Tuesday 30 September 2014

Day 64 - Nespresso

I’ve got one of those Nespresso coffee machine. Don’t judge me I got it because I thought it would make me look like George Clooney but to date not one woman has chased me in or out of the shop when I’ve been buying the capsules. 
Anyway about 3 weeks ago the bloody thing stopped working.  I cleaned it a bit too roughly and it looked like I had pressed the buttons too hard and it had become jammed. It meant that once the water started flowing, it didn’t stop (that made for a very weak cup of coffee). Judging by the amount of times George has to buy a new machine, I guessed this was a common problem and resigned myself having to replace the broken device. But a friend of mine pointed out that on their website you can contact George directly to ask for advice. I thought it was a lost cause but I sent a polite email off explaining the problem and forgot all about it.
To my amazement less than two hours after sending the email one of George’s cronies, gave me a call. He managed to explain the problem and the solution and now my Nespresso machine is as good as new. You’d think this would make me happy wouldn’t you? But I am not that easily satisfied. No, this has made me grumpy for 4 reasons.
1. George didn’t reply himself, now I know he is on honeymoon so has other things on his mind but …
2. How dare their customer service be so good, do they not know I have a grumpy blog to keep? It’s almost as if they are wilfully trying to sabotage it.
3. How stupid was I thinking that the machine running its descaling function was actually a broken machine?

4. If the solution was that simple, why had I left it 3 weeks before I sorted it out?

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Monday 29 September 2014

Day 63 - JK

Dear Twitter user XXXX, (Name withheld for legal reasons),
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my tweet, I realise that when I hit send on my tweet it goes off into the ether, potentially never to be seen again. So the fact that someone notices it and replies is a miracle in itself. You obviously found the intended humour in the tweet funny which was also pleases me greatly.
But can I maybe give you some advice? The F in WTF means F*ck. I find that swearing at strangers can be construed as being a little rude, bordering on aggressive. Your message was also full of upper case typing. I am told that using capitals can be considered as shouting, again a little rude bordering on aggressive. Therefore the humour in your reply was lost behind the façade of a little, shouty person. You finish your tweet with the term JK. Now at 43  I am not that down with the kids. I find it hard to know the difference between the aiadws and the bitds and the wmtgtfys.  Therefore I didn’t know that JK meant just kidding. To start with I thought you were referring to the lead singer of Jamiroquai. This meant your tweet just came across as aggressive and odd.
Also here’s the thing, you can’t be racist and call it banter, you can’t be sexist and call it playful and you can’t be aggressive and then qualify it with just kidding. It just doesn’t work, I’ve learnt this the hard way (the aggressive bit). People see your first action as your true action and the excuse as just that, an excuse. Try waving a gun around at an airport and then saying JK, I am not sure many people will find it funny.
So, my new found twitter friend, I hope this advice will come in useful so you will get many more followers who will see your humour and not your hostility.
TTFN

Gareth

Sunday 28 September 2014

Day 62 - High Treason

Before 1998 high treason was the only crime that still carried the death penalty in the United Kingdom. Thankfully this has been reduced to life imprisonment. This is good because I am about to  to be rude about a national treasure - the common law royal Mr Stephen Fry and if that is not modern day high treason then I don’t know what is. 
Now I don’t dislike Fry, some of his output is very good, some good and some less so, much like many people. I am not sure what he’s done to deserve the fawning, unquestioning admiration of the population of the UK, but that’s not his fault and that is not what this post is about. No, I am wondering why Mr Fry has not been arrested for drugs offences seeing as he has admitted taking class A drugs in all sorts of famous places such as the BBC and Buckingham Palace. As Barbara Ellen points out in her Observer column today Fry’s revelations are certainly designed to sell his new books, but he is admitting to a serious offence and national treasure or not, he should surely be investigated for his crimes.

This grumpy now has a part 2 click here for details. 


Saturday 27 September 2014

Day 61 Conspiracy theory

In the last week or so I have had terrible trouble typing messages and notes on my iPhone. Suddenly simple words like simple were coming out as dombljd. At first I thought it was my tiredness, or just carelessness but I pride myself on my iPhone typing. In fact I felt I could almost ‘touch text’, so my sudden inability to text was disturbing. Not only that, but I write quite a lot of my stories on the phone so not only was it disturbing, but it was also inconvenient. So clumsy was my typing I was beginning to think I was having a stroke, every other word was coming up wrong. So I looked long and hard in the mirror for other signs of illness but none were forthcoming. Then it stuck me, the new iPhone is bigger, the screen is bigger, the keyboard bigger, maybe my mind was playing tricks on me, making me think I need a bigger keyboard, I need a new phone. OR… They wouldn’t, would they? They couldn’t, could they?

Maybe Apple themselves were tricking me, maybe they sent a stealth Operating System update actually making the keyboard smaller, meaning that I made more mistakes and would want the new phone.  They wouldn’t, would they? They couldn’t, could they?

Friday 26 September 2014

Day 60 - The Ryder Cup

The Ryder Cup - according to the BBC the greatest sporting show on earth. Hmm a big claim for an event that doesn’t even get a mention on two of the biggest Czech Sports websites. So if you have no idea what the Ryder Cup is, let me fill you in before I tell you why it brings out my grumpy side. 
The Ryder Cup is a biennial golf tournament where the best male players from the USA take on the best male players from Europe. (In the dim and distant past it was from the UK not Europe but the UK golfers got trounced so many times that they had to get the rest of Europe in to bail them out.)
Now the reason the Ryder Cup makes me grumpy isn’t the hyperbole that surrounds it in the British media, or the televising of rich men walking in the countryside in those ridiculous matching uniforms occasionally thwacking a ball after hours of ponderous deliberations.
No, the cause of my chagrin is the complete hypocrisy with which the British embrace it. I am a European. I believe in the EU and being part of the EU, that seems to put me in a minority in the UK. There the general consensus is that the EU are a bunch on interfering bureaucrats who use all our money funding jollies for themselves, making our banana straight and facilitating stinking foreigners to come over to the UK and steal our jobs.  So Europe is viewed with suspicion, ambivalence or outright hatred.

Except for the three days every two years in September when the Daily Mail brigade, the Nigel Farage crew, the Tory right forget all their animosity and start waving a blue flag with 12 stars and hoping that German fella can sink the winning putt. I wonder if the EU threated to kick UK players out of the Ryder Cup team if Britain left the EU, would it change a few people’s minds. Worth a thought.