As a member of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise...
...I regularly get to tell people off and make them feel like the stupid small insignificant little insects that they are.

You see I sit at the booth on the quay at Dover dressed in a smart uniform which gives me more power over the cowering holidaymakers and booze-cruisers than God himself.

One time, I was polishing my insignia when a driver in a Peugeot estate pulled up. He looked like a dodgy character, and his wife had a face like a bulldog sucking a lemon, so I quizzed him at unnecessarily long length about his purchases.

His name was Ron, he and Dorothy his wife had come from Loughborough at 3am to be in Calais for a day's tax free shopping at 9am. They had bought wine, beer, cigarettes and clothes.

On examination after an hour of questioning them, I found there to be a higher than allowed quantity of cigarettes in the boot of their car.. (2 packets to be precise) and called our boys over to remove everything, categorise it, and hold them whilst we calculated the tax owed.

After 5 hours of detention we decided they owed £4.25 on the excess cigarettes, so I had a severe word with them, after polishing my insignias and putting my official hat on.

I berated them for cheating the honest british taxpayer with their illegal and nefarious activities, and made them kneel in front of me and apologise.

What a surpise for them when they returned to their car and found that whilst my boys had disassembled it to look for stolen contraband, they had no put all the parts back together.

The last I saw of them, they were both in tears after 7 hours in the customs shed, loading their car onto the back of a transporter, and being driven off to a peugeot garage to pay the exorbitant fee to get their car put back together again.

I dont know, people!
(Vic Flange, Mon 24 Sep 2007, 9:53, Reply)