Sickening Poster

This very repulsive poster has recently come to my notice, shown to me by my horrified son. I have made a riposte to it in order to offer some redress for the utter cloying imbecility of the human race here displayed.

AT OUR HOUSE

We do not give 2^nd chances to people who make posters like this. One poster and you DED.

We stamped out the practice of having said or sung Grace, long ago with an iron fist. Mother says Grace silently as a private matter between herself and Our Maker.

We HATE sentences like ‘We do real’.

Mistakes will not be tolerated.

No apologies in our house. Nous ne regrettons rien. Jamais.

'We do loud really well' is completely unacceptable. You might better say ‘We are a childish group of over-excited show-offs’

No physical contact permitted on premises.

We will DO in  your family, mate. A family that spawns posters like this deserves nothing less.

We do love Gin though.

I hope that makes you feel better, everyone.

Writing Letters in Anger

I have had cause lately to write to the Prime Minister about a matter of importance; Kingston Maurward College are proposing to build a housing estate at Lower Bockhampton in Dorset thus ruining a charming hamlet associated with Thomas Hardy.

Here is Lower Bockhampton - simply BEGGING  for 70 more houses to be built, as you can see.

I will here expound on the process involved in writing a letter when extremely cross.

First you should write a letter saying exactly what you really think. In my case the first draft is often not suitable for printing in public. Then try to do a toned-down version - this is what I wrote on my second attempt:

Cameron.

  I demand that you forbid immediately the building of houses which is proposed at Lower Bockhampton. Porlock is FULL of empty houses. So is the rest of the country. WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE HOUSES. Fill up the empty ones, for CRYING OUT LOUD. Then get the population reduced. This can be achieved by ensuring that

                                                      n(l) > n(e)      

         where n(l) = number of people leaving eg via dying or moving abroad,

         and n(e) = number of people entering eg via being born or moving over here from elsewhere.

   It's tremendously simple! Even a MP could understand it! 

   If you don't do it the promises and undertakings you made in order to facilitate your trampling your way to the top of the metaphorical dungheap which is Westminster are exposed as void. If you wanted to be Prime Minister in order to further your own devices you should not have pretended it was because you cared for the good of the country. 

    Do NOT give my regards to SamCam.

                      Mel

This is still quite rude. It needs to be softened further. The Right Honourable Gentleman will not read an overtly hostile letter.

Here is a politer version which still makes your point, but can actually be sent. Having written the earlier, cross versions, makes you feel better though.

Dear Mr Cameron, (While noting that Mr Cameron is not your dear by any means, you must take account of the conventions and address him as such.)

I request (not "demand") you to use your influence as most powerful man in the land (bit of flattery. They like that), to put a stop to the proposed building of a housing development at Lower Bockhampton in Dorset. The Dorset County Council has a shocking record of allowing insensitive development and they need to be curbed. You hold the whip hand here (more flattery) and it is your duty to use it.

This housing development is a symptom and you need to deal with it and then with the root cause which is the unquestioning acceptance that we "need more housing". (Leave out the capital letters and italics; they can prevent the letter from being taken seriously.)

  

There are huge numbers of empty houses and another single house should not be built until every empty house has been occupied, and no more people should be allowed in to the country unless there is a house available for them to move in to. I realise that it is cheaper to build new houses on previously unused ground ("See? I'm very reasonable. I am not a loony"), but we have to stop pandering to people who want to make easy money. In the long run it will be better for everyone if we acknowledge that the pleasant bits of our country do have a value which, although it can not be quantified in money terms, is extremely important for our national well-being.

If you stand by and do nothing about this housing in Dorset you will be letting us all down. Please act immediately. (You can't put in that stuff about the Westminster Dungheap either. MPs are very superior and do not take kindly to that sort of talk.)

Thank you. (More perfunctory and meaningless politeness. But at least you have still not sent your regards to SamCam)

          Yours sincerely,

                             M. G-AHLK (Mrs)

The letter will certainly be ignored and the houses built. If there is a halfpenny to be made, someone will make it. At least they will be able to connect Hardy's revolving body parts in their disparate graves, to some magnets and generate some electricity for the National Grid.

P.S. I did get a reply. An underling wrote and told me Mr Cameron was quite THRILLED to hear from me and has passed on my comments to the Development and Buildings Directive. 

So much for being the most powerful man in the land.

Investment Advice

Currys - a company ON ITS KNEES

If you have got any shares in Currys I think you should ditch them right now, or at least as soon as the dealing floor opens in the morning. This firm is not bothering to make the slightest attempt to satisfy the customers, and people are going to notice before long. I have noticed already.

Currys -  the Investors' Bane. Sell NOW.

I went to a Currys shop recently to try to get an iPad thing in the sales. Mistake! It was a place of utter pandemonium. Horrible music played loudly on tinny speakers; numerous deafening alarms and beeping noises sounded constantly and no-one made any attempt to stop them. Ignorant, gauche young men milled about, their Currys livery betraying the fact that they were supposed to be helping the customers. They were all chewing gum. Well they weren't actually - they must have been forbidden to, which is something I suppose - but you could see that they wanted to. 

We found some iPaddy items, but noted that they were displaying the normal (not sale) prices. We secured, with some difficulty, the attention of a gauche young man and asked him what the hell he thought was going on. He told us that the displayed prices were false; but he did nothing to rectify the shop's blunder. We sent him to a staff information post among the toasters and kettles (don't know why it was there) to find out whether they had got any of the particular iPad thing we wanted. (That took him ages.) Predictably, they did not. 

We collared another young man, marginally less gauche, who was in fact a Manager (V grand!) who said that we could have, he thought, possibly, a different iPaddy thing which might well be in stock but was not the one we had painstakingly chosen after many hours of online research. Dismissing the manager, we discussed what to do. All this was being carried out in conditions of extreme inconvenience due to the mega-decibel beeping etc and music. We decided to order the wretched machine online and have it sent to our house. 

While still in the shop we found a cover for the machine and went to buy it at the counter, where a charmless girl eventually, grudgingly, served us while making it clear that she resented our interrupting her courtship of a nearby youth of negligible appeal. I think if he likes her, their union will be miserable. He should look for a girl who applies herself to her job in a more responsible manner. 

Then we went to the Carphone Warehouse section of the shop, directed there by the Manager fellow to sort out getting Wifi. Here the ignorance of the youths available surpassed even that of the ones with whom we had already dealt. They knew NOTHING about setting up the Wifi, but they were willing to set us up with completely the wrong thing, and take our money for doing so. Luckily they were quite unable to disguise the extent of their stupidity so we made our excuses and left. 

When we got home we needed VAST gins to restore us.

Later, the iPad we had ordered online arrived. And behold! They had sent the wrong one! So, not only do Currys' actual shops not work, but their online facilities are useless as well. Many hours were then wasted on the phone to the Complaints Dept who were steadfastly reluctant to help. I demanded to speak to Lord Curry himself but they wouldn't let me. We were told to return to the House of Ignoramuses, ad Domum Ignoramorum which was bally MILES away. 

Back we went. Still as noisy, still populated by dolts. Spoke to Manager. He looked at the unopened box, found a not-visible-to-the-naked-eye product code, looked it up on his encrypted secret staff site and confirmed it to be actually the right item after all - despite it saying clearly on the box, the name of some other iPad item.

Informative, eh?  Curse you, Apple.

If you went to Tesco's to get some baked beans, you would not expect to have to look at tins labelled Beans, with an electron microscope to find a secret code which you then had to look up online to find out what was in the tin, would you? You would just expect there to be writing on a label which says, truthfully, 'Tesco's Value Baked Beans'. According to Manager Man, this is a problem they have with Apple packaging; all the boxes look exactly the same and just say iPad on them. They do not go into the niceties of whether it is an iPad, iPad mini, iPad mini 2, iPod shuffle, Babbage Difference Engine etc.  Since this is the case Currys should make sure their Complaints Dept knows about it so that they can tell the customers where to look for the microscopic code to discover what is in the box.

Currys cares nothing for the sanity of its customers and I strongly recommend SELLING any shares you have in it because with service as bad as this the company is sure to founder soon. Also it is unkind of them to expose the gauche young men to the fury of the general public. While on to your stockbroker, tell him to get rid of your Carphone Warehouse shares which are equally worthless. 
Put your money in to Gin, my friends. 

GIN: Reliable stuff.