» What nonsense did you believe in as a kid?

Mind bleach has reminded me of a story from my formative years
Back in the Day Me and My little brother were huge Superman fans

We had recently seen Superman 2 and the bit where Superman gets the bit of coal and crushes it in his hand to make a perfectly cut diamond for Lana Lang really grabbed our interest, especially as our Grandpa had a coal bunker in his garden, the fool we thought he could be sitting on untold riches and he doesn't even know it!

We naturally realised that our puny hands would be unable to exert such pressure to squash the Coal and release the shiny diamond hiding in the middle so we used to steal handfuls of coal from our Grandpa's coal bunker and take them into his shed to crush them in his vice.

Manys the time that we would emerge from the shed looking like a couple of victorian chimeny sweeps confident that it was only a matter of time before we would find our diamond.

WE never did, and we got told off for wasting coal and getting coal dust on the furniture. bloody Superman!
(Mon 23rd Jan 2012, 13:42, More)

» Babysitters

Wee Willy Winky
I once babysat for my cousin who was about 5 at the time and a very excitable young tot. Anyway, after several hours of playing Guess Who, and other games, to tire the little monkey out and several aborted attempts to get him into bed I decided that another tactic was to be employed.

Do you remember the character “Wee Willie Winky” and the rhyme that went with this? Well I decided to become the man himself, donning my granddads dressing gown (he was staying with my Nan at the time) and picking up a candle holder I decided to ambush the little tyke on the stairs as he attempted to thwart my plans to get him successfully into bed and asleep, Surely “Wee Willy Winky” the very personification of sleep for erstwhile children would convince him to get to bed and allow me to go back to watching TV in peace? No.

Imagine the scene, I am in position in the landing near the top of the stairs, suitably dressed in WWW style ready to intercept my cousin as he tried to get back downstairs and continue to misbehave. This enough as you can imagine would be pretty terrifying to a child of 5, however I did not stop at the dressing gown, in some massively ill advised display of creativity I thought the costume needed the final touch of taping plastic spoons to my fingers……..

My cousin left his bedroom with happy childish ideas of joining his older more responsible cousin downstairs and getting to watch some grown up (but not that sort of grown up) TV, only to find a hooded maniac with plastic spoons for fingers wielding a candle at him and chanting a slightly menacing nursery rhyme. He went mental and started shouting for me, I thought he was laughing and kept up the disguise for a full 5 minutes (a long time for a 5 year old) before I realised he was terrified and revealed that the maniac was in fact his me, his cousin Superkitty, needless to say I allowed the now highly suspicious lad to return downstairs and watch Thomas the tank engine videos with me until his mum got home and was never asked to babysit for him again.
(Fri 29th Oct 2010, 10:57, More)

» Little Victories

Manners cost nothing
I used to work in the aptly named off licence chain "Bargain Booze" in Liverpool.

AS with any shop job you get used to your regulars, some of whom are a nice and others who are just the opposite. Anyway there was one lady who used to come into the shop most nights with her hyperactive progeny at around nine ish. Each night she would order her booze and get some sweeties for the kids. It should be explained at this point that Bargain Booze shops are like huge human manned vending machines in which the staff are "protected" by an aquarium like structure of bullet proof glass and the customers can peruse the stock through the glass before asking at the counter for their order which the assitant gets off the shelf for them etc etc.

Back to the story, each night this woman would come in and ask for her order thus: "giz 8 carling" to which I would answer "Please?" she would studiously ignore the request to be treated like a human with a scowl before inviting her kids to ask for thier chosen sweets of the night i.e.: "giz a kinder egg", "please?" the kids would usually say please (to more scwls from the mum) and I would get the stuff, take payment, thank the lady profusely for her business and that would be it.

Usually the kids would take their sugary quarry with them to munch at home however one night they were allowed to eat their sweets straight away, in the shop. Now I hate litter, on the street is bad enough but to drop your crap on the floor of a shop with the poor sod who will have to clean it up watching is, in my opinion, the height of rudeness. So the kids have been awarded thier kinder eggs and are eagerly unwrapping them dropping the litter on the floor as they go. I politely bang on the glass and ask them if they could please pass the wrappers through the hatch as I have a bin in the back. The mum who was on the phone sees me asking her litle ones to do this and comes over to me and shouts through the hatch "PLEASE!" with a smug grin on her face, to which her youngest cub replies "she did say please mummy!"

On another occasion one of the pissed up drunks came in to demand a 1 litre Zepplin cider, through a shower of abuse aimed at me, I duly gave him the drink and started to add that it had fallen on the floor in the back of the shop and may need to be left a while before opening, I was told to go, and fuck myself. and he left the shop, I meandered over to the window to see the bloke open the cider followed by a display that would not have looked out of place a the end of the Grand Prix. I shouldn't laugh, he wasn't.
(Wed 16th Feb 2011, 13:22, More)

» Trolls

Disgruntled shop worker
This is a long one but a lot of it is scene setting........

I used to work in a convenience store in Liverpool, which was fun and to be honest a bit of a doss, all the staff were mates and got on well, we’d get any jobs (like deliveries stock checks etc) done and then get on with watching the shop and having a bit of skive, as you do when you are a 20somehting just out of Uni type.

So far so good until the manager/ franchisee of the shop got offered a much better job in the Co-Op down the road and another Francisee / manager was brought in, we shall call him Eric for that was his name.

Eric was to put it mildly an anal retentive self important wanker of the highest order, think Norris from Corrie but turned up to 11. He had very different ideas about how he wanted his shop run, ideas like all female staff should wear skirts (not in a pervy way just a ridiculously old fashioned way) , that and no alcoholics allowed in the shop, fair enough you might say but those alcos were our bread and butter, bad move Eric!

Anyhoo I digress, the man was a fool, and did not like me (despite the fact that I was doing my best to toe the line with his new rules, I even wore a skirt FFS), I could tell this by the way he gradually reduced my hours week by week, would ask my colleagues to pass on messages about job that need to be done in store even though I was STANDING RIGHT THERE! Oh and for some reason he told the managers of other shops in the company and on the Lane that I was lazy (I know this because the manager of the restaurant I also worked in told me he has said this and had in turn told Eric that he was talking bollocks). This as you can imagine was pretty annoying and soon I’d had enough!

The time had come to move on I thought, so I got myself another job and gave in my notice, during this period however I made sure to leave some clues to show Eric that his pettiness had not gone unnoticed and I could be just as petty in return (I freely admit that this is petty before anyone says anything).

There was a big pile of tissue paper on the counter by the tills that we used to wrap up bottles o wine and spirits, I carefully divided this into layers and on every 50th or so sheet wrote Eric a little message, such as “I am Watching You Eric”, “I hate you” and various others. In addition to this I also unravelled the toilet roll in his private (yes he made the ladies loo of the shop into his private shitter and the rest of the staff had to use the other one) and wrote more messages to him (fair enough he would have wiped his arse on them but hey it seemed like a good idea at the time). I also left loads of little notes hinting at my disdain for Eric as a human being hidden around the shop

My mate who Eric liked said that he was finding these for months afterwards much to his confusion.


Oh yes and two years later he had run the shop into the ground.
(Thu 19th May 2011, 14:18, More)

» Devastating Put-Downs

Not me but a mate.....
Was once in a cafe in Blackpool wearing his admittedly dodgy looking 80's sunglasses when a group of ladies, eylashes a flutter, sent him over a note that read:

"Should have gone to Specsavers"

He followed this up with another note that read simply:

"Should have gone to Weightwatchers"
(Fri 25th Nov 2011, 16:00, More)