A PERSONAL JOURNAL

16 Mar, 2007

...they are a plea from me to you to leave me be.

After sixteen months of keeping this blog on and off, I realise recently I've been using it primarily for the purposes of going on inane rants. And what the hell, there's so much that's pissing me off at the moment so why not.

Today I’m going to rant about people who try to annoy you on the street. Whether it’s for charity, for market research or to try and offer you a fantastic opportunity or whatever I don’t really care. I do things to avoid these people.

Normally I walk around listening to music on my portable media player. I have noticeable Sennheiser headphones with gorgeous sound quality. But these, in my opinion, do more than one thing. Sure, most importantly they’re headphones. But in addition they create a barrier. Yes, there’s a neckband-sized barrier between me and the world.

Sometimes when I’m walking around I want to be in my own world and I want as little distraction form the outside world as possible. I usually have some place to get to and with my bad timing I’m normally running late to get there. My headphones are supposed to shout “piss off” to anyone who would try talking to me. No, silly people, I’m not going to turn off my music or move my headphones for you.

So when some girl and who looks like she could use a week in the bath and her bizarre furry coat comes to try and talk me into a gap year, I’d normally ignore her. Or shout “sorry, I’m running late”. Or even pretend I don’t speak English.

It’s incredible, however, when you get out of the university building and there’s not one of them. But a row of four. Four of them. Standing in a row between me and the road. All looking enthusiastic, mind, despite the rain. It was truly a gauntlet. Just imagine playing this game. You have to get from one university building to another, whilst minimising contact with these bizarre people who donate their time to harassing people.

So today, I ignored the first. So, fairly happy that I’d successfully ignored the first I had imagined that the others would get the message and not bother to pester me. Unfortunately not, as I found out. Annoying girl number 2 made it her mission to get my attention. She stood in my path, and waved and shouted. My reaction to this was to smile at her, wave back and say “hi, how are you” whilst slaloming around her.

So what I propose is that these people should be dealt with in the same way as spammers. In case you don’t know, the law (in the UK) with spammers is that you must have opted in to receiving emails from a particular company (or consent to receiving cross-marketing) in order for them to be able to send you any. Otherwise there’s a £5000 fine. Pretty weak, but it seems to keep most of the companies here respectable. (And John Lewis, too, after I threatened to complain to the information commissioner).

Now I suggest that these people not be allowed to talk to you. At all. Unless you consent to it. Maybe the people who actually like being bothered by these people could wear a “please annoy me” badge. And make it illegal to irritate anyone (for commercial purposes) who is not wearing the badge. This would fix my problem of having to dodge Big Issue sellers. They can stand at the side of the road with their puppy dog eyes, but if I’m not wearing the badge then they are not allowed to say “Big Issue, please”, or any of their other catch phrases. The moment they open their mouth to whimper a single “Big”, then along comes Jack Bauer from the Counter-Tantalizing Unit and locks them up (with added torture, because lets face it, some of these tramps might quite like a cosy CTU cell for the night).

Okay, so I got carried away and that idea sounds a little more totalitarian than I intended when I first thought of this article, so here’s a message for you people, should you ever read this.

Give me the dignity of being able to ignore you. If I’m clearly trying to ignore you, please don’t continue to pester me.

You’re not going to get anything out of me. I’m not going to fill in your survey, and I’m not going to give you any money. I’m not a mean person and I do like to do good things for people sometimes, or give to charity, but usually it has to be on my terms and not on yours. And if you want market research out of me, then you can pay me for it. Why should I give my time to help a company improve their product if I don’t see anything out of it?

That’s a very selfish attitude but isn't it the same attitude of contempt that companies treat consumers with?

14 Mar, 2007

In the immortal words of Dale Cooper… “the minute a traveller leaves home he loses almost 100% of his ability to control his environment.”

I'll tell you about the time that the fucking Liv-F-C fans went out to a match and came home at three in the morning shouting the “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. I’m sorry. Johnny Cash? What the fuck does Johnny Cash have to do with Livepool Football club? Last time I checked, Johnny Cash was an American. He may have done concerts in Liverpool from time to time, but I doubt he was a Liverpol supporter and I very much doubt he wrote the song for Liverpool.

Well here’s a note to you fucking retarded football fans:

From Wikipedia:

It was originally written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, and recorded by Anita Carter in 1962. The song documents Carter's feelings of conflict arising from her relationship with Cash, and his drug addiction, with the refrain:

I fell into a burning ring of fire

I went down, down, down

And the flames went higher

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire

The ring of fire

Cash's major contribution to the song, besides his bass recitation of the lyrics, was the addition of a mariachi-style horn section.

And no, the mariachi-style horn section wasn’t inspired by Liverpool Football club either. Cash claimed that this innovation had come to him in a dream.

Now if the fuckasses had come in shouting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” I could understand, whilst not Liverpool’s song originally they have made it their own since Gerry and the Pacemakers sang it in the 60’s. It has become the club anthem, it’s written on the club crest. Or even if they came in singing one of the naff songs that I have on a CD that I copied from a demented Liverpool fan. Well, maybe not the one that praises Michael Owen for being a star, I’ll let them forget about that since he’s at Newcastle now.

So what I’m wondering is did Rafael Benitez or Stephen Gerrard team wake up one morning and decide that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” wasn’t lively enough? Maybe it wasn’t American enough? Or fuck it, this guy’s Spanish, he doesn’t know the difference between America and England.

Or perhaps it was the fans. Who knows, but claiming such an awesome song has anything to do with anything as shallow as football is a travesty. And then the wankers proceeded upstairs to destroy this song further with a cover version that sounded like Rolf Harris was singing it with a cold.

Poor Johnny Cash, he’ll be turning in his grave.

However, revenge is sweet. I’m normally an early riser, and I just happen to have Cash’s greatest hits and a pair of speakers that go super loud. And they won’t mind, they like Johnny Cash songs, right?

14 Mar, 2007

So this year my house”mates” seem to have turned into the biggest bunch of cunts ever. I felt I need to write something to capture some of the stuff I’m feeling right now. In case I haven’t already told you, in our house we have.

• Churchill – the dirtiest guy I’ve actually ever met. He smokes (a lot, rarely legal substances). I’ve never noticed him to use the bath room for an actual bath, and we’re convinced that he must eat the toilet roll mixed with water as mashed potato, it seems to disappear so rapidly. Oh yeah, he also sounds like Britain’s favourite insurance dog.
• Manlover – with such a blatantly homosexual taste in music I’m convinced this person must be gay. It’s all the mega chavvy dancy stuff that you can just about nod your head to but always do it wondering when the tune is going to come in.
• Mellivora capensis – probably the one in the house I originally trusted most and was the one all behind the idea to move into a house, although said some pretty nasty things about my best friend being over all the time. The whole reason she’s been over all the time is because I can’t cope with the atmosphere in the house by myself.

So really, it would all be fine. I didn’t have a problem with anyone. Until…

Bad things happening.

The first sign of unrest was a few things going missing. Namely a casserole dish just vanished and my iron magically had broken when I went away for Christmas hols. A bunch of tea towels (everyones, not just mine) disappeared too. I just tolerated it all as I didn’t want to kick up a fuss.

The thing that pissed me off most was a pair of my jeans disappeared. They weren’t my smart price jeans, yes I have some of those and to be honest they’re not too bad. No they were my fucking levi’s. Sure, they were getting a little tight on me but I bought them for me, not for some fucking cunt who lives in the same house as me and has taken a liking to them.

And the thing is, I swear it must be Churchill. The other two in the house are too damned fat to fit into them. He probably thought, hmm clean jeans, I don’t have to wash this week. And they’ll end up in the bin the next week.

Sure enough I asked everyone in the house but nobody seemed to have any idea where they went. FUCK THAT. These things don’t just disappear. Well, no. But I have a feeling that things are going to start disappearing. Starting with the gas money. Woohoo, new pair of jeans here I come. Might treat myself to a new iron while I’m at it.

At the moment I’m counting down the days until I go home. Whilst the odd thing does go missing at home (normally down to my father doing a tidying spree) it’s not generally important things or expensive things, and they’ll usually turn up at some point. Thank fuck there’s a lock on my door here otherwise who knows what might have gone missing.

The sooner I move out of here the better. I swear next year I'm getting my own studio appartment. So long as I can afford it...

24 Dec, 2006

(i may edit this again later, if I should read it when I'm not knackered)

It really fucking sucks, I can tell you that. I've been saving this rant for so long now, it's finally time to get it out of my system.

The shop is run by people who have, essentially, nothing going for them. Maybe they dropped out of university, maybe they dropped out of school, maybe they never went in the first place. And they ended up working in Major-High-Street-Retail-Chain. These unfortunate wretches started from the bottom of the chain, roughly where I am right now.

Yet not having anything better or indeed more important to do with their lives, they persevered and worked shit loads of hours. Wait, I know you want to interrupt me here. You're going to tell me, surely that with their hard work ethic and their building up a retail career from the ground, doesn't that make them far from the loser I picture them to be? Yet, I have to disagree with that sentiment. Working full time in high street retail, it's pretty difficult to not advance. The real reason: not many people want to advance.

Nobody really wants this sort of job for anything more than a once-a-week, Saturday/Sunday kind of job. Schoolkids are grateful for the job to get some extra cash in hand to spend getting rattassed on Friday night. The fact is that retail is dominated by women and gay guys(with the odd straight guy such as yours truly to make up the numbers for political correctness reasons, I suppose), and unfortunately the net result of this is that retail is a real fucking bitchy place to work. The schoolkids see this and this helps them work harder on their GCSEs and A-Levels, lest they have to go back to working in a shop... and this time for life.

I'm still counting myself in the category of "schoolkid", yet I'm almost halfway through my final year of university. Believe me, I have no desire to work any more than I have to to help clear the overdraft.

Ignore the title of "manager" which many of these fuckers hide behind, that's irrelevent. It's certainly not the type of job that requires more than a tiny bit of brainpower. These fucking cunts can't manage their lives. They're losing years of their lives doing a job that any simian can do. Yes, there are things that the managers *should* have that is not something you'll walk into the job with. The main thing is product knowledge. But that is something anyone can have from slogging away and doing the hours. And then there's the extra "training" which is just the easy stuff that they think the normal staff can't hack, or aren't trusted with.

So here are a couple of characters you will encounter if you come into my shop:

Sasha (aka the Slasher): seems nice until she finds you don't know something that she does, then she feeds on your ignorance (the slash) and takes great care explaining it in the simplest terms. If she had hand puppets to hand, she would almost certainly use them. Oh, she loves for you to be wrong. Can be dealt with (but only when in extreme circumstances when it's very necessary) by mimicing the patronising voice.

Twee: likes to dish it out but can't take, conversation with Twee is a nervous dialogue because you never know when she will take offence at my witty retorts. She is 22 but looks twice that, almost certainly down to the smoking. Can be dealt with by never letting your guard down.

Chav girl: I have nothing against Chav girl, she stays out of my way and I never bother to get in hers. She has a general attitude of "can't-be-arsed" which is very appealing in such a bitchy environment. Of course, she'll probably never leave the store, and it probably won't be long before she's a manager.

Gay guy: the really camp voice and mincing about can be grating on a bad day, but otherwise there's no reason yet to hate.


I constantly move between Liverpool during term-time, and Cheltenham during the holidays. This means that I need to transfer from one store to the other every now and then. Surprise surprise, the staff turnover is so high that I get to the other store and there's only a handful of people I know from the last time round. And guess what, all the fuckers have overinflated egos! They all think that they're God's gift to retail.

The biggest one of these cocksmokers can committ (from my point of view) is customer hijacking. This is when you're helping a customer and another assistant feels it's their duty to come and help your customer, maybe even destroy the web of deceit I've been spinning to confuse the customer and make me look stupid.

One thing that is funny, however, are the stupid fuckers called customers. The quality of clothing in this shop is shit, you get a sense of this being on the tills and seeing first hand some of the stuff that's returned. The quality, in actual fact is comparable to what I'm sure you'll agree are the cheaper stores such as Primark and Asda (I've even heard rumours that this company I work for manufactures clothing for Asda George). Yet the prices of the products we sell are about four times the price of equivalent products in those stores. You've got to wonder where people's brain disappear to when they go shopping.

The computer systems in the shop where I work are so retarded. Doing computer science, one of the biggest things to think about when making a user-friendly interface is "all actions should be reversible (to a point, at least)". And the systems at my chain of shops throw this principle out of the window. You make a slightest mistake on the tills(scanning an item twice, or a customer changing their mind about something), and it requires a ridiculous amount of paperwork (from the fuckwit managers, or course) to set right.

Of course, I've writen on some of this aforementioned paperwork my views on the spastic nature of the computer systems, but the only feedback that was forthcoming was that my comments were not very professional in tone...

So here's how to solve the problems in retail:

- stop women from being able to attain managerial positions. Seriously, it's not like it's sexist or anything. We gave the whole equal rights thing a go, it didn't work, so let's let go of that. Or alternative, give them all counselling so they're not half as bitchy.
- ditch the 80's computer systems, get with the times. Why not a real-time stock control system? Come on what is this shit?

Problems solved. I really should have been in bed two hours ago, early start tomorrow! Customers to serve and whatnot!

22 Dec, 2006

So, it's a couple of days before Christmas. The world seems to be setting itself right. Our former music teacher Mr "Caudle-Wood" is going to be spending his Christmas behind bars, his days of kiddy-fiddling are long over and he's about to become somebody's wife in jail.

It was clear that when he was teaching us his mind was always somewhere else, now we know where it was. Perhaps imagining the entire class nude? No wonder he couldn't teach us the majors, he was too busy concentrating on the minors.

Oh I have loads of those jokes up my sleeve? Hell yeah. What's mr woods' tongue's favourite type of chords? School kids' vocal chords! What's mr wood's type of musical texture? Homophonic! Where does mr wood take his kids for inappropriate activities? His A flat! Sorry, I'm going to stop there...

Now if only they'd dig up dirt on the rest of my poor teachers. And even the university lecturers. Yes, and all the foreign ones they employ who speak no English. Please, dig up dirt on all of them and the world will be right.

19 Dec, 2006

What better way to start my technical section than to compare two obsolette products?

So I've recently replaced my Abit KV8 motherboard with an ECS 755-A2.

It's not an upgrade, it's a replacement. Maybe even a downgrade. I can't afford a proper upgrade at the moment: maybe when I finish uni and start work! Obsolete socket 754 boards are in short supply, there was very little choice. But thankfully it was not a bad choice.

Whilst inferior in specification, the ECS board is far superior in one thing: it's not complete crap like the Abit.

The Abit gave me nothing but problems from day one.

When first putting the memory in the board, I came across a fault with it. The tension on the CPU caused the board to warp a little, so the memory wouldn't go in straight.

The temperature sensor was completely inaccurate and set off the warning alarm.

The USB ports were incompatible with most USB devices, and I had to purchase a seperate USB PCI card. Running a USB2 tv card bluescreened my computer.

The board caused problems with my graphics card, the AGP 8x card had to be run and 4x to make it stable some of the time. It still crashed intermittently and couldn't handle a real game.

Whilst some new drivers appeared on the internet, none of them solved any of these problems leaving me with a very unreliable piece of shit for a computer.

Let me say, in contrast the cheapo ECS is a beautiful piece of technology. Never before has my out-of-date computer been so stable, so quiet, and so reliable. Sure, it has its quirks: not auto-detecting the floppy drive had me baffled for about an hour.

So, no longer do I have gigabit lan (who needs it anyway?). No more SPDIF (I could have it, if only I could find a PCI bracket to connect to the board) and no more dual channel memory. But hello, stability, I've been looking for you for a long time. But at least I have a parallel port again now, if only I had something to plug into it.

Never again will I (knowingly) buy an Abit product. Never again will I buy a board with a Via chipset. I don't know who'se to blame. But you've both made my list.

Anyone want an Abit KV8?

19 Dec, 2006

Things are weird being home again. There seems to be no purpose other than to work, pay off credit card and overdraft and pay for Christmas. The first term at university is always the longest and most financially hard hitting. Surprisingly, I have managed to have quite a quiet time at uni and concentrate on my grades. The fun of first and second year seems to be a distant memory, I wish it could be the same it just isn't. Is it because of the people I'm living with? Maybe. Though I will say this: all over the board everyone seems to have grown up and stopped caring about things like, oh, fun.

Thank god for one soul who's taken it upon herself to keep me entertained this term. Without her I would have been bored stiff.

So there's not much left to do than work and get money in. I will revise, as soon as I get used to the new schedule of working again.

Last time I was home, I was dealing with issues that made my life look like a scene from Chasing Amy. I found out some things about myself I didn't like, and was genuinely surprised about things I liked and others didn't. I found that I can accept pretty big things but I will still try and change people. I kept quiet on this blog, if only to avoid questions on this matter. Happily, certain people have moved on now and I will not have to worry about awkward encounters.

As always, I won't let it bring me down. I have enough faith that everything will turn out good. Everything happens for a reason, each emotional experience effects the psyche in a new and marvellous way and prepares for more of the same.

In somewhat related news. In an effort to understand addiction, I stopped biting my nails. Yep, I think. If I can stop biting my nails, which is a 6+ year habit, then you fucking smokers can stop smoking. I guess this was something that came out of an encounter with someone, I wanted to win this argument on some level, even if I only manage to convince myself.

I never will post the song I wrote on September 7th. That was the product of a mood I was in at the time and it was my effort to empathyse with a particular mindset. It was also terrible.

7 Sep, 2006

One thing I promised myself was that I'd write a song before the summer is over. I haven't done this yet, and with 2 days to go I'd better get my ass in gear. Therefore I'm going on an emo walk with my notepad and pen and I'm gonna get some good material. May report back later, depending on what the song is like!

2 Sep, 2006

Life is very much back to normal and very much chaotic at the same time. I haven't been bored, really, but I have. The sun is shining, but it keeps on raining. I have been working lots but don't seem to have very much money to splash around. I haven't been blogging because I've been busy, and not busy too. Like always. You should know better than to expect a regular blog from me, anyway. And my thoughts are very unorganised today. I'm not too sure what I'm going to say in this blog just yet. Sometimes I sit down to write one of these and it flows, at the moment it feels like an essay. Maybe it's because I'm out of practice. Maybe it's because I'm on my parent's computer and the chair isn't as comfortable.

Wednesday night was funny, going out with people from work. I seem to have lost my suit jacket, oh never mind. It was only the Matalan ripoff of Armani - Armando! Anyways, I had a good time and was quite drunk. And Moda seems to have photographic evidence of this too. My colleagues are certainly not a normal bunch, either, it turned out to be a bizarre and unplanned night. But at least it ended with the traditional pizza, a margharita with sweetcorn and pineapple. A fine choice, even though it was not purchased from the traditional outlet that would be Pan Pizza!

It was my last day at work today. Wish I could say I'm going to miss it, but I'm not. At. All. Some of the people there I'd consider friends now, and yeah I shall hope to see them around. Here's just a few things I won't miss:

• tidying the shop after (generally fat) customers walk around knocking clothes on the floor
• dealing with the aforementioned customers when they decide to buy the unattractive clothes that they managed to avoid knocking onto the floor
• again dealing with those customers when they decide they don't like the unattractive clothes that they bought. If you don't like it, then why the fuck did you buy it you stupid cow. And yes, on the way back from the till they again manage to create another carpet of clothing.
• managers who talk to you like you're a 5 year old.
• going out for a drink and listening to hours upon hours of shop politics. None of you cunts are important, just get the fuck along. At the end of the day I go into work, do my work and get out of there.
• working!

But it will be short lived, hopefully I can find another job when I got back up to scouseland. Just cos i will need the money!

All my stuff is packed for uni again, although the date I'm going up keeps changing. It started off as Saturday, then it changed to Sunday, then Tuesday, now Monday. Wish my parents would make their damn mind up. And the mode of transport has changed too. I'm going up on the train now.

My cousin's wedding was good, once you avoid the crazy adopted cousins, the rude cousins, and the posh and smartarse cousins. Another thing to be avoided was the pricey drinks from the posh hotel. Fuck you, Marriott. We went to the bar across the road and got drinks for a third of the price. You didn't get any of our money, you greedy cunts. Beth's already blogged the exploits, I'm not going to.

I've been rediscovering the joys of old Pro Logic now that my 5.1 surround system at home has packed up. I'd get a new one, but it's not really worth it for a while as I'm going to uni soon. Every year I say, next summer I'll get a decent setup and it never happens. This time round I'll say, when I get a proper job and my own place I'll get a decent setup. Until then, it'll be pro logic and a 14in tv all the way.

I have to sign off now, my parents keep walking through the door and putting me off. Lately I've reached an impasse with this blog. I'm limited in what things I can say, when this was meant to be a personal blog. Yet somehow having people read it makes me want to reveal less secrets. I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to offend anyone. But I'll continue in the same vein and see how it goes.

12 Jul, 2006

Well, today people have been treating me like shit so I can only conclude it must be International Asshole Day. So, have a good one.