Archive for November, 2011

Bang bang

November 30th, 2011

I am sick of this fucking Euro crisis.

It’s all we hear about on the news these days.

The cunts in Brussels reckon they have a solution though, but it will mean total control over every European country’s budget.

Of course this is all but the final step in the path towards a United States of Europe.  Presumably they want something along the lines of what they have over in America.

Well, I will agree to this and vote yes on any treaty change they want, with one little proviso.

If they want this to be same as America then all I want is another little thing they have over there.

The right to bear arms.

Fair’s fair.

Bang, bang.

Another financial crisis

November 29th, 2011

I have a bank account with Ulster Bank.

While offshore accounts have their advantages, I need a local account for such mundane things as paying bills, and Ulster suits my purposes.

I have had a reasonably good relationship with them for the thirty or so years I have been with them, apart from one period when I had a right little cunt of a manager, but that’s another story and he is long gone now.

I received a letter from them a couple of weeks ago.  My Mastercard apparently has lost its Triple A rating.  I don’t know if it was Standard and Poors or Moody’s that downgraded me but I was flattered to think I was up there with the worst.  Leastwise I could now only overdraw to €500.  That didn’t bother me as I rarely use the card and pay it off each month.  I only really use it for Interweb transactions.

I got a letter from them yesterday.

Please contact my office urgently at 01 7025257 to discuss your account.

Fair enough.  It was urgent so after I got up this morning, I only had a couple of mugs of tea before phoning them.  Urgent does after all mean urgent. 

I dialled the number.  I got one of those horrendous systems where a recorded voice tries to steer me through a fucking “Press 1 for whatever” system.  One of the first things she wanted to know was my card number.  Have you ever tried typing a credit card number into a phone keypad?  It’s not easy and on the fifth attempt I got through.  More menu options.  Fuck!

To cut a long story short, I went thorough all the options that might possibly lead to a chat with a bit of flesh and blood, but there was no way the system was going to allow that.  I hung up.

That word “urgent” was still at the forefront of my mind so I phoned the number on the letterhead.  I was asked by a recorded voice to hold until someone was available.  Fair enough. I waited.  Then it started rabbiting on about “if you talk to one of our representatives the call may be recorded”.  If?  What do they mean – if?  It transpired that they weren’t kidding.  They hung up on me before I could get to speak to anyone. 

So…..

If there is anyone out there from Ulster Bank, could you please contact my office urgently?

At least I will have the courtesy to abuse you in person.

A rip off

November 28th, 2011

Somewhere in Saudi Arabia a teacher has given out an essay.

The title of that essay?

“The pros and cons of getting older”

And how do I know all this?  Heh!  Because the lazy little bastards have spent the last few days frantically scouring the Interweb looking for a ready made one and a lot of them are ending up here.  Lazy little fuckers!

It got me thinking though.  Presumably all over the world, teachers are handing out essays.  Presumably the kids are just going to scour the Interweb and print out someone else’s hard work.  What can the teacher do about it? If the brain dead kid in the class [there is always one] produces an essay with perfect syntax, spelling and grammar alarm bells would ring, but what about the other kids?  Does teacher have to take a couple of sentences from every essay and search to see if he can find those sentences tucked away on a quiet server somewhere?

Maybe teachers don’t bother with essays these days?  Judging by the quality of writing on a lot of sites, they probably don’t any more.  Or maybe the kids have to write their essays on their mobile phones in txt-speak, or whatever they call it and mail them in?  If I were a teacher I would probably go high tech just to confuse them – “Write me an essay summarising the importance of each and every character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and make sure it’s in less that 140 characters.  All essays to be in via Twitter on Monday morning”.  Hah!

In the meantime some teacher in Saudi Arabia is going to get a load of essays from his pupils recounting their experiences as an old fart in the Wicklow mountains of Ireland.

I wish him luck!

Old dogs and new tricks

November 27th, 2011

I see myself as a fairly ordinary bloke.

I muddle along through life, doing the best I can and occasionally jotting my thoughts down here.  I don’t see anything extraordinary in that?

But then I come across something like this –

GET YOUR FOLKS ONLINE

Are your folks missing out because they’re not online?
Have you ever tried to help?
We know how difficult it can be!

Aha!  So that’s where I have been going wrong?  It explains one hell of a lot.  I shouldn’t be messing around here on the Interweb at all.  I have to wait until the daughter shows me how.

I will look forward to that.

So apparently she is going to teach me about “Using the mouse”?  That’s wrong for a start.  I don’t want to use the little fucker – I just want to kill it.  It has been shitting all over the place and resolutely ignoring all the traps.

Then there is “Sending an email”.  Again, that’s wrong.  I want to know how to send thousands of emails with one press of a key.  Those Viagra won’t sell themselves.

And “Shopping online”?   No, no, no!  That won’t do.  I need a course on “Stopping shopping online”.  Maybe then I could teach it to Herself.  Badly needed.  Just ask the poor postman.

Delving onto the site, I found a links page with all the links that any old fart would need.  There is a section there called “Blogs written by Older People”.  That’ll be interesting, I thought.  And what do I find in there?  Me.  Me and Grannymar.  The only two they could find?  And we are not even related?  Fuck!

So I am being held up as a beacon of light to the Old Folk of Ireland?  If that old fart can do it, then anyone can?  Hah!

In the meantime, I had better let the daughter know about this site so she can start teaching me.

Now, if only I knew how to use email………………

Willying my computer

November 25th, 2011

I was called upon to do a drop of babysitting yesterday.

Our K8 had to feck off on an urgent errand, and as usual, TAT was nowhere to be found so I was asked to look after Laughingboy and Sir Fartzalott.

For those of you who haven’t been around long, TAT [The Accidental Terrorist] is married to my daughter and therefore presumably is my son-in-law, but let’s not go there for the moment. 

I’m not used to little boys running around the place.  God bless him, but our Laughingboy never did much running around the house, being confined to a wheelchair from birth.  Little girls are no problem as Puppychild has stayed here many’s the time and of course I had all those nightmare years bringing up the daughter. 

You may ask what the difference is in a child that hasn’t even reached their second birthday, but there is a difference, and Sir Fartzalott has found it.

Obviously he has seen his sister running around in the pelt and has noticed that there is a distinct difference.  He has discovered that he has something that she hasn’t.  He has also apparently jumped to the conclusion that the reason they are different is that she is older and that therefore hers has fallen off.

Now Sir Fartzalott is worried about this.  If hers has fallen off, he has concluded that his is about to follow suit and he is determined that that isn’t going to happen.  As a result, he maintains a firm grip on it at all times.  He has become single handed, as the other hand is maintaining a firm and unyielding grip on his appendage.  It brings a whole new meaning to “getting a grip of yourself”.

At one stage during the evening he decided to climb onto the couch.  Now when you are a pint sized nipper this requires a bit of effort and is normally a two handed job.  Sir Fartzalott had a problem, because he only had one available hand.  He thought about it for a moment and decided that the best way up was to lean his top half against the couch and then to give a mighty pull to his willy to haul the lower half up.  It was a classic example of pulling oneself up by ones bootstrap.

I don’t know if you know this, but the expression “hauling up by the bootstrap” is the origin of the word “boot” in computers.  I bet you didn’t know that?  Someone obviously decided that “bootstrapping” a computer was a bit cumbersome so they shortened it to “boot”.

It occurred to me last night that but for a quirk of fate, we could all be re-willying our computers.

It makes you think.

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