A Bit about Students

I will begin this first blog of November by saying that I have never been one of those people who complains about students. We were all students once, weren’t we! However something occurred recently that has forced me to get something off my chest.

Near to the office where I work there is a sixth form college. If I leave work at the wrong time and head to my car, then all streams of student are piling down the road towards me, having finished a hard day studying. They spew forth, a never-ending flow of seventeen and eighteen year olds. Do they move out of the way as you are walking towards them? Hell no. But this is not the cause of my gripe, even though that can be quite annoying.

 

I am not sure, but I have the idea that they think they are indestructible. If I get into work early I can park on the street near the college. But when I get into the car and set off, if the kids are out of college, they seem to congregate in the middle of roads, obviously unaware that a car might well ram straight into them. They are like zombies, brainless and wandering, gathering in groups. The driver, or me, is looked upon as a nuisance when trying to pass them as they stay in the road.

 

What a strange creature the student is then. Correct me if I am wrong, but those staying on to gain A-Levels and such at sixth form should be deemed as being intelligent, wouldn’t you think? But standing in the middle of the road when there is the distinct possibility of being mowed down by a car is far from clever.

This is not all students I hasten to add, but it doesn’t bode well for the future of mankind… does it!

A Bit about Spam

Let’s pause for a moment shall we and think briefly about spam. Now I don’t mean the meat here, that tinned stuff that Monty Python liked to sing about, oh no… I mean all those emails that seem infest our inboxes like, well an infestation of… well, infesting type of things. It is all so commonplace now isn’t it! And the scary thing is we are not shocked anymore, just annoyed.

Now I have never suffered from sexual problems, but I get email upon email suggesting that I might have! I also get emails from so-called lawyers whose client has passed away leaving 5 million US dollars and that I can claim for it somehow… I don’t go into the ins and outs of this as I delete them as soon as I read the first line, which usually begins with ‘On behalf of the Trustees…’ As do I delete those emails that begin, ‘It is with gladness I write you this message, to congratulate you… blah blah…’ You know this is dodgy for many reasons, the most obvious being that no one ever uses the word gladness.

You check your email and think hey, I have got mail, only to find out that the email is in fact spam. I can’t count the amount of times I have won the lottery of something or other. My most recent was when I won a lottery from Nokia. Why or why would anyone believe that Nokia would choose some random email and decide to give them millions of pounds…? And the email addresses they give you to reply to! They might as well read Iamagullibleidiot@yesitstrue.com



No... not this kinda spam...

Spam doesn’t just infiltrate your inbox either. You look at a football score or a news item and scroll down to look at the comments only to find out some Russian woman is dying to meet you in the middle of other comments. Or that you can win Ipad and Ipods galore.  Surely people are all wise to it by now? Surely they realise that these spam are not genuine? And if that is the case, then why do our email boxes still get bombarded by a bombardment of such idiotic emails?

Anyway, got to go now, someone from the Halifax has emailed me to say I need to send off all my bank details (along with passwords)  to him, as the Halifax have lost them… banks, hey! What can you do!

A Bit about Sales Assistants

Okay, don’t get me wrong here, I am not going to spend the next few paragraphs ‘dissing’ sales assistants. In fact, I used to be one! Sales assistants have a tough job at times and can get some really obnoxious customers. No, today’s gripe is about how some of them of them seem to spring from nowhere and ask if you want any help.

‘Can I help you?’

I don’t mind this practice in big electrical stores, or when I am after a sofa. But recently I have been getting this in shops such as Game! I enter the shop and out props a sales assistant and asks:

‘Can I help you?’ Good god! I just want to look at the prices of games and stuff… Christmas is coming… I am after a few ideas. ‘No, I am fine, thanks…’

‘Okay,’ sales the smiling sales assistant. ‘Give me a shout if you need any help.’ Yes… okay.

But is doesn’t really end there. The sales assistant remains fixed to where he is stood, that smile still on his face, watching me walk over to a stack of second hand PS3 games. This is very bad as I don’t even own a PS3. I have no intention of owning a PS3. I might one day, but I don’t yet. I walk over to the DS section. I try to act cool, but I can feel shop assistant’s eyes boring into me. Always eager, always keen. It is quite spooky really.

‘Do you need any help yet?’ No...

‘How about now?’ No...

‘Now?’ No...

‘Did I say to give me a shout if you need help? Did I? Did I say that?’

So, I leave… But the next time I go in, the same thing happens. I have got into the practice of dodging these shop assistants, by fixing a meaningful expression on my face, as if to say, ‘I am fine… I know exactly where I want to look and what I want to look at. I do not need help.’ On other occasions I enter the shop as though I am playing a game of Chess, and anticipating the sales assistants’ next move. Sometimes I will outmanoeuvre the assistant, other times I will not.

I know they are touting for business, and we are amid a big recession. But I know that come Christmas time, when these shops are really busy and I definitely do need help, I will not see a sales assistant for love or money…

A Bit of an update about Slugs

Following on from my last blog, here is a quick update…

The other night I went up to bed and read for an hour. I realised I had left something downstairs in the kitchen. When I went downstairs I saw a big massive yellow slug in the middle of the dining room. It was yellow. It was big. Okay, it wasn’t gigantic… it was big massive, that is a phrase we use here, big massive. Not big, not massive, big massive. Might I just say that Big Massive need not be really big, and can be used as an exaggeration, such as in this context. It was about three inches long. Yes, I know: big massive.

I picked it up and ate it. No… I picked it up with a tissue and chucked it out back. Since then, there have been no more slugs.

Question: How did this big massive slug get in in the first place and where had it been hiding?

New blog entry, not about slugs, to follow soon…

A Bit about Slugs

We begin Friday night’s blog, the gateway to this bank holiday weekend, with a look at slugs. I have been having problems with them, you see, and they have been giving me a lot of trouble… I don’t mean that they have been rowdy, playing their music loud and having general anti-social behaviour… Mind you, they have been anti-social in a way. No, I mean they have been getting into my house. No, not breaking in a steeling the DVD player… but getting in and leaving their gross snail trails all around my dining room. There are no signs of the actual slugs, just the slime.

I have tried putting salt on the floor and have sealed my back door better… but they still get in! I have, today, put salt at the door outside, which I have tried before but to no avail. There are no holes or big gaps in the door in my kitchen/diner so how are they able to get in? It is so annoying waking in the morning and coming down to their silver snail mucus on the floor. I quickly rub it away with the soles of my slippers, but it can’t be good for the carpet can it!

They come sometime during the night, (not every night, they have time off) when we are all asleep, silent predators, creeping and sneaking. But how do they know it is night time… and how do they know there is no one around? I can go to bed at twelve and get up at seven and their trails will be there.

If you have any tips, then let me know.

If not, all I can think to do is one of the following.

1, Set my alarm clock for 3am, go downstairs with a large hammer and squash them all to death… or perhaps forget about the hammer and just pick them up and chuck them outside (however, they might be back).

2, Put salt all around my house. Problem is though that salt goes soggy and also people might think I am crazy.

3, Put slug pellets outside and kill all the slugs in the area? Tempting…
Perhaps I could…

4, Go back to choice one, but capture the slugs and send a message to their leader saying I will only set them free if they promise not to enter the house again. Could sign a kind of treaty, like the Treaty of Rome… call it the Treaty of Roam?? I did a similar thing with gnomes, called it the Treaty of Little People. They don’t like being called gnomes, it hurts their feelings.

But I digress. Which reminds me of another time I digressed, in the mid nineties, I was talking to a friend at work.

Anyway. Slug help needed. Slugs Out!

By the way, I have updated my settings on this blog so everyone should be able to leave a comment now without logging on…

A Bit about Bus Spotting

I will begin this blog with three words:

Bus Spotting… Why?

For those people who do not know and have not seen such a creature, they ‘spot’ buses. Yes, it is true… no, I am not lying. I know people have hobbies and I know we are all not the same, but come on… Bus Spotting? I can understand, in a way, how people like Train Spotting. But not Bus Spotting. I work next to a bus station and when I go out on lunch I see them with their cameras at the ready. They all seem to wear the same type of clothes too. Not duffle coats, but bland tops and black nylon trousers. They look in the need of a good wash too, as do their man-made leather shoes with the man-made leather uppers.

I recently saw a family of them drooling over a… well, bus. The dad was about forty, the daughter in her mid-teens and the son about eighteen. Why weren’t son and daughter out with their mates, or at the very least wasting their lives playing on their Xboxes? I did notice that there was no mother there, she had probably divorced dad years ago on the grounds that he is a complete and utter prat.

I usually see lone Bus Spotters as they snap their cameras at some double decker as though it is the Orient Express, or maybe the Hogwarts Express. I want to go up to them and yell, ‘It’s a bus, it’s a bloody bus!’ I want to shake them. ‘Snap out of it man… it’s a bloody bus!’ But I don’t, of course. But what makes a man think, Yes, I know what I will do, I will take pictures of buses for the rest of my life. I can accept people who collect stamps, or set physical challenges. Oooh, look at the wheels on that bus! Phew, what a sexy bumper that bus has!

If there are any bus spotters out there, then please let me know. I don’t want to offend you… but… why?

A bus is not exciting, it gets you from A to B. The wheels on a bus go round and round…


… all day long…

A Bit about Moaning

Tonight I want to discuss moans. Moans are all around us. There is no escaping moans, or moaners. There are good moans and there are bad moans. Moans are like things that live in the water, they can be cute little fish you want to stroke and love, or they can be floating turds you just want to get away from as quickly as possible. Where do moans come from?

People, of course.

I don’t mind people moaning or having a good moan about something if it is a good, valid moan, so don’t get me wrong here… You know what I mean about a valid moan: someone has a sick relative, has had a crap time, or other such reason… But I just cannot abide a bad, invalid moan from someone. You know the kind of person I mean I am sure. That work colleague/mate/relative/bloke in the pub who bends your ear for what seems like a lifetime going on about something so mesmerizingly … ridiculous!

When you are stood there thinking, What in the hell is this work colleague/mate/relative/bloke in the pub moaning about? And why is he or she moaning at me about it, and why in the hell are they moaning anyway?
Moans about the weather really get to me… It’s cold/warm/wet etc… Get over it won’t you! This is England! Okay, if it really is cold and you have had to scrape an inch of ice off your car windscreen that morning then have a moan… but don’t come to me a moan about it being too hot…! For 364 days of the year here in England the weather is crap, so when that one day of the year arrives when it is warm, don’t say to me, ‘Oh Borg, it’s just too warm isn’t it?’


‘No… it is not too warm… moan at someone else… leave me alone to enjoy this rare bit of warm weather.’

Some people moan about their favourite football/rugby/baseball (for all my US readers) etc teams. Why do you support them if all you want to do is moan about them? ‘Oh, they’ll get relegated this year, they’re rubbish.’ WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO BE MORE POSSITIVE, YOU, YOU… INVALID MOANER YOU!’

Oh, my boyfriend/girlfriend is a right git… Get another one, dump him/her!

My cat keeps trying to eat the fish… Why get a fish and cat together anyway!


So… moan about something worth moaning about, okay? Thank you.