» Call Centres

I've had more than my fair share
This story happened over the course of several weeks last year.

Being a legal immigrant to the United States, I've definitely spent several hours being given the complete runaround through automated phone systems. For example, after having been told that I need to phone the USCIS to sort out my address for my adjustment of status (Green Card) since me and the missus moved into our own house, I proceeded to phone them and be told that I wasn't allowed to speak to the government.

This left me sort of miffed, as since the US Government calls its immigrants 'Customers' rather than actual immigrants, and considering the amount of money it had cost us to do the entire visa process legally I would infact consider myself a customer. A customer to what is perhaps the most incompetant bunch of ingrates known to man. Being British, I kept my cool and calmly explained how I needed them to know that my address had changed, so that they didn't think I was abandoning my visa case and then send out some US Marshals to hunt me down and deport me.

One simple phone call, that's all I thought it would be. However, this was sadly not the case. in an age where you can talk to absolutely anyone at any time instantly, apparently the US Government still uses carrier pigeons, abacuses and papyrus to communicate. If the seperate government departments and agencies communicate at all, which they often don't. After calling and being told that they weren't allowed to talk to me, but my petitioner (my wife) I got her to call, only for her to be told that then *I* was infact the one they needed to speak to (each time we called it took exactly 11 minutes to get through the incredibly awful automated phone system) I was starting to get a little infuriated. Then we were given the name of someone who apparently could help us.

I've no doubt that being given this name, was akin to being given the name to a black market arms dealer, that you can only meet on a certain day at a certain time, with no backup. Because after being given this fellow's name, and his supposed seniority over the obviously incredibly unintelligent call centre peons, I proceeded to call back and try to get hold of him. Only to be told that they've never heard of him at this number (the same one I'd called the day previously) and that there were 2 call centres and they both had over 2000 people working at each.

This was the final straw, my English patience and resolve broken, I shouted down the phone at the stupid bint on the end of the line and repeated that all I wanted to do was be sent a form that allowed me to notify them that I had changed my address, and then repeated it again and continued to speak in what could be considered a level of volume that would indicate some amount of irritation for the next 10 minutes until the stupid bitch suddenly, and magically 'found' a menu in her computer that allowed her to input my details magically.

Christ was infact, riding a bike.

So now, I've come to learn that the only way to get things done in America, is to do them the American way: shout and scream and be obnoxious and throw tantrums until the 2 braincells in the head of the person trying to 'help' you rub together quickly and cause enough friction that it could be mistaken for intelligence.

Length was roughly 2 years and 4 months from applying for the initial Visa to getting my Green Card. fucking slow cunts.

When I hear an American complaining about illegal immigrants, I tell them my story, and the most common answer is "well gee, no wonder so many people move here illegally then!"
(Fri 4th Sep 2009, 16:22, More)

» The B3TA Detective Agency

HDMI Cables
The signal still comes through the same coaxial cable that it always has whether you had an antenna, cable or satellite telly connection. So what is the point of HDMI cables? The coaxial cable is clearly capable of relaying the HD signal to your house but from there apparently *MAGIC* happens and you need a special (and pricey) cable to make it appear on your telly. Also since its digital data there is no difference between a cheap cable and an expensive one in terms of quality, since you either get the data or you dont.

Its a fucking swindle I tell you.
(Fri 14th Oct 2011, 5:30, More)

» Mobile phone disasters

Mates and Prank Calls.
When I was a lot younger, around 10 years ago, I got my first mobile phone. A Mitsubishi Trium Geo with a flippy cover for the keypad and extendable aerial thingy! I thought it looked awesome at the time but Most of my friends had got the Nokia 3210 which honestly looked about a million times better. Now this being my first mobile phone, and being about the time that everyone had to get one and be constantly txting 24/7 to all their mates, I quickly accrued a nice tally of phone numbers, especially from some lady friends.

Now I had been doing the usual "text a girl that you fancy and tell her things you can't tell her in person cos you're a shy cunt" thing and such, and even managed to get a girlfriend or two. Around this time, me and my best friend that I had been friends with since we were 5, had met 3 girls and all kinds of flirty shenanigans went on during the summer and such.

Then it happened.

One day during school, at lunchtime i had got up to go for a slash, and apparently my phone had dropped out of my pocket and my mates took it upon themselves to constantly do the phone & hangup about 20 times to one of the girls I fancied. This resulted in an angry voicemail from one of the other girls, which only spurred on my friends to then start sending her some exceptionally nasty text messages, many of which apparently her mum even read.

Cue me getting home from school later that afternoon to a bunch of txts from my friend, asking what the hell I was playing at and how this girl was in tears and the other 2 never wanted to see me again etc. The worst part of this was that my supposed "Best Friend" decided to take the girls' side of the argument, and no amount of explaining and apologizing on my part was going to make any of them believe me. So I had become a Pariah within that particular circle of friends, although I had come to realise that 2 of my other friends were trying to get in their collective knickers, and probably saw that getting me out of the way was to their benefit, even though they knew that I wasn't the one doing the deed.

10 years down the road and said girl hasn't said a word to me, although my friend apparently was godfather of her baby, although he's barely said much to me either in the intervening years. I later learnt that the 2 other guys had been slowly turning him against me before that incident anyway, as I found out he'd been saying some rather nasty shit about me.

Being cast out of that group I eventually fell in with my 2 current best mates, who liked to partake in the smoky green leaf on a rather regular basis. So it wasn't necessarily a great loss to me in the grand scheme of things. It was especially hilarious when a few months later her boyfriend, who she'd told all about that incident, threatened to beat me up. Now I'm by no means a big fella, just shy of 6 feet tall, but having been bullied a great deal during my first 2 years at school I'd started hitting the gym rather often, as well as taking up kickboxing, this guy was probably less than 5'6" and very slight, and quickly cacked his pants when he finally ran into me and started mouthing off, only to receive a fist to the mouth.

The moral of this story is,

Teenagers: Cunts.
(Thu 30th Jul 2009, 23:13, More)

» The Dark

Been at odds with the dark for some time...
I've always had a love/hate relationship with the dark, from pretty much as soon as I could walk until the age of 12 I would sleep with the landing light on, the big light and a lamp shining in my face. Now I've since learnt that the dark can play tricks on you, but there are some experiences that just don't seem to go away.

On Boxing day, around 1991, I was 6 years old and being the close knit family that we were, my parents and my aunt, uncle and their kids did what many would do at that time of year: Go to the pub from 3pm until closing time. I remember very little of the actual time spent at the pub, just that once it got dark, we all sat out in the pub garden for many hours.

That is when I saw it. In my mind's eye, the huge oak tree that was sitting in the beer garden opened up, as if it had a door, and out rolled a huge boulder a la Indiana Jones. My cousin was stood next to me, and before I could even say a word he said "did you see that?!" of course shortly after that we both freaked out and went to our parents, who were around the corner from us, as we returned with reinforcements in our parents, there was of course, nothing there. I would've dismissed it as nothing had my cousin not seen it also.

Later on in life I also had various experiences in the woods by my friend's house, such as seeing a red light off in the distance through the trees, knowing that the forest pretty much stretched far enough in the direction that there should be no light. Of course, we had rigged up a home made bong, made with a pringles tube and were ripping it enough that any experiences at that time are pretty much suspect.

Sorry for the length and lack of funny. Its my first post here.
(Tue 28th Jul 2009, 19:30, More)

» School Naughtiness

...Come to think of it I was quite the little cunt.
The first I can remember was in year 2, during breaktime and trying to do some aesthetic regeneration work on a fellow schoolmate, whose name we shall give as *Matthew's face... With my fist. I don't even really remember what I had against the poor lad, just that his face sure would look good on the end of my knuckles.

A year later, in Year 3 I was mincing about in a bookcase with some shit, I was at the back of my class, that happened to back onto another Year 3 class' tables that was also in lesson (my primary school was a little bit cramped at times).

I found some amazingly thick elastic bands in said bookshelf that grabbed my extremely short attention span immediately. I HAD to play with these! Stretchy stretchy stretchy SNAP! Time seemed to slow down to a stop as I watched the now broken elastic band scream off towards the next door class. Right into the face of Matthew. I immediately acted normal, did my best "I'm just a normal student, doing studently things" gig and walked back to my desk.

About 5 minutes later next door's teacher came over and whispered into my teacher's ear and they gave us the old "One of Mr A's students was just hit in the face with a rubber band, who did this?! You totally won't be punished, at least not by us but your dad will likely need a new pair of slippers after the hiding you're going to get" speech and then, when no one owned up to it just kind of huffed and got back to teaching us about whatever it was.

In year 6, Matthew had become that kid that always hung around your social group but was invited by no one and couldn't take the hint to sod off. After school one day, my mum had cheerily volunteered me up to go round to his house for dinner with him after school, much to my chagrin. As we walked to his house, a kid who was well known as the school bully came lumbering along towards us and started laying into Matthew, first verbally and then physically, while I stood aside and did nothing. The bully left me alone since he lived in the same street as my cousin who he was terrified of.

I must've been the bane of his existence for a good 4 years and half of that time I probably wasn't even trying to be mean to him.

When secondary school came around I had a few run-ins with the people in power, the first coming in Year 8, although this one I was kind of shown in a bad light, in part thanks to a classmate's fantastic acting ability in pretending I had punched him, when all I did was ruler flick his ear as I walked by. I received a week of what our school called 'Internal Suspension', which basically meant I was my head of year's personal assistant for the week. He did apologize for his theatrics although, I have to say that it was probably the easiest week of my time there.

Then there was the time I got 2 weeks solid of 2 hour after school detentions with the 'senior management team' for beating up one of my team mates during a football P.E. lesson. In my defense he was a total shithead and had been riling me up the entire lesson with sly comments, although it probably wasn't the best idea to be kicking his arse in front of the vice principle who just happened to be standing in for one of the regular P.E. teachers as referee that day. Massive facepalm moment there once I realized what I'd done about half a second after I threw the first punch.

Year 11 I had what was probably one of my finest escapes from justice; Me and a good friend, Dean were standing with the rest of our social group on lunch break in the main hall doing 'kit bag curling'. A game we had devised where we took another of the group's P.E. kit bag, swinging it then releasing it to slide across the main hall floor.

It usually didn't have much force or velocity, but on this particular day the planets must have aligned and some stars were exploding or some shit and said friend's bag weighed a shitload. Probably on account of him cramming books into his P.E. bag with the rest of his shit, I gave the bag a swing once, twice, thr- SNAP! "FUCK!".

The bag went skimming across the main hall floor like a juggernaut and slammed into a year 7 at knee level. This year 7 looked like he couldn't have weighed much more than the bag did either, and much like those extra slo-mo replays of american footballers getting hit at the knees mid air, this poor bugger flipped almost 180 degrees and slammed headfirst into the floor with a loud crash, his own backpack banging his head into the ground a second time from behind as a final insult that had been levied upon him in the space of about 2 seconds.

The poor bugger was carried off to the nurse's office by some of the older kids that had seen him go down, but oddly enough no one had actually seen who had thrown the bag. Cue another grilling by the vice principle, who looked us all over with those cold, jaded, dead eyes that only an educator that had reached 'lifer' status in the biz could have.

He was just thinking about pointing the accusing finger at us, due to the evidence mostly pointing at us from the direction of travel of the bag, and the force with which it traveled (us being the only year 11s in that part of the hall) I should imagine there was also some DNA tests and ballistics a la CSI going on as he was obviously a supersleuth, but we were saved by none other than the owner of the bag himself.

He had somehow managed to concoct and spin a story to the VP that he was hated by a few sixth formers who on their way through the hall to the field outside and out of the gate to town had grabbed his bag and launched it across the hall as a mean joke.

Top notch acting I must say. I never saw that kid in there on lunchtimes again either until I left a few short months later. We often debated about whether we had actually murdered the poor soul with a P.E. bag, or at the very least instilled a permanent phobia of backpacks in him causing him to become a recluse.

Apologies for length, the wife gives me enough grief about it as it is.

What a massive cunt I was.
(Sat 10th Sep 2011, 5:13, More)