. By “slight accident” I mean some degenerate idiot managed to lob a chunk of concrete at the window and it smashed. Sadly I wasn’t home as otherwise I would have got to enjoy having a criminal record from what happened when I caught whoever did it. “What happened when I caught it” may or may not have included taking said chunk of concrete (about 10cm in length), tying string to both ends. One end out of its mouth. The other out of its backside. Begin flossing. Continue until concrete has worn down to size of a very very small molecule. Find another piece of concrete. Repeat until bored.

Due to the insurance company being as useful as a multipack of sugary sweets to a very diabetic person having quite a diabetic day, I had to call the police and lodge a “oh gosh…some naughty children have been bad. Come get em…please! Yes I know it happened some point in the last 24 hours and the chances of you catching them as about on par with me catching Usain Bolt….while I am wearing iron trousers and have just been given a particularly nasty enema…but just give me a crime ref number so I can get the idiot at the insurance company to come do something about the window.”

In return for them giving me a crime ref number they passed my details on to “Victim Support” whose tagline is “We are here to help”. Really? With what? Somebody else fixed the window. I ironed my own clothes the following day. Only 6 people have ever changed my daughters nappy…and they weren’t one of them. Can they help me win the lottery? Help me become attractive to my wife? Stop the spam I get in my email inbox? No. So what the feck do they do?

They also sent a letter saying “If you don’t want us to contact you, please get in contact.”. This was on a piece of headed paper. Without a phone number. And in the signature…there was no number. It is OK, lets check for the existence of an email addre……oh…yeah nothing on there. I didn’t mind, I wasn’t expecting to ever see them short of the weird look they give you me when I am out on a run late at night. “He looks shifty…we should check him out”. Things I have when running: Running shoes. Shorts. Tee. Watch. Things I don’t have when running: All black clothes, balaclava, sledge hammer. Book called Idiots guide to burglary. Seriously guys…it is OK, just out for a run!

And then they (policey McPlod) decided to send me an email with some questions. All the classics you expect on a greatest hits of the 80s mixtape such as “Do we think we were targeted”, “Has this issue affected my day to day routine” – No, I often come home early to let someone in the house to put new glass in the window! and then we got to “Other details” question. My time to shine. My time to show I am a valuable member of the community whose superpowers can be used for the good rather than for the changing of TV channels.

So I asked:

What are Sussex Police thoughts on letting me have a tazer? I could vigilante the streets tazering old people and young kids to make sure it is not looked at as being bias towards gangs of kids. No? Fine. But you understand I had to check.

I figured showing that being an indiscriminate tazer user and my willingness to take down the pesky young and pointless old, I could clear up the mean streets where I live and make it a better place. I sent that email at 13:49 on Saturday 14th.

At 21:20 on Saturday 14th, myself and el wifeo were having a little drinky at the dinner table and the doorbell rings. Walking to the door I say to my wife…who is still in the kitchen “Who the bloody hell….it is night time. Who the hell is calling at thi….oh…it is the police.”

“Hi, we got your crime report and thought we would come around to meet you.”

Ah crap.

After a lengthy discussion, they STILL wont let me have a tazer. I also think I may be on a “watch list”.

SyHamster050375

Take as long as you want. No not that long. Done already? Why did we bother?

Sy — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:55:37 +0000

I am not the greatest conversationalist in the world. I have a habit of finding that line that you do not cross….and then taking a running jump and seeing just how far over I can get. Then I will try again. I then manage to keep trying unabatedly until I realise I am the only person left in the room and don’t get invited to sleepovers anymore.

Other times I manage to steer a conversation in a direction that it didn’t need to go in and somewhat hijack the conversation for my own selfish needs.

And others I manage to turn a conversation about why a girl I know hates it when a guy keeps at it all night like a rampant sloth…and she only wants 20 minutes and a good nights kip.

It started with this post: http://livingaloneinyourthirties.blogspot.com/2012/01/all-night-long.html (unashamed plug for a fellow blogger and friend) and then she posted it on her Facebook wall for people to read. And then I felt the need to comment on her FB wall about it. Shortly after, I was comparing her nocturnal activities with a gentleman to what he does at the gym….and the fact he probably thinks she is a protein shake.

And you know, you take your time with a protein shake. Too fast and you will probably end up constipated. Nobody wants that. I get accused of being full of sh*t frequently enough as it is.

OK, I am not saying that him spending all night at it with her will make him constipated, you read that the wrong way. But you don’t buy a gobstopper because you want to eat a quick snack.

She mentioned that her question is “Why do men think it’s hot to go all night, surely just going with the flow is best? Going with the moment”

I’ll be honest, if I went with the moment too often I would be arrested. Probably divorced too. What if I saw a garden gate and thought “Hey baybeeee…” and got all carpe diem about it. I would guess she maybe meant something other than inanimate objects and likely didn’t really consider the bounds of decency while asking that question.

But I had to wonder…what is an acceptable amount of time that a man must make uncomfortable grunting noises, flex his proverbial muscle and be all caveman about it? And I don’t mean smack her on the head and drag her to the bedroom…trust me…that does NOT go down as well as you may think. Suuuure….you think it is funny and she will see the funny side when she comes around, but my wife was LIVID. I think mostly because had I said “Me. You. Squidgy squidgy time?” she was likely to say yes. But instead I decided I knew best and she now she has a fat sweaty man on her…and a headache. And a phone number of a divorce lawyer.

Back to the conversation on the FB comment thread though. A few comments later I managed to compare her nightly sessions to gardening. She was talking about how it is not right for a man to be all King Kong and climb a building. OK, she wasn’t…but…same thing. Climbing a building takes time and if you wanna take a girl to the heavens…it takes time apparently. I wouldn’t know. I got my wife to the 2nd floor once, but I wont lie, I had to use an escalator.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that gardening is like sex. I spent some time in the garden this summer. Not a lot. Enough that I thought “Yeah, wifey will think that it is an acceptable amount of time and now I can go back inside and have a nap saying that all the being in the sun wore me out”. Except that her comment about time to completed workload comparison went more like “You could have done this and that and this….but decided to come in too early and now you are napping”. But if I had gone out there, smashed a few bits around and then came back in saying “That’ll do! Maybe I will do more later!” she would give me grief saying “What were you doing? Why did you bother? Later? I will do it myself now instead.”

So what is an acceptable amount of time that I should spend in the garden? I don’t understand. The female brain is too confusing. Us menfolk need a friggin clock or something that the woman can set an alarm on so we know when whatever task we are doing has been done for an appropriate amount of time. And we cant snooze.

But I never complain if my wife decides to take all day to clean the entire house or only a few minutes. I am good like that.

So. Women. Remember, the next time a man takes “too long” in the garden, be happy. He could arrange a couple of pot plants a little differently and then bugger off to watch the footie on the telly leaving you thoroughly unsatisfied with the state of the garden.

SyHamster050375

Broken: New years resolutions. Fixed: New years resolutions.

Sy — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:49:05 +0000

It is believed by many in the “Wow, it is a slow news day…we should probably make something up” circles that today is the day most people break their new year resolutions.

5 days in to the new year? Really? What kind of stupid targets are they setting themselves that they fail so easily?

“I will go to the gym more”. You cant really fail that until you actually spend enough time of the year not actually going. I will guess by the way that the person who failed probably doesn’t have a gym membership and ate 24 Krispy Kreme doughnuts last night that they have given up the gym dream.

“I will swear less”. Well that’s just bollocks. Totally unatainable and stupid to even contemplate it to start with. Why bother? You trap your finger in the door and it falls off, you swear. You don’t go “Well golly gosh. Would you look at that. Seemed to have trapped my pinky in the door there and now it is on the floor. Well, I must get the cleaning done before I toodle off to the hospital”

“I will be less annoying to work colleagues”. They didn’t like you before. The clock didn’t strike midnight on new years eve and the people you worked with thought “Hey, I should give numbnuts another chance”. There is a reason they don’t like you. The changing of the year is not enough. Bringing in cookies to work…it still isn’t enough. But it is a start.

“I will use my car less and will start walking to work”. You work 20 miles from home. I am surprised you took this long to fail. Plus you cant carry your box of 24 Krispy Kreme doughnuts that you plan to eat instead of going to the gym all that way…what if it rains?

“I will wear more dresses to work”. You are a 6’4″ tall hairy bloke. Just…Don’t.

“I will drink less alcohol”. I have no words that can convey the dumbness in this one. “Right, as of midnight…I am not drinking again until February”. The bell tolls. It is now midnight. You raise a glass. You fail within the first seconds of the year but don’t see the irony.

“I will have more sex this year!”. You’re married. Forget it.

“I will eat more healthily”. Seriously…who does this one? Well, who ‘promises’ themselves this one? ‘I wont eat the poor little piggy sandwich, I will eat this salad instead’. Again, the clock didn’t strike midnight and you became a rabbit. It’s a stupid resolution and you are stupid for contemplating it. You woke up all hungover on the 1st Jan. You walked downstairs, opened the fridge and made a fry-up. Fail.

I on the other hand set myself completely attainable targets. These are.

1 -

That is all. I don’t think I will fail. I am sure by the time the clock hits midnight on 31st Dec 2012, that one will still be standing. This is because I generally do fail at every resolution I make so decided to go for something that I can at least try to do. Last year was “At least 50 posts on this site”. I did 24. And that is only that high because you got 4 out of me in the last couple of weeks of December.

My only other resolutions I considered this year were:

“To finish it still alive.” I really don’t want to piss off fate just now so I am going to put that one on the back burner.

“Learn to speak or read the Klingon language.” This is a completely valid one. Not because I am some star trek geek who thinks he will be more attractive to his wife if he talks in a very angry sounding language or anything but because…well…let me explain.

We had a new guy start at the company I work for a while back. Strange chap. By strange I mean I just cant work out if he is shy, an axe murderer or maybe…and likely… cannot talk to humans unless they are on his PC screen and are a World of Warcraft character. He is a little ‘Nerdy’ to say the least. But I cannot rule out the axe murderer bit just yet because when I found myself sat at his desk, I noticed a notepad. All written in Klingon. True story. It was all there. Written in Klingon.

And you know…part of me thinks it might be a hit list. And details of how he will take each person out. And I got to thinking “How did this guy get through the interview?”. So now I am thinking “also a closet Jedi”.

“I am the person you are looking for”

“You are the person I am looking for”

“I am going to work here”

“You are going to work here”

And thus, he now works here. Plotting our demise in his Klingony language. To be fair, it may not have been Klingon. Could of been Greek for all I know…but with his shifty eyes, refusal to talk to people…and the fact he carries a Klingon Bat’Leth (can I just confirm…I do NOT know if that should have capitals…before some Klingon wannabe starts with the “Learn how to spell you Qu’vatlh qhuy’cha’ baQa’” – again…I really have NO idea what that means).

Things that worry me: I just did a spell check on this post and the ONLY words in “Qu’vatlh qhuy’cha’ baQa’” it didnt understand were “baQa”. What the hell…Wordpress speaks Klingon? The world is conspiring against me. Set phasers to bloody hell.

SyHamster050375

Customer service doesnt work when they tell you that you are going to die

Sy — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:52:38 +0000

Well, here we are. 2012. The year the world ends. Apparently. You know, if you are some crazed whackjob that thinks a gazillion years ago some guy was too lazy to finish his calendar off and instead said to his boss “Yeah man…look…I have gone as far as I can go. When I was on the toilet last night, Jeebus came to me and said ‘You must end your calendar in 2012′ and I asked why and he said ‘because the world will end’. So I did it. Because…well…when you are on the can and some gnarly dude with long hair and doesn’t shave pitches up and tells you that, I think you should listen”

His boss replied “You mean Crazy Dave…the cleaner?”

But, after talking his way out of it, he managed to get put on to a different project and so the legend of “We are all going to diiiie!” came to being. And here we are. Just a mere 12 months away from saying “Well, that was as apocalyptic as a wet fart in the middle of an empty field wasn’t it” when nothing happens.

So all of this end of the world thing comes from 3 simple words: Bad. Customer. Service.

Had that guy done his job correctly he would have been making that calendar last another 1000 years. No doom in our lifetime. But instead, because that calendar making company failed, we are expecting the world to end. And after watching the film 2012, I honestly thought my life HAD ended. Wow…that was epic. Epically bad.

But talking of bad customer service, just look at Harold Camping. That nutter who said in 1994 that the world will end. Then backtracked when nothing happened and he said “Hang on…I forgot to carry the 1 in my calculation. Try 2011 instead”. 2011 passes “Hang on, I forgot to carry the hammer that I need to smack myself over the head with.” and instead of bringing about a hornets nest of bad stuff, he brought some mild anal itching and bad customer service.

So I thought I would tell you, the avid reader of this silly little site about a couple of customer service issues that have plagued my life to the point where I almost remembered them when writing this.

Firstly. I bought a camera last year. It was a pretty camera. I bought it from a shop called Jessops. Jessops are a big high street camera shop. They are also the single most useless pointless unbelievably stupid dumb bunch of earth dwelling moronic single celled life forms to inhabit this little rock we live on. 2 weeks after buying that little camera, it stopped working. Well no, it worked but the lens wouldn’t go back in to its little sleeping hole when I turned it off. So I took it back to the shop. “Yeah it looks like you probably have sand in the aperture” the guy in the shop….about as old as my oldest daughter (3 years old) said to me.” “Does it? Coz…well…it looks clean. Is clean. And I haven’t been to the friggin beach.” “Yeah, nothing we can do” “So you are telling me that within 2 weeks this is as useful as the space inbetween your ears?” “Yes”. So I had an email chat with the customer services department. I wont post my responses as I got a little “irate” after they just couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell them. They never asked me to return it etc etc. So what I am trying to say is this: If you are in the UK and want a camera….PLEASE don’t go to Jessops. Their customer service is as useful as yellow snow in a nativity play. They say all press is good press. It’s weird how I dont think that if I managed to get the guy in the shop to stick his head in to a vice and I press it so hard it explodes that they will call it good press. But if they want to find out…i’ll take the time out of my day.

Moving on from my dramatic camera issue.

Just before that time of year where we all get really drunk, eat too much and bitch and moan how religion has tried to take over OUR holiday….or Christmas as we non-religious people like to call it…I bought tasty snacks in for my co-workers. Why? Because I am just an amazingly nice guy. And because I couldn’t be bothered to write out cards so decided to fatten them up instead.

One of the tasty snacks was a box of Terrys Chocolate Orange Segsations. And can I just say…tasty as it gets. Wow…good. But. And this is a big but (which is similar to the thing you will get if you eat too many of them)….the box advertised more than they were giving. What was it they were advertising Sy? I hear you ask excitedly. Well, here is the email I sent them explaining my woes:

Hi,

I bought a box of Chocolate Orange Segsations. Excitedly I looked at the back of the box. “New!” it shouted at me. “POPPING CANDY!” I excitedly read. “Volcanic popping candy bits ready to explode” rang through my eyes and as excited as a child on Christmas morning, I tore that box open, poured the contents on the table….and realised that there were actually none in there at all. None. Nada. Nout. Actually, there was also only 1 of the “NEW!” “Toffee crunch!” (which although tasty, just didn’t have the “OH MY GOD! POPPING CANDY!!” effect in my head) in there too. 1? Well, that is a LOT more than the quantity of the popping candy ones I guess. It’s OK though, the box seemed…on counting…to be 83% Milk Classic. I could have just bought the actual chocolate orange, smacked it against a work colleagues head to open it and laughed as he lay there unconscious. Blood seeping in to the carpet.

If your QC team could lay off of the Christmas cheer during work hours so people like me…small minded and easily pleased…can continue such excitement and actually TRY a “POPPING CANDY!” sweet, that would be splendid.

If it helps… BBE date – 11.12.2012 (like they are going to last that long.) and some other numbers which were 00T7215011 07:33 (exciting huh?)

Merry Christmas…have some popping candy for me.

They have not replied. I am devastated. It was weeks ago. I will never ever ever ever EVER buy another box of those tasty chocolate orange treats again. You know…until I see them in the shop. SOOOOO good. But sadly, their customer service is a goddamn disgrace. Hang your head in shame you chocolate making nasties. I would take a photo of the box that I bought to show you all, but I am currently having camera issues.

But moving on to GOOD customer service. I have reactivated my Twitter account. By reactivated, I mean I logged back in. Started typing stuff. So if you feel the need to know what I ate for lunch, why I think a certain footballer should let me rip his lungs out and a whole magnitude of pointless rubbish…. twitter.com/wthd is the way forward people. If you want to know something more exciting, I suggest you stop reading this blog.

SyHamster050375