» Why I was late

Train Trouble
Not me, but a couple of years ago a colleague arrived about 2 hours late for work. Being in the City you get used to the tubes being crap once in a while, so the bosses tend not to mind too much.

Apparently the train driver/guard had said "I have to apologize for the delay to your journey. I realise it is June and you wouldn't expect leaves on the line to be a problem, but in this case it's quite severe as the leaves are still attached to a tree".

Apparently no-one on the train could get pissed off about being late as they were all too busy laughing. Apparently eye contact was made between strangers in London on public transport - a first maybe?

Length? not sure, seems to work though. Be gentle, I'm new.
(Thu 28th Jun 2007, 18:52, More)

» Council Cunts

Off Topic...
as this concerns one of our beloved former public utilities, which may or may not be trading under a name like 'Gritish Bas'.

I decided to go abroad for a bit towards the end of last year so let my flat out. Prior to this I had some problems with the gas bill. I thought I had it sorted, but I've now just had to send them this letter. (It doesn't start well - I consider it a courtesy to get someone's title right, normally only a problem when addressing a woman but in this case it wasn't obvious from the person's name what sex they were. I'm not a bigot but I'm not that au fait with names from the indian subcontinent to know what is a male or female first name! Is it too much to ask people to include their title when they write to you?)

Anyway:

Dear Mr/Ms Fuckwit,

I have received a letter from you (dated 21 June) concerning the above account following my letter to you (dated 18 June). You would have had a quicker response from me if you had written to me at the address at the top of that letter rather than the billing address. Please respond to this letter on the address above.

I find the contents of your letter very frustrating. I appreciate that your systems indicate that I have an account and have had one since 2003. I entered into a significant amount of correspondence with yourselves and othershitpowercompany last year and have also had to write to you twice this year.

To summarise (yet again):

• I set up an account with yourselves for both gas and electricity supply in 2003.

• Subsequently it transpired that neither of these was being supplied by you, but by Othershitpowercompany.

• I successfully resolved the problem with electricity supply last year.

• I thought I had successfully resolved the problem with gas supply last year as well. In previous correspondence to you, I sent you a copy of the closing bill with Othershitpowercompany before I moved out of the property last year prior to it being let out.

• You refunded to me last year all the monies I had paid to yourselves from 2003 onwards as they were actually due to Othershitpowercompany. I paid up the full amount due to this company.

• Earlier this year, you sent me a bill for gas supply to the property. I responded to you that this was incorrect. A conversation with one of your call centre operatives from your Edinburgh call centre advised me that this was indeed an error, and that although the Meter Serial Number was correct there was an incorrect correlation in your systems between that Meter Serial Number and the Supply Reference Number.

• Your Edinburgh call centre operative advised me that any bills that came through should be ignored and that a ‘zero’ account closed bill would be issued in due course. I have also received a cheque from you in respect of monies that had inadvertently been collected by direct debit by you.

• At your call centre operative’s request, I performed a ‘burn test’ and I can confirm from this that the gas supplied to the property is indeed passing through the meter with serial number 1234567S.

I fail to see why I have an obligation to pay you further monies. I have now received a number of demands to pay this bill, with added threats of legal action and one letter threatening me with having the supply cut off. Since I do not actually live at the property (it is tenanted) I assume you cannot legally do this.

I am not prepared to waste more of my time sorting out this issue, having to write repeated long accounts of the previous actions taken by you and me on this matter, when I have already supplied you with all the pertinent information.

I would like you to:

• Annul this bill for £195.11 (plus the additional £14 for your ‘urgent telemessage’) immediately.

• If there IS an amount due to you in respect of this property, please sort it out between yourselves and Othershitpowercompany. I have paid them fully for all gas used whilst I was occupier of the property. Your (or Othershitpowercompany’s) failures in this matter, if any, are not my problem to sort out.

• Desist from any legal action against me – it is not warranted!

I hope that you can appreciate from the tone of this letter that I have now run out of patience and am quite angry about having to spend yet more of my time attempting to resolve this issue.

If your response to this correspondence is not to my satisfaction I will take the matter up with EnergyWatch.

Yours Sincerely,
Calamity

Apologies for ridiculous length and girth.
(Fri 27th Jul 2007, 0:22, More)

» Political Correctness Gone Mad

Auntie
I thought it was a myth at the time, but when I went for a contracting job at the BBC about five years ago, I mentioned the fact I was going to a friend of mine.

She burst out laughing. I asked her why. She turned to me and said 'have you looked at yourself recently?". I asked her what she meant. Her response: "Tall, normal build, White, Straight, British, Not obviously Disabled, Degree in a useful subject rather than archaeology or classics*, and a non-regional accent!! You've sod all chance of meeting their profiling requirements."

And, truth be told, I didn't get the job. But as fate would have it, the guy who interviewed me became a colleague at my present place a couple of years later, and one evening over beers on the roof (the office of my employer has a lovely roof terrace overlooking the Thames just by the formerly 'tumescently-challenged' bridge) I asked him about it. He said that I was the second best candidate, but he said if I had been the top one and the guy who came first was second, he'd have still got the job as there was a quota to meet to keep the balance of the team - not his choice, but one made very clear to him, although never in writing, from his superiors.

* Nothing against archaeology or classics, btw - I'm quoting.
(Thu 22nd Nov 2007, 19:56, More)

» Family Holidays

The Joys of Camping
I had amazing childhood holidays. We'd never go abroad (well, we did once and it was so shite you would not believe) and virtually always it would be camping. My dad couldn't drive (he became epileptic in 1982) and my mum wasn't the most confident of drivers, she certainly couldn't have coped with towing a trailer or caravan, so there we were (me and me little sister, 2 years younger than me) squished up in the back of the Austin Maestro or whatever heap of shit the building society Dad worked for gave him as his company car. My dad was a master at packing the car, but it always took about 2 hours to load the roof rack as my dad got a bit OCD about getting everything tied on. You've never seen such tensioned bungee cords - a tornado wouldn't have loosened the tent, pole bag, and whatever else was on top of the car.

Obviously, holidaying in britain inevitably meant it rained a lot. We did a lot of jigsaws, drawings and played card games. We'd often go to those 'haven holidays' type sites with an 'entertainment' thing on-site, with overpriced beer (i'm told) and talent contests. We did have a few good hot holidays - whit week in weymouth, and the first two weeks of august 1990. Then of course there was the hurricane that hit cornwall one year - my dad's OCD extended to using tent pegs you could have held up a marquee with, so whilst the other tents around us blew over or blew away, our (apparently good danish-made tent) took a beating but remained standing. Happy days.

Fondest memory is getting lashed for the first time - those two hot weeks of August 1990. We rocked up at a campsite in Brixham, and my mum says 'oh, I think those people were here last time we were"(87 or 88). Anyway, we're beginning to unpack everything and over come this couple with cups of tea for mum and dad and some fizzy pop for us kids. This couple are also friendly with about 3 other families on the site as well, so there's about 10 adults and a load of kids between about 8 and 15. Lots of water polo, general mischief and going to the local pub and getting a sly pint of devon scrumpy pushed in my direction by my dad or one of his new drinking buddies was the general theme.

I was beginning to get a taste for this scrumpy stuff as we got towards the end of the second week and the head drinker of the adults decided a group barbecue (read: massive session) was in order. So off they pop to the cider farm and get about 5 gallons of 10.5% scrumpy, a load of meat and charcoal and the party kicks off at about 6.30. Me and this welsh lad are kids in charge of fire, whilst the head drinker decides it's mission to get these two 14-year olds larruped. Three pints of scrumpy later and i'm strutting around like some cokehead, being a cocky little shit, not agressive but full of cheeky chat to the adults. For the only time in my life I was in the communal campsite bogs having a lash and my dad comes in, pushes me against the wall, grabs my t-shirt by the neck and quietly but intensely says 'calm down, stop making an idiot of yourself and your parents'. Which worked, because although I got more pissed I didn't get any more lairy.

Did a bit more barbecuing and then the rest is a blur. By this age I'd been given my own little 2-man ridge tent, which was a good job considering I lost control of all three bodily functions during the course of that night. I've never been able to drink scrumpy cider since...

And although they don't camp anymore, my parents still go on holiday with the people they met on that holiday. But now they can afford it they get on planes and go to warm places now.

Length? Too squigy to tell...
(Mon 6th Aug 2007, 18:05, More)

» Council Cunts

Generally
it seems that anyone who works for a utility company (especially one of the former monopoly companies), in any level of local government administration or for the civil service is a complete cunty jobsworth who follows their inane procedures to the letter in spite of any common sense to the contrary.

Actually, I'll take that back as my mum worked in the jobcentre for 15 years and always had a great time with the 'clients' as they were called, but couldn't understand why some of her colleagues would treat some unemployed people like scum. She used to say she'd like some of them to be made redundant and see what it would be like on the other side of the desk. She got so fucked off with the bureaucracy in the end she left herself.

But what amazed me was the experience I had when I worked in Austria over the winter. You have to register in the local administrative town. They had a form, in German, but also had kindly printed out a guide to how to fill it out in English. They gave out a load of pens and dragged a couple of people BACK EARLY FROM THEIR LUNCH BREAK when we rocked up so that they could process us all quickly (about 25 of us had turned up in one go from our company). This in a beautiful pristine office building which compares mightily against Hammersmith & Fulham council offices. Same experience in the Post office / A1 (mobile network) shop - you go in because your UK charger has packed up to buy a new charger, they don't sell them but instead have a box of old chargers for various different mobiles (bog standard nokia for me so no hassle) - they encourage people to bring in their old chargers if they upgrade their phones, and they charge you EUR3 which gets stuck in the mountain rescue charity fund! Same in the electricity supplier shop, you can sort out your bill in no time if there is some error.

I'm tempted to join Humpty in Scandiland...
(Fri 27th Jul 2007, 15:32, More)