» I witnessed a crime

OAP Terror!
To set the scene, a couple of years ago I was happily sat in my car in the car park of my local Tesco reading a book while waiting for the wife to whizz round and grab a few foody essentials.

I was parked a few spaces away from and opposite the "parent and child" reserved spaces and so had a perfect view of what unfolded before my very eyes.

With a squeal of rubber and a cloud of exhaust smoke a very nice very new looking BMW M3 screeched into one of the "parent child" places
and out gets a fairly big bloke (big & buff rather than big & fat) with the cliche shades, baseball cap, designer gear etc.

He starts to walk away from his car when he is apprehended by what I can only describe as a shorter version of Foggy from last of the summer wine. An old feller well into his 70's, military bearing walking with a brass topped cane.

As it was summer I had the window down and so could just hear the jist of the conversation. The old feller tells the steroid freak off for parking in a child space when he is obviously without the required child and asks him to move his car. Steroid freak then proceeds to lose it with the old feller shouting screaming and swearing at him and prodding him in the chest for a good minute or so before he turned round and carried on walking into the store.

I was shocked, the old feller was shocked and was just stood there for a fair few seconds white faced and imobile.

I was just about to get out of the car to see if he was ok when I found out why he was just standing there ... he was waiting to make sure steroid freak was out of sight. The old fella then walked around the BMW and with his brass topped cane put a deep dent in every body panel, a couple on the roof, took out the rear light clusters then walked off past me giving me a huge wink and a grin as he went past.

The wife was back a few minutes later and I told her what happened ... she laughed and made us wait until steroid freak came back so she could see his reaction.

He cried

He cried a lot

He cried a huge amount in fact, but not as much as my wife. Hers were tears of laughter mind you!
(Thu 14th Feb 2008, 14:56, More)

» Council Cunts

Parking tickets
Outside my house there is a single yellow line. Lord knows why, its a residential area, a good mile or so from the town and for some reason it only goes down 1/4 of the road. The sign only restricts parking from 8am to 8pm on a Saturday, again, god knows why, but the net result is all the poor buggers who live in the top 1/4 of the street, after a long week at work, don't get a lie in on Saturday morning as we have to move our cars before the traffic cunt comes along for his easy kills.

So ... I have lived hear for over 10 years, and being a lazy bastard and unwilling to get up early, I got a couple of tickets a month.

Also because I am an unorganised bastard, I seldom paid on time and so usually paid at the higher £45 late payment rate.

Now comes the good bit.

Quite a while ago, a B3tan posted "the magic words" on a QOTW about parking tickets. I forget who, but I love them dearly.

After reading this god like B3tans post, I did a bit of research and found that the yellow line outside my house was invalid. It had not been terminated (look it up on the web).

One photograph and letter later, I entered into "lengthy correspondance" with the council and was eventually sent a refund cheque for £5,550 after they were forced to cancel all tickets issued on the line.

I then wrote up a newsheet type thing detailing what I had done and posted it through every letterbox on my street which resulted in many more thousands of ponds paid back to my neighbours (and quite a number of bottles of wine whiskey and boxes of choccies to say thanks to me from said neighbours).

You may call me petty, but I kept the cheque for a few days until the next saturday so I could wait for the joyless traffic Nazi to turn up to do his usuall ticket run outside my house. I popped out to meet and greet him, waved the cheque under his nose and followed him for 100 yards up the road laughing hysterically calling him a useless cunt.

If the B3tan who made the original "Magic words" post messages me, I have a bottle of the finest malt with your name on it mate.
(Tue 31st Jul 2007, 15:37, More)

» Your first cigarette

Damned Weed
I suppose you could say I was a late starter.

My little pink lungs were smoke vigins until I smoked my first joint when I was 17. I can't say I remember much of the experience as the Red Lebanese resin turned my young mind to mush for an hour or so.

For the first few weeks of my introduction to smoking spliffs, I just smoked spliffs ... nothing else. 3 or 4 spliffs over a weekend.

But then, as I suppose is the same for many, the nicotene monkey was on my back and I started buying and smoking regular cigarettes to tide me over during the week until I would have my weekend spliffs.

It started with a pack of 10 bensons on a monday morning, which would last at one or two a day until the weekend.

Then of course, that rapidly grew until within 6 months of my first spliff I was a regular 20 a day joe!.

I gave up smoking marijuana by the time I was in my early 20's, but the nicotene monkey was well and truely entrenched on my back and as a souvenier of my heady pot smoking teens, I had a 20-30 a day cigarette habit.

I thought nothing of it to be honest. I met and married my Wife, she did not smoke, so I restricted my habit to the basement.

Once we found that my Wife had fallen pregnant, I moved my smoking habit into the garden where it stayed for a few years.

Then came the fateful day!.

I was bathing my Daughter (now 4 years old) and she was playing with some foam letters that stick to the side of the bath. She picked up the letter "I" and put it in her mouth and said " look Daddy, I have a cigarette just like you".

I took her out of the bath, dried her off and sent her down to Mum, then threw my cigarettes in the bin, followed by lighters, ashtrays etc and had a little wobbly teary eyed moment.

I have not smoked since ... no patches, no gum no nothing ... just the memory of my dear little girl sat in the bath pretending to smoke "just like Daddy" is enough to keep me stopped!.

Almost a year since I quit, best thing I ever did.

I totalled up how much money I had spent over almost 25 years of smoking.

FUCK!
(Tue 25th Mar 2008, 14:21, More)

» My most gullible moment

Degaussing Wand fun
Sorry in advance for geekness

FYI
A degaussing wand is a nice little bundle of electro magnets that used to be used a few years back for degaussing CRT monitors (before the inbuilt deguass button was a common option)

These days its just an overpriced very strong magnet used for deleting data from HDD's etc.

The story

We had an old high power battery powered degaussing wand in the back of the drawer left over from the days when we had lots of CRT monitors about the place.

One of the trainee techies dug it out and asked what it was, so we dug out an old CRT monitor, put some batterys in the wand and showed hime the fun you could have distorting the screen image by holding the tip of the wand an inch or so from the screen and moving it in circles. This is how we used to degauss a CRT monitor

While we were doing this the boss of the day wondered in for a quick chat, and admired our big powerful wand (oooh errr) and then wandered off again on his travels.

he popped in again a couple of hours later asking where the trainee was, as he had some work for him, so we told him that the trainee had been so impressed with the wand that he had gone on a tour of the server rooms to "degauss" the little LCD screens on the front of all of the Dell servers (next to the hard drives).

The poor guy turned white and ran in the direction of the nearest server room as fast as he could, meeting the trainee who had really just gone for a coffee half way and physically rugby tackling him to the ground.

We would have got a right bollocking for the joke if the boss had not been so embarrased
!
(Fri 22nd Aug 2008, 11:57, More)

» Food sex

Never straight from the fridge!
About a million years ago when I was young, freshly moved into my first ever place on my own and actually going out with the first girl daft/sympathetic/mentally impared enough to have sex with me I got my phobia about doughnuts!

One fun night she decided she wanted to hoopla the old fella with a doughnut, liberaly apply squirty canned cream and top with a glace cherry before in her words "making sure you never forget me as long as you live"

Well .....

All I can say is if you try this at home make sure you do not use squirty cream that has been in the fridge for a week and is verrryyy cold.

at the first touch of the icey cold squirty cream, poor Mr Johnson retreated in shock, transforming from the kind of granite babys arm holding an apple job that only teenagers or viagra freaks can achive, into a frightened little nubbin at an alarming rate of knots and could not be persuaded to come back out to play until morning.

She was right though, Every time I see a doughnut in Tescos I still think of her after almost 30 years!
(Sat 8th Aug 2009, 15:08, More)