Customer Service Shenanigans

It used to be said that the customer is always right. These days I'm convinced it's being said that the customer is a chump. A bit of respect, please?

I used to try to be a bit considerate about them, having worked in customer service myself, but eventually I came to the conclusion that people who can't or won't do their job and make no effort to be helpful deserve what they get, and if they annoy me I give them Hell. And nothing annoys me more than dun dun dunnnn...

Pirhana Pedicure

RE: the change in my profile description, when friends came round for pizza and a chat last night, one of them, Tom, was amused when I told him about this blog after hearing about the fish pedicure treatment thingy you can get in the Arndale Center, Manchester. The conversation turned from a rather horrible-sounding beauty/pamper treatment option to what would happen if a Kingsian event* occurred while someone's foot was in the bowl.

Seven gloaty Songs For Nadia

My friend Nadia is a teacher in a London school. Since she started there, she has been tormented by this bullying fiend of a woman who seems more like a German football player at an international match than a teacher. She dives like Tom Daley, is what I'm saying, and she does this to get sympathy. That, and her PHD in BS and her gold medal in Olympic-standard delusions of grandeur have wound her colleagues up no end... to her utter surprise.

Anyway, when Nadia phoned me today for our regular gossip-fest, it was to tell me she felt bad that this ridiculous figure of fun had gone the extra mile in Advanced Douchebaggery and actually did herself out of her job. Let's call this sad sack Elaine.

Elaine, also a teacher, wanted a more highly paid position in the school and had convinced herself that they simply couldn't do without her, so she hatched the maddest plan ever to get herself a promotion: she went up to the head and handed in her notice. Yep, she honestly believed that the head would offer to give her anything she wanted and beg her to stay on, the idea being that Elaine would then graciously accept the new, better position. Can you see how this ends?

Yes, dear readers, to everyone's amusement (apart from Elaine's), she handed in her notice and the head just accepted it. No begging, no pleading, no suicide threats or emotional blackmail. Elaine was aghast. To make things worse, it seems she hasn't even lined up a new job. She was counting on the headmistress begging her to stay and offering her the job she wanted as a bribe. Well, she didn't. At this point, it gets ridiculous because Elaine then staggers out all shellshocked and everything, and falls over conveniently in front of the staffroom, which she then enters in a bid to get some sympathy. Which doesn't happen. Elaine then slinks away with her tail between her legs.

Nadia tells me she feels a bit guilty for gloating, but after all Elaine has done to undermine her, I think she's entitled, and have compiled a list of songs to play on her ipod for a guilt-free gloat.

Counting down, Top of the Pops style, from number seven:

7. Leaving Me Now - Level 42


6. I'm Free - The Soup Dragons


5. Unbelievable - EMF


4. I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down - Paul Young


3. Stupid Girl - Garbage


2. This Is The Day - The The


1. Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead - Wizard of Oz (original)

Link to video.

Gloat away, love. Gloat away. Here oop north, I'm gloating, too.

Frustratophone

My friend Nadia is being driven nuts by what can best be described as a Frustratophone. It all started innocently enough when she was offered a new phone by the people running her mobile phone contract, and she accepted it, as you do. The trouble with Nadia is that she's fussy, especially where phones are concerned.

She hates slider phones because if you leave them open for too long, they get stuck in that position (not an experience I've had, to be honest) and button phones annoy her by calling people unexpectedly if she has one in her handbag and she jiggles it.

After exhausting the possibilities, and because she wanted the biggest screen she could get, she settled for a touch-screen like the one on the left. So it begins...

First of all, she tried to import all the information from her other phone and ended up losing all the numbers. This led to her sending me an email to get my number. Then when she called me, it got ridiculous. Every once in a while, as we were yakking away, I'd hear a beeping sound. "Nad?" 

"I'm here."

"What's the beeping?"

"The phone. I don't know why it does that."

After a while the sound of her voice faded out. "Nad?"

"Wendy?"

"Nad, are you there?"

Just at the point of switching off the phone, the volume comes back up. "Sorry, Wendy, I'd brushed it. This darn thing is much too sensitive."

Great. So there's a good chance that, one day while she's walking along with it jiggling about in her handbag, it could end up dialling the speaking clock in Hong Kong and she'd be unaware of this until she got the bill. I mean, this thing freaks if she as much as breathes on it. So much for the wonders of technology.

Well that raises the spectre of the new phone I'm due to get from my contract supplier. Last time they called me to offer me a free new phone, I told them I wanted one the size of a half brick with decent-sized buttons because I'm not a flippin' Hobbit. I want to be able to see and touch one button at a time without the aid of a magnifying glass, is what I'm saying.

They sent me a slide-phone. The buttons are tiny. I avoid sending texts because the effort to type them is a flippin' ordeal. The buttons are tiny and don't always work when you press them. Or they do something unexpected. It took ages to work out how to get rid of that awful predictive text. I absolutely loathe that feature. 

So now, thanks to Nadia, I know to avoid the touch-screen ones unless they've got an option for switching off the screen touchability unless I want to use it. Otherwise I may find I've accidentally hacked into NASA while out shopping with the thing in my bag.

Group names

I've been messing about with the dictionary widget on igoogle and came across some rather funny words. What exactly is a clowder of cats? I know it's a group, but where do these words come from? And what would you call a group of nerds?


Hmm... Now I'm thinking. This is a dangerous thing. Okay, how about "a niggle of nerds"? "A program of geeks"?  "A forum of gamers"?


Can anybody think of a better term?

The dangers of rain

My friend Pamela came over today and we went to the shops, as you do. 

"What's the weather doing?" she asked. "Is it raining?"

Rain. Fear it.

An innocuous enough conversation, right? Yes, but it got a bit silly when we got outside, it was raining and the umbrella stayed up long after the soakable part was over. I mean, personally, I don't mind a bit of rain. Drizzle away, I can live with it, but must we cower in terror at the mere thought of one drop falling on our helpless, quivering forms? To quote local comic Peter Kay, "It's spitting! It's spitting! Run for your lives!"

I don't get it. Obviously when I'm actually at risk of getting wet, i.e. dripping all over the floor when I get home, that's the time I'd reach for an umbrella, but the way Pamela sees it, you'd think she was the Wicked Witch of the West and would melt if she was touched by but a drop!

While it was still pouring, I huddled with her beneath her umbrella. We walked along as if we were in a three-legged race. The umbrella is quite small so I had to stick close beside her to keep dry. We were practically tripping each other up. When it slowed to a drizzle, I got out from underneath to get my space back, but she still clung to it like grim death. It wasn't until we were safely in the shopping centre that she finally took it down. It's not as if she has a fancy hairdo that might be ruined or anything. There really is no explanation for it. I just think it's hilarious.

My psycho washing machine

Am I the only one here who's afraid of her washing machine? I know it sounds weird but mine scares the crap out of me sometimes. Allow me to explain.

The Washing Machine of Doom

Here's a picture of the culprit. Doesn't it look innocent and harmless? It is until I put some clothes in. Then the fun (for the machine) begins.

Food for thought

It lives on a diet of Persil Automatic, chenille jumpers and black socks. Why chenille jumpers? It's destroyed several of my favourites already. You can almost hear it going "Om nom nom" while it's chewing up yet another item. I have to wash them by hand. And why black socks? I've learned to use those indispensable laundry bags. Really, I can't live without them.

Revolutions

It's fine when it's just humming to itself as my clothes revolve inside it, but when it spins I'm convinced that the world is coming to an end.
 

I try to avoid spinning it any more than I can get away with. I don't mind waiting for another day for my clothes to dry. But the other half doesn't get this. He finds it unsightly to have clothes hanging on the drying racks in the hall and likes to get them out of there as quickly as he can, even if it means paying for a dryer. To save on drying costs, he sets the machine to  super-spin, and that's when all Hell breaks loose. A racket like a malfunctioning jackhammer erupts from the kitchen (where the beast has its lair), drowning out all other sounds and giving me one mother of a headache. The banging, like a thousand Hellbeasts bashing armour-plated enemies with warhammers, threatens to shake my home to its foundations and topple the tower in which I live.

There's a very real risk that the neighbours will complain -- and who could blame them? Apart from the racket there's a reasonable possibility that the vibrations could do damage to something... or the damn thing could explode. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. I am surprised that I haven't had a visit from Plod, an outraged neighbour or someone from the council to complain about the unholy cacophony.

So there you go: I'm probably the only person you know who is afraid of her washing machine.

Memories

This is one of those things that are off the telly and shouldn't actually work in real life because it's that flippin' weird. I mean, seriously, it's controversial and has apparently been proved to be utter nonsense on many occasions. On that basis, it can't be actually real, right? Uh, no. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

Mogrophobia*

What cats look like to Caroline.

This friend of mine -- let's call her Caroline, came to my house one day, and to be polite, I offered her a cup of tea. My favourite mug, the one with the kitten, I kept for myself, but when she saw me approach with it, she said, "That's not for me, is it?"

"No," I replied, and gave her the one with the comedy dinosaur. "Why?"

"Try not to laugh," said Caroline, "but I'm terrified of cats."

"That's not quite as weird as the woman who is terrified of Daleks," I reassured her. "Do you know why?"

She couldn't tell me. The first significant memory she has of freaking out at the sight of a cat was when she was on holiday and felt. Something. Strange. She looked beneath her deck chair. A cat! She screamed and ran back to her hotel room. Seriously. The weirdest thing for her was that she had always liked kitties before. It's just that something she could not explain had made her fear them so much she couldn't bear to be in the same room as one.

The theory

Naturally I thought there was probably a rational explanation such as weather balloons or counter-currents to explain this but gentle probing revealed nothing. Caroline had no idea why she was absolutely crap-your-knickers terrified of cats. Apparently it's better these days: she can bear to sit three feet away from a mug with a picture of a sleeping kitten printed on it. That's when I suggested that a repressed memory might be the cause of a fear that she couldn't explain.

We discussed it a few times with no light being shed on the subject and the more she told me, the more I was convinced that she was repressing something -- based on stuff I half-remembered from television shows. One episode of Law and Order or CSI Something-or-other (one without that prat who takes his shades off dramatically. I think it was the one with Jerry Orbach. You know, the dad from Dirty Dancing. Him.) came to mind, to wit, the one where some girlie shot and killed her own father because some deranged counselor told her he'd abused her and other members of her family (although he had done no such thing) and she had repressed the memories because it was all so vile and puke-worthy. It reminded me to not put ideas into Caroline's head and insist I was right, but to let her find out by herself by looking over the past few years and coming to her own conclusions.

The twist in the tail tale

I thought nothing of it for a while, and a few times when she came to my house again I hardly mentioned it. Then one day she came to see me and was excited to tell me that she'd worked out why she was so scared of cats that if you gave her a mug with a cat printed on it, she'd get all queasy and refuse to drink from it. Naturally, I was curious and eager to hear her story.

Caroline told me she had told her family and friends that I'd said she was probably suppressing a memory and one of them sat her down to tell her why I was right.

It seems that, a few years ago when Caroline was driving along a street near where she lived, a cat ran out in front of her and she couldn't brake in time. A considerate and law-abiding person, she stopped and went to check on the animal. It was twitching in its death throes and there was nothing she could do. She called the police to report the incident and went on her way. Then she blocked it so completely that she never even thought of it again. When her nephew confirmed this, memories of that day floated back and now she has full technicolour recall of the incident.

Confounded, I could think of nothing to say for a while, then I confessed that I was guessing about the whole suppressed memory thing and didn't actually take it seriously.

"But why am I afraid of them?" she asked, evidently seeing me as a fountain of knowledge.

"Guilt, I suppose," I replied, as the fountain of lucky guesses and half-remembered snippets of television programmes. "I suppose you're half expecting the Vengeful Cat From Beyond The Grave to appear one night and claim your soul or something."

She didn't think that was funny but conceded that I had a point.

Deep down, I think it would be rather cool if a Giant Zombie Cat came back from the grave to avenge its bretheren. Someone has got to make a film about that. But don't tell Caroline.

* Aw come on, it sounds better than Ailurophobia, doesn't it? No? But it's easier to say!