Archive for May, 2009

Failing the NCT

May 11th, 2009

While I was at the wedding on Saturday, I got a text message.

It was from the NCT, to remind me that my car was to be tested first thing today, Monday.  And when I say ‘first thing’, I mean first thing.  The bastards wanted me to be there before half eight, for fuck’s sake!

I had forgotten all about it.  Normally, I would get Spanner to give it the once over but he was busy yesterday recovering from a hangover so I decided I would have to wing it.

I left the house this morning, and while I was driving up towards Dublin, I began to have second thoughts.  I hadn’t even opened the bonnet of the car or checked the oil in about eighteen months, and these tests are fucking expensive.  So I stopped off and ‘borrowed’ a new car from the forecourt of a garage that looked exactly like mine and switched the number plates.

I rolled into the car test centre full of confidence and handed it over. 

I got myself a coffee from a vending machine.  I ordered a white coffee with sugar and got a black unsweetened paper cup full of something that tasted like used sump oil, which it probably was.  Fail.

Eventually they drove the car out and gave me the result.  Fail.

Apparently they were worried about the radio being tuned to the wrong station and the back seat was the wrong colour, or something.  So I thanked them very much and told them I would fix it.

I went back to the garage and switched cars [and number plates] again, and then went back to the test centre.

They checked it again.  Fail.

I asked them what was wrong this time, and they said I hadn’t removed the hubcaps.  I suggested very calmly and politely that they could remove them, but they said they didn’t have the right tools.  So while the bloke was standing there, I prised the hubcaps off with my car keys.  I think he was a little embarrassed by that, because he gave me the pass certificate on the spot.

To cut a long story short, the car is parked out the front of the house now.  It has a little scrap of paper in the windscreen saying it is grand until 2011.

That little scrap of paper cost me a lie-in and €50.

NCT?

Fail.

fail

The Wedding

May 10th, 2009

I confess that it is quite some time since I was at a wedding.

Apparently the ceremony is full of new traditions.  Now I always assumed that a tradition was something that has been done for generations, but it seems that the modern wedding ceremony is full of traditions that were dreamt up in the last week or two.

I don’t know whether it is a modern tradition or not, but I was a little surprised when in the middle of the proceedings, the priest gave a Nazi salute [complete with a ‘Heil Hitler’] and then went on to extol the virtues of the Third Reich uniforms.  I don’t remember any mention of that being introduced into the wedding ceremony, but who am I to argue?

A few minutes after that, I swear I heard the priest signing the happy couple into the Roman Legions and pledging allegiance to the Emperor, but I may have been mistaken.

The main thing though is that TAT finally signed that bit of paper.  It has taken a few years, and a lot of persuasion, but he has finally done the honourable thing, so I suppose I can give him those negatives now.  I have no further use for them, though I have kept a couple of copies, just as proof that it is possible to do that to a goat.

There were a couple of anxious moments where the whole thing went belly-up, such as the time near the beginning when TAT did a runner.  Our K8 was a little anxious until we managed to find him hiding in the graveyard.

waiting

The bridesmaid was TAT’s sister, Loopy Loo.  She was a bit hyper before the wedding but we managed to get her sedated and sobered in time, so that was all right.

loopyloo

For some unknown reason, TAT and the Best Man turned up wearing skirts.  I think it may have been a ploy to allow him to run faster, but that didn’t work.  I had to ask The Question though, and apparently they do.

underwear

TAT’s biker friends all behaved themselves impeccably.  Until they got drunk, that is.  When we left the pub, it was burning merrily and even as I write, I can see the smoke rising beyond the hills.

Herself took a photograph of me after we got home.  I was proud of the fact that I managed to drive that distance with a pint of Guinness in my hand, without spilling a drop.

fireside

Incidentally, she has asked me to point out that the underwear belongs to Cousin Stacey and not her.

But seeing as we don’t have a Cousin Stacey, I think you can draw your own conclusions.

I’m free

May 9th, 2009

I won’t be around today.

Having successfully traded my daughter on the open market, I’m off to the signing off ceremony.

Major celebrations.

She is TAT’s headache now.

It has started

May 8th, 2009

I was out yesterday, and I noticed that the election posters have started growing in the hedgerows again.

We have the usual clatter of gobshites hoping to be elected in our area.  I don’t know where they come from but they are all as thick as each other.  We have the usual Fianna Fáilers, Fine Gaels, Labourites, Greens and Independents.  And Mad Miley.

They all promise the sun, moon and stars before an election.  Once the election is over, we never see them again apart from the odd postcard from Thailand or somewhere where they are supposed to be on a fact finding mission.  There isn’t one of them that I would piss on if he were on fire.  Except maybe Mad Miley.

Mad Miley stands in every election, whether it’s local, national, European or for membership of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.  I admire him for his persistence.  His usual platform is for the repeal of the bestiality laws and equal rights for hamsters.  He’s a bit strange.  He always does very well in every election simply because people refuse to vote for the other candidates.  Unfortunately, he always seems to find some way of disqualifying himself, usually by failing to declare that he has done fifteen years in a mental institution and that he hasn’t got his discharge papers yet.

I like the election posters.  I like the way they are less prone to melt when there is rain.  You see, they make excellent targets for practice, and I can guarantee that within days, there will be banks of them up the top valleys, peppered with buckshot and bullet holes.  Of course, using election posters for targets has the added advantage of training us for when the real thing comes around.

My area is a five seat constituency, and usually there are between twenty and thirty candidates for those five seats.  By the time the election comes around, there are usually only five or six candidates left alive, which makes voting quite easy.  I suppose you could call it the ultimate democracy?  Nobody has the heart to take a pot shot at Mad Miley so he always lives to fail to be elected.

I suppose they will start knocking on doors soon?  I will let Herself deal with them.  She has been off the Prozac for the last two weeks since I hid the tablets, so she is raring to go.

I hid Sandy’s dog food too.

It should be fun.

How slow can a man get?

May 7th, 2009

I am sick and tired of the Interweb.

I started to write this morning, and being the conscientious bloke that I am, I decided to research my material.  I went searching the Interweb.

Fucking forget it.

I kept getting blank screens, and when I wasn’t getting blank screens I was getting messages like “Google.ie cannot be found.  Are you sure the site exists?” or some such shite.

This has been going on for a couple of months or more now, and I am really getting pissed off.

I went to test my Interweb speed, just in case.  I couldn’t load the fucking site!  Eventually I managed to load it and came up with the results that I expected.


Click to embiggen 

I then tried another site.  It came up with exactly the same figures.  So I tried testing with some foreign servers.  Same result.  For once, my connection is fine, and my service provider has once again escaped a pleasant little chat on the phone.  This annoys me because I like to know where the problem is so that I can eat the balls off complain to them.

If I make any mistakes in this bit of a scribble, I am not going to correct them.  Why?  Because it will take me ten minutes to log into the site.  It will take another fifteen minutes to get the page up to edit it.  Then it will take another twenty minutes to save it again.

My Google Feed Reader is hopeless too.  If I click on a link to see what little gems of wisdom you have all been imparting, all I get is a blank screen.  There again, maybe it’s because you have been writing nothing? 

This morning I tried to download a simple filthy perverted hard core update file and it took about twenty minutes.

I have tried everything.

I have talked nicely to my laptop, even though that is against my principles.  I sacrificed a virgin [and it took me weeks to find one of those].  I even paid my bill for my connection and that really went against the grain.

I want this fixed.  What’s more, I want it fixed now.

Or heads are going to roll.

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