» Eccentrics

Mad Frank
Oh Mad, Mad Frank!
I was Mad Frank's 'supervisor' at the local community centre. I use 'supervisor' loosely as I was the lowest office temp myself so it says something about Frank.
Mad Frank would turn up for work every day, shirt tucked in, tie straight, shirt CLEAN. At the end of a day, well half day actually because he couldn't really cope in the world of employment, of filing everything in the wrong place and making everyone battery-acid tasting coffee, his shirt would be untucked, tie lost somewhere, dubious stains down the front. The amount of times I had to go back to the archived files and sort out his alphabetical filing mistakes...

I was quite fond of Frank, so don't get me wrong here. But he was absolutely crackers! He was convinced that the police regularly broke into his flat to read his computer files and tap his phone. He also claimed to know the location of a secret police HQ in the area, because he himself was an ex-member of the service, but had to leave for 'personal reasons'. He asked me once if the actual body of the computer should be dusty inside, because his was spick and span clean, suggesting someone had been there to take the hard drive away and have a good snoop.

Once Frank rang me at work to say he would be late and for my sins I said 'Did you hear that, Frank?'
Frank: What?
Me: I don't know, a click or something on the line...

This totally fed into his conspiracy theory and he never gave up that train of thought, pestering me endlessly for what I heard. Oh, I was so bad to have done that! This conspiracy theory was added to by his claim that Charles Saatchi's post was once delivered to his flat - all of his post. So Frank packed off a whole sack load of this 'post' and had it redelivered, retaining the postal receipt.

Which he kept. For his art show. Which consisted of a multitude of pictures of Tony Blair with a pair of women's lips cut from fashion magazines stuck on. Or men wearing leopard print trousers with female model heads on top. And - a hand drawn self-portait of Frank staring out of his letter box with a copy of his Royal Mail delivery note to Charles Saatchi glued on. There was also a visual representation of the night his neighbour started banging on his front door, and Mad Frank just didn't know what to do...because he was naked....and he just didn't know what to do...but he wanted to open the door...but what to do...he was naked!!

The best thing was, to advertise his exhibition, Mad Frank left a coded message in the local newspaper with the co-ordinates of the location! I've kept the advert, it's around somewhere. Mad Frank also had his own political party.

He always wanted to try so hard at everything, he just never quite made it.
(Sat 1st Nov 2008, 2:00, More)

» Evil Pranks

Girl Friday
When I left school I had one of those fill-the-gap temping jobs whereby I worked for the 'call centre' of an equipment repair store, Tvs, Videos and the like. Our back office was staffed by about 7 people with one guy downstairs on the phone to engineers out on the road. We were all school or university leavers so being more or less the same age we all got on well. Too well really because the number of calls we took from worried people threatening to cause havoc (ie throw bricks/knives at the engineers, abuse them verbally) should they be without their daily episodes of Brookside, Corrie, Eastenders, Trisha and the like, diminished rapidly after about the first month of our employment. We discovered the internal email system, quite a novelty in those days, we perfected the art of making cartoons of our fellow colleagues, we learnt how to make speaker calls blare out through the whole building etc, etc. One girl came to work some time after the first of us were employed and soon let on that she wasn't there for the 6 month contract we all had but was planning to work a short while and then go back packing. Fair enough. On her last day at work a new boy came in to replace her. Knowing she wouldn't recognise his voice we asked him to call her internally (which should have been a sign to her) from downstairs and state that he was from Flywizz airline or whatever she was flying to Australia with. The good news? The airline had overbooked the seats on the plane and were upgrading her to first class. Whoopee! As we sat next to her we could hear her side of the conversation. Exclamations of joy and glee at the prospect of free champagne and plenty of leg room. Then came the bad news. We asked New Boy to tell her that the company had already charged the cost of the upgrade, around £1000, to her credit card. 'But you can't do that' we heard her say. You can if you pretend you've already spoken to the passenger's mother who had authorized the payment to go ahead and there was absolutely, absolutely no way they could refund the charge. Shouts of glee soon turned to rage as the girl argued her best to get out of a £1000 charge she'd saved so long to earn. Eventually she hung up in tears. The pracitcal joke had turned sour. How evil we all felt. Thinking it best to own up and brighten her day once more, we told her the truth. She fumed and spat feathers, refused to speak to us and left without saying goodbye. oops!
(Mon 17th Dec 2007, 23:43, More)

» And that's the thanks I got

Thanks a bunch
My boyfriend - let's call him 'Rusty' - used to have a close friend who we'll call 'Incubus', due to his ability to drain the life out of every social situation. He was the most tight-fisted bastard, renowned for stealing from charity collections (putting in a few pennies and grabbing a fist full of coins).
Now, Rusty was moving with a group of mates (and Incubus had none) so he arranged to move him in too. Was he grateful? No, he acted like even more of a kanute than before and decided to sabotage our relationship by sending me texts and emails saying 'Rusty doesn't fancy you', then sobbing like Tiny Tears when he got found out. When it was time to move, the c*nt was too 'depressed' (lazy) to do anything, so Rusty did it all.
A couple of months in, the new housemates were called to a meeting. My boyfriend soon realised that Incubus (who was too scared to show up) had told his mates a huge pile of lies, which for some reason they'd believed (e.g. that Rusty had tried to steal his girlfriend - he didn't have one - and that'd he'd beat him up). The housemates were totally enamoured of Incubus to the extent that one of them dropped him off to his stupid I.T. job every morning with a packed lunch. That didn't piss off Rusty as much as coming back days later to find that his stuff had been packed into boxes (apart from anything that the housemates had fancied and stolen) with a neat little note telling him to move out.
A few months later a series of letters started to arrive. Incubus had written to the local council to tell them that Rusty had been living alone in the house for a year and owed the council £1k of tax. He also told his lies to everyone who'd listen, losing Rusty a lot of mates. Never mind, as far as we know, he's still living in the middle of ASBO-ville (where the neighbours shoot at each other with air rifles) getting my boyfriend's mates to wipe his arse for him as he hits 30. Some thanks I guess...
(Thu 24th May 2007, 18:08, More)

» Spoilt Brats

My Preciousssssssss
My cousin is a self-confessed wannabe Footballer's Wife. She actually has a first class degree in Maths and is by no means dumb. She also has a very well paid job in the City. She's in her early 30s. Precious bought a house last year and it took her 6 months to move in while she continued living with my aunt and uncle for minimal rent, no council tax, no utilities bills, use of car, no road tax, MOT or petrol bills (which she had done on and off for about 10 years). My uncle arranged everything for her new flat, made all the phone calls, got the plumber in, painted the walls, waited in for the furniture to be delivered, made endless trips to B&Q etc. Once when I enquired, nearing the 6 month mark, why Precious hadn't moved in, I was told there were no INTERNAL door handles and she couldn't possibly move in without them being fitted incase she got trapped. Drip by drip Precious moved her things to the new place, taking her time as she went.

Despite this well paid job Precious still borrows my aunt and uncle's car and takes it whenever she can't be bothered to walk to the station in the morning for work. So she picks up the car in the evening, drives herself home, and then drives back again in the morning to walk the much quicker 5 mins to the station. She also does this whenever she has grocery shopping to do, or just fancies a night out spinning around in a Kia Picanto blasting out Hed Kandi. When she was younger my cousin was a grumpy, moody teenager who barely lifted a finger to help round the house and blamed her parents for all her teenage woes. No karma yet, instead she did wage a hate campaign against my other cousin, lying to their parents and claiming that her brother had done big injustices against her and was slowly pushing all the family members away. This isn't true but I wouldn't blame him if he was anyway.

Actually, there is karma - her life is an ambitionless slop viewed through rose tinted glasses, no doubt polished by her parents every morning before they wipe her arse, and she has to listen to the fat chav upstairs decant his horse piss ever morning into his toilet.
(Sun 12th Oct 2008, 23:17, More)

» Ripped Off

Scammed in Split
First post!

I was in Croatia a couple of years ago with a good friend. On the last day we took a busride out to a quaint village near Split. We asked for and bought two return tickets so we could get back again. We spent the day wandering around at our leisure, bought a few postcards of dalmatian dogs with dolphins jumping over them (?) and then went for dinner before heading back. We found a taverna with what looked like a good 'meal deal'; three courses for a very reasonable price. Not eating meat I ordered the fish choice and my friend had the chicken choice. My starter of 'soup' turned up and when I asked what flavour it was I was told 'the flavour is red'. Fine, I thought, well I'll just give it a go. It was ok, the fish main course was alright but we were both looking forward to sating our sweet tooth for the final dish. Out came dessert - one biscuit each, laid on a white napkin. Great. Rip off #1!

Anyway, off we went to get on the bus back to Split. Again we checked that the tickets were returns. 'Yes' affirmed the driver and he waved us on to the bus. About 20 minutes into the journey we came across a huge traffic jam caused by an accident. We waited patiently a while and then some conducters came onto the bus to check tickets. No problem we thought. 'These are not return tickets' we were told. 'Yes they are' we said. 'No they aren't'... etc etc. The conducters started threatening fines and charges despite our protestations. I pointed at the bus driver and said that he had assured us we had returns so it must be his fault not ours. He then eventually just got off the bus anyway and someone else got on. At this point the group of Croatian students behind started shouting 'Girl Power' and punching the air. But did they offer to translate and help us out? Nope. We eventually got back to Split at 10pm to arrive at a deserted square in the dark. Suddenly no one is around but three conducters demanding we pay £50 or they would call the police and we would have to pay £500. No chance of this and by this point I'd given up on broken english and had swapped to german which they all understood better. We tried to explain it was our last day there and we had no money but soon enough they made the call to the 'police' and then demanded our passports. No chance of me handing my passport over to anyone who is wearing a makeshift uniform. In the end we gave them the equivalent of £5 which was all we had and this bizarrely was enough. They wrote us out a receipt, shook our hands and trilled 'Guten Abend' as they walked off. Rip Off #2!

On another matter, how's this for being ripped off. My partner was contracted to live in a house for a year only to be told one day that they weren't liked anymore and had to move out. This would have been ok if my partner had the chance to just quietly move away but one day we turned up to find the entire room inexplicably packed into boxes (sample box contents: one cashmere jumper, one packet of crisps, one bag of pasta, one tub of fishtank gravel, one glass lamp, one bottle of wine, underwear, one camera) - no prior warning given or permission asked for. The house was a total shithole anyway - RIP OFF!
(Tue 20th Feb 2007, 11:44, More)