...and compulsory hard-labour sentences issued for stupidity would be nice too.
Now, contrary to popular belief, I am not a violent man. Truly, I am not. I am driven to it however by excessive amounts of stupidity. Lazy selfishness, and generally lack of awareness in others except of anything other than one's own anus as though it were the center of the Universe.
Let me highlight a few examples that occurred in the past week.
Pret a Manger Server in Training.
So we have a server in training. Yes I understand that it's a minimum wage job where you have to wear a uniform so basically your intellectual potential has to be marginally above that of lobotomised clam in order to get the job, nevertheless, we can train monkeys to recognise certain sounds and press appropriate buttons so this should not be beyond the range of capabilities of your average Pret a Manger server.
And of course I understand that some of these poor souls only speak a local dialect of Serbo-Croat accompanied by gesticulations and much face-slapping. In fact I am happy to help with the face slapping really. Because surely to God it should not take 15 minutes to get me a damned cappucino. I picked the rest of the stuff I want myself and it's in front of you. It's not that hard. Punch the button for each corresponding item. Add a cappucino. Tell the guy behind you to make it. Hand it over.
Surely, even if you hailed from the same Taliban cave that Bin Laden uses you have actually been inside and used one of these places. Because Osama himself uses US made dyalisis machines and these are a little harder to come by than a McDonalds. So you should have a vague idea of the process.
What you do not do is punch in half the items, forget which ones you did after you come back from a sudden interruption you just had without prompting or explanation to anyone (violent diarrhea? Memory loss? Schizophrenic surge?) then re-type in half of them, forget the cappuccino, try to give me a black coffee and then repeat the price to me 4 times as though I was deaf or actually not paying.
I mean, ok...so she's in training. So for fuck's sakes...somebody please train her! Christ. Or just at least do a basic "is she on heavy drugs/insane/less capable than a lobotomised clam" Q&A evaluation form.
Or hire a chimp. At least I'd get a laugh out of a chimp even if he overcharged me for cappucino and made it frothy instead of wet. Because he sure as fuck wouldn't get it wrong past that. And I could live with that. From a chimp.
The general staff of the estate agents we used to move.
Really good at getting me the kind of place I wanted.
Also really good at not giving me a damn thing as soon as I paid the deposit. Including two full sets of keys, a garage door opener, getting the tap fixed, or even giving me a copy of the lease I signed. In about 6 weeks.
This prompted a letter from me to them. It discussed at some length (and I quote myself) my not being born a sarcastic pain in the rectum but being made into one. Also how if they thought I was a pain in the rectum now, they would have a whole new dimension of idea about that come Friday if the whole list of items hadn't been taken care of, since it is my clear and expressely stated intention to then take care of all said items myself, and charge them for my time. Which is quite expensive and I have proved in court before and am very willing to do again, after I stop paying rent until the landlord shows up on my door step, at which point I'll settle with him directly thank you very much.
I did get a nice e-mail back telling me I would be contacted by the end of the day. So let's see.
The disgusting turd at Waterstones Jubilee place working there yesterday afternoon.
The fuckwit with the beard and the finger in his nose. This fuckwit personified everything I hate about humans in one person pretty much. Excepting child raping and a few other choice behaviours I am not absolutely certain he exhibited.
I bought a couple of books and fuckwit rings them up while actively picking his fucking nose. Being too oblivious, half-witted, lazy and self-engrossed to understand that placing his snot over my just purchased book is not what I consider an added bonus.
I was however surpised with myself. Normally I would have had a marginally higher blood pressure after eviscerating the idiot. But I actually remained calm, simply wiped down the books when I got home with a bacterial wipe and then contemplated this whole regimen of incopetence and ineptitude. It reminded me of the futuristic Graphic Novel featuring Marsha Washington. Google it. Read it. The subtext of ever increasing human incompetence is disturbingly realistic.
I mean, short of public executions for stupidity this situation is not going to get better. I am therefore planning to have an island getaway in preparation for stage one of the annexation of this crappy planet. World domination requires quiet contemplation free of the regular tsunamis of human stupidity I seem to encounter daily after all.
And I am not even going to talk about my job and the examples there. But trust me. That specially bred Pret server? She has relatives all over the planet. And I work(ed) with many of them.
Now, while professionally my preferred method of dispute resolution would actually be this:
when it comes to intimate relationships, this song describes it perfectly.
And Redhead Girl has this attitude etched in her woman's soul.
For which I am grateful to whatever Gods may exist.
This one's for you.
So the plan was to pack Saturday and move on Sunday.
Sunday comes along and I take the first of two furniture units down to the lobby. I come back up in the elevator and when i step out of it nearly go through the window in the corridor because the thing has actually stopped about a foot higher than the floor and I stepped out of it without noticing (because you sort of expect lifts to stop level in general!)
Needless to say the lift is now screwed. We call out the emergency repair guy who takes an hour to get to our place then after a quick investigation proclaims that it's a "worst case scenario really".
According to him, the lift expert, the whole memory unit of the lift is shot and it's not even from the UK but maybe Italy or Portugal or Spain and the lift has no way of re-setting itself without this board being replaced. Which will take at least a week no matter what.
So we are basically fucked and together with one poor Brazilian guy who actually showed up to help us move (man with a van) despite being told the problem we moved the entire contents of the flat out from the fifth floor.
Redhead Girl was actually heroic throughout the whole thing. That girl has an organisational ability that is quite superior to my own and while I have moved now 42 times in my 40 years of life (not joking) she moved 5 times in 2 years so we're both pretty expert at it by now.
Even so I did not plan to take things down five flights of staris for 4 hours straight. With a fever on top of it which just added to the fun when I got the sweats and chills.
At one point my neighbour Lee (Lee Hurst the comedian was my neighbour for 3 years) offered to help and I asked if he was actually serious. Redhead Girl asked if he knew "it was not a joke!" but to his credit the man helped us for about an hour.
I told him I wasn't sure if I had been a good neighbour or if he was or if maybe he hated my guts and couldn't wait to see me on my way, but whatever it was I was grateful. It needs to be addd that Lee has asthma. Not that I knew, coming down the stairs with yet another box of heavy books I saw him a couple of flights below me take a quick pause to use his inhaler. Just once in a while a human does something like this that gives me hope for the whole planet.
The Brazilian guy missed the start of the Brazilian Grand prix, which he wanted to see to help us deliver the stuff to the new place. He was contracted to get £60, but I gave him £100, since without him it would have been only so much worse.
Redhead Girl packaged most of our crap in a way that was novel but very efficent for me. I am used to moving from one African home to another mostly and generally you need to pack your crap into bomb-proof crates to ensure at least 50% of it gets to the destination. Redhead Girl on the other hand put everything in big IKEA-like bags and it worked faster at both ends. She also put up with my grumpy, sweaty, fevered ass, and carried a fair load of crap up and down stairs too, so yeah...as soon as we're settled in properly I'll have to think of a good thing for her.
This is what our new place still looks like because of course along with all this move comes the busiest time I have ever had in the last 6 years probably. Even the toy duck looks wasted.
People calling me and relying on me for all sorts of martial arts related stuff. Work kicking into high gear as we're reaching the end of a pretty intense process and people near and far inviting me to all sorts of things I can't really say no politely to, like their birthdays, house warmings, grandmas dying (not really but you get the idea).
So much so the EXTRA-stuff begins to conflict. For example, this next Sunday we were supposed to go see a friend of mine I have not seen in years but I also just got told that someone has organised for a magazine interview for the Martial art stuff I do and could I please be along as I am the instructor for it.
And tomorrow I am supposed to go to another dear friend's birthday party but also i have to take care of my new work related stuff i have been ignoring for too long. And yeah, our new home still looks like you saw above. I.e. a bomb shelter. That has received multiple direct hits.
I also have to go over to the old place tonight to hand over the keys and do the inventory and hopefully not get ripped off and get my deposit back in full since i took the trouble to hire not one but TWO professional cleaners. Mainly because the big furniture could not be managed down the stairs so Redhead Girl is going there a couple of hours before me with yet another man and van to get the last bit out. We've both been on 13-18 hour days for a couple of weeks now and basically i can't wait for the end of all this stuff.
Which is why I have been lax on the blog readers.
And just so you know....when I got to the office on Monday the lift THERE was out. And guess which floor the office is on? Yup. The fifth.
And when I returned to the old flat to finish up the last bits....yup. The lift was working perfectly. Seems the lift expert of Sunday was just another lazy, incopetent, arse-sucker who couldn't be bothered to know how to do his actual job when it's apparently easier to blame it on "cheap parts from them foreign countries".
So yeah. But apart from that, everything is going just swimmingly.
And I can't wait for my job to end...it continues to get extended and frankly I am just over it now and it needs to stop, despite the money being good of course.
If all the cyclists and all the smokers just suddenly died it would be a better world.
I'm thinking like a really short version of Flash-Forward, that cool new series...only not a series, more like a single pilot that lasts about 12 minutes.
Every stupid ass cyclist (that's 93.7%) of them and every single smoker (because smokers are all definitely dumb fucks) just keels over and dies.
We would still have to deal with their putrifying remains of course, but it would be a small price to pay for the sudden spike up of the average human IQ of some 30 points.
The 12 minute documentary would end with an ominous hint that if the flash-death happens again politicians and bankers would be next.
