Vicola's blog

Wanker of the Week

This week's wanker is unfortunately unnamed, I have no idea who the wanker is, what the wanker looks like or why they thought their idea was a good one. This week's wanker is......the PR Pillock that informed Gordon Brown he needed to smile more in the run up to the general election. We have gone from:

Serious face

Potential leader of the UK who might be the one elected to deal with the running of the country to.....

 

Registered lunatic

Potentially dangerous lunatic who might be found running round the park with a knife and no trousers.

 

Well done Tarquin, fucking excellent suggestion. Now he actually looks as clueless as he is. I suspect Tarquin from Pretentious Prats PR might be a Conservative or Lib Dem stooge....

 

Bush_memogate

Still, at least we don't still have this amoral, slippery little twat in charge so things could be worse...

Mr Useless strikes again....

Today we have a department meeting to discuss the actions we were given for the big audit at the last department meeting a few weeks ago. We were all given pages of things to do except for Mr Useless who was given one task. One. Uno. In the singular.

This morning he swans into my office, "Did you take minutes at the last meeting?"

"No. Why would I?"

"Well it's just that I've forgotten what procedure it was I was meant to alter."

"You only had ONE thing to do!"

"But I didn't write it down and neither did you."

Of course, I'd completely forgotten that it was my responsibility to ensure a man ten years older than myself did what he was supposed to do. How remiss of me. 

Then Boss Lady comes into the office.

"Vicola, would you mind taking minutes at today's meeting because it turns out some people have forgotten what they're supposed to be doing".

So now I have to write down everything because one member of the team is too stupid to do it himself. A member of the team who, I might add, earns more than I do. Give me strength.

I can only assume that there's someone on site stood next to him all day reminding him to breath in and out on a regular basis so that he doesn't keel over and die.

 

UPDATE: Boss Lady has just sashayed into my office and informed me that I need to tidy my workspace, get a bit of feng shui going on in here. My look of incredulous rage and curt reply that between dealing with all the subcontractors, holding Mr Useless's hand through life, doing sections of Mr Useless's job because he's incapable and doing all the other work that I have to do or no one else wants to do doesn't leave me with a great deal of time to feng bloody shui the office hasn't been lost on her. She muttered something about busy, scarpered and is now avoiding me. Tidy the fucking office? Are you on glue woman? I tell you what, you give some of the shit that always gets dumped on my desk to some other poor twat to do and I'll make my office beautiful. How does that grab you?

For fuck's sakes. It's 9.30am and I require the services of a gin and tonic already.

Votes for women

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I would like to ask a question of our local MP, who is standing for re-election in the forthcoming election. why do you keep sending reams of election and campaigning material to our house addressed solely to Mr Vicola? I can think of only three possible reasons:

1) You are not aware that woman now have the vote. If this is the case let me enlighten you - back around the turn of the last century a group of determined women called the Suffragettes campaigned to ensure that women were not placed in the same voting category as minors, criminals and lunatics and were allowed to voice their views via the ballot box. Thanks to their efforts women over 30 were granted the vote in The Representation of the People Act of 1918. In 1928 this was extended to 21, the same age as men and in 1969 the voting age was lowered to 18. So there you go, we CAN now vote. You might want to spread this news throughout your party because The Brother's Wife has been irritated by the Labour candidate in her ward who is doing exactly the same thing so also obviously doesn't realise either. This gives you a whole new batch of people to aim for but since you've only got a week and a half you might want to pull your finger out of your arse and get moving. We are after all a key marginal constituency and so pissing off 50% of the residents by not acknowledging their importance may be considered a little unwise.

2) You think I'm just the little woman indoors and don't need to be targeted as I'll just vote how my husband instructs me. If this is the case I can assume that your secretary never passed on the letter I sent you about my feelings on your government's performance and the Civil Contingencies Act. Perhaps they passed it straight to MI5 to be filed under 'Dangerous Subversive', who knows? Anyway, the upshot is that I make up my own mind. Mr Vicola has long since worked out that the safest way to ensure I don't do something is to instruct me that I have to do it and it's about time you learned the same. We women are allowed to think for ourselves these days, we're even allowed to have jobs! What a brave new world of emancipation you're encountering today eh?

3) You don't give a crap how I vote. This is technically possible since your government has shown time and again that they couldn't give a flying rat's arse what the electorate thinks as they assume we all have the IQ of a polystyrene ceiling tile and are quite happy to be shafted from all directions by our ruling elite however I will point out once again that we are a key marginal constituency and so the rules of the game instruct that you have to at least PRETEND not to have utter contempt for your constituents until the polling stations close at 10pm on 6th May. Play the game sir, play the game.

Oh and if anyone from the BNP is reading this, could I please request that you send me a large box of your campaigning leaflets? They are on that non-glassy paper you see and so are superb at soaking up wee from the bottom of the guinea pig hutch, saving me the cost of buying a newspaper. Thanks.

And if anyone from the 'English Democrats' is online - If you're going to stand on a platform of 'England is great' then you need to get someone with at least a rudimatary grasp of English grammar to proof read your election leaflet before sending it to the printer. 'Form filling' is two words, not one and the guy in your party is 'Mayor OF Doncaster', not 'Mayor OR Doncaster'. Also note, the comma was created for a reason.

Emirates and the Foreign Office - somewhat less than helpful.

So, the parentals are stuck in Delhi because the Icelanders have decided to get us back for dissing their banks by opening up the earth and sending clouds of ash into our airspace, meaning all flights to and from the UK were grounded. They were meant to fly from Delhi to Dubai yesterday and then on to Manchester from Dubai. Still, when they couldn't fly they were transferred to a lovely 5 star hotel by Emirates where my mum was perfectly happy because she'd found two young travellers to look after and my dad was happy because he was drinking beer on the terrace and watching the world go by. However happiness was short-lived when a representative of Emirates arrived this morning and announced that as of midday, Emirates had discharged its duty to provide them with accomodation for 24 hours, they were now required to vacate their rooms and leave or speak to the hotel about booking in and paying for it themselves. Needless to say this went down like a lead penguin and they are now, along with the 22 other UK-bound passengers, staging a sit-it in the lobby of the Jaypee Vasant Continental. Apparently the hotel aren't that concerned because the militant holidaymakers are buying drinks however whether they'll be so cheerful about it when the sun goes down and they still refuse to move or when they've been there 3 days in the heat of Delhi and they smell like a tramp's slipper is anyone's guess. Emirates are being somewhat less than helpful. The passengers in India have been given no information other than that they definately won't be flying before the 18th April and if you try to phone Emirates you get a posh sounding chap announcing that they're very sorry but they are experiencing a high volume of calls and so you should ring back later. Helpful, thanks for that Emirates. Eventually I managed to get through to Emirates customer services and I found out something interesting - that no one in the call centre has a fucking clue what's going on or what's going to happen. In fact I knew more than they did, which seems to be a rather arse-about situation. Possibly the call centre staff should have been instructed to read the BBC News website before starting shift, since it would not have been an unreasonable guess that people might be ringing to ask about this.

Given that Emirates clearly didn't give a fuck, I decided to ring the Foreign Office for information. I got through to a posh sounding chap called Nick. I'm sure that all people who work for the foreign office are called Nick, Charles or Fiona. After hearing the explanation Nick came up with the following invaluable advice.

"Well if the airline have discharged their duty then the passengers are on their own and will have to pay for private accomodation and food until the airline will fly them back to the UK".

I explained that it was ok for those like my parents who could afford to do this but there were some young backpackers on the flight who didn't have any money. Nick didn't seem overly bothered about this, I don't think he really likes backpackers because he repeated the word as if I'd just said 'camel-turds' and informed me that they'll just have to find some cheap hotel to stay in at their own expense. Very helpful, we pay how much to have consulates across the world whose main function seems to be to tell you to fuck off and not bother them. Presumably they're too busy fantasising about the days when you were allowed to use natives as a hearth-rug and getting dressed for dinner with the colonel. They'll be sitting up and taking notice if my mother arrives at the Delhi Consulate I can tell you. My vocal abilities were inherited from a master. Currently my brother and myself are trying to figure out a way to get them back into Europe so they can travel back overland. Once that is done, I will be sitting down to write a sternly worded missive to both the foreign office and Emirates airlines. There's nothing quite like writing a sternly worded missive for warming the soul....

Low cost my arse.

The last ten or fifteen years have brought us the delight of the low cost, no frills airline, famed for their little tiny fares to exotic climes. And so it was with high expectations that I navigated my way to BMI Baby's website. Not only are they a low cost airline and so much cheaper than BA, they are also not in dispute with their cabin staff and so there's a fighting chance that my holiday to Perpignan won't be spent in the terminal at Manchester airport.

So onto the website I go and duly find that for £34 per person outward and £46 per person return me and Mr Vicola can go to Perpignan and spend a week in the sunshine sipping beer by the sea and going brown in Mr V's case and well, slightly beige in mine. Then it asks me if I want to book seats together as they can't guarantee we'll be sat together if we don't prebook the seat. Lovely idea. Except it's a further £8.50 per person per flight for ordinary seat and £11.50 if you want the seats that mean you don't have to telescopically fold your legs backwards into your body cavity to sit in the space. Fuck it, it's only an hour and a bit flight and sitting separately means we're less likely to have had a row by the time we land.

Then we get to the baggage and check in section. Do we want to check a bag into the hold? Well unless I want to be wearing the same undercrackers for a week, which I don't, then yes, a bag would be good. So I tick the '1 bag and check in' option. £18.99 per person per flight. Because of course if my bag were not in it the plane wouldn't be bothering with the hold at all, it'd just leave it on the runway. And the people without a bag don't need to check in because the magic fairies tell the airline they're on the plane so I can completely see why I have to pay extra to alert the airline to the fact I'm on their aircraft.

Then I go to pay. I'm a bit peeved at all the extra costs and the fact that the website was so slow you could almost hear the Latvian immigrants peddling in BMI headquarters to keep the servers running but it was the 'please wait for the verification page, do not hit the refresh button, it may take up to 45 seconds for your payment to process' page that really gripped my shit. At least it did once it'd been there for 15 bastard minutes. So now I don't know whether I've paid for the flights or not.

I duly look up customer services and dial the number, where I'm informed by the woman on the line that this is a premium rate number and so from a BT landline I'll be paying 65p a minute, from  my mobile the cost will be racking up faster than Tiger Woods sex stories. The automated woman then goes on to waste more time telling me about BMI's website. Well thanks for the revelation darling but if I could get the fucking website to work would I be racking up the national debt of Moldovia on this call? No madam, I would not. Eventually I get through to someone who tells me that he's sorry my transaction didn't work out and he would get a member of his team to ring me back and take the booking over the phone. Utterly mystified as to why the man on the reservations line can't make a reservation but now fortified by a stiff gin and tonic I agree. With something less than good grace.

So the lady rings me back, we go through all the tedious details I went through on the website and it comes to payment time. 

Lady: So how will you be paying? Credit or debit card?

Me: Credit card.

Lady: Well that will incur the handling fee of £4.50 per person per flight.

Me: And if I only choose to pay for one of my flights and just gatecrash the other one?

Lady: Madam must pay for both flights.

Clearly humour is not dealt with on the call centre training course.

Me: So what if I use a debit card?

Lady: That will be £3 per person per flight.

Me: So what you're saying is that there is no way I can avoid getting ripped off at payment stage? Is there any charge for paying with magic beans?

Lady: Magic beans?

Never mind. The gin and tonic is wearing off so it's time to get off the phone before I get barred from BMI altogether. So I share my credit card details with the robbing harpy on the other end of the line. 

So, bearing in mind the amount stated for each flight, £34 outward, £46 return for each of us, the final cost for us both to get to Perpignan? £336 .27.

Low cost airline my arse. I've a good mind to write them a VERY sternly worded letter.

Whne life becomes too tedious to be angry...

D'you know, usually I can find something to be annoyed about, however small, be it the uselessness of the eternally useless Useless Twat (it took me hours to come up with that nickname y'know), politicians and the fact that about the only revolting thing they haven't been caught doing is sexually interfering with a stoat during Prime Minister's Questions, the weather or other drivers. But this last two weeks, life has been so utterly tedious that I can't even get annoyed. I've filled in at least 70 million (possibly a tiny exaggeration but it's a lot) of crap subcontractor evaluation questionnaires and sent them out to people who won't bother filling them in and sending them back to me, as per our procedures. I've waded through the dullest audit report in the known universe to see what we need to address before the next world-shatteringly dull bout of paper pushing with the folks from Achilles, I've booked some courses for Useless Twat which is not my job but his but no, not even a twitch of anger (unless you count the fact that I've deleted his last three emails without reading them because he deleted mine without reading it, something I know to be true as it had a 'read receipt' attached and the gormless wanker can't even grasp Outlook etiquette). So I've come to the conclusion that sometimes, real life is so fucking tedious that it saps not only your will to live, but also your will to rant. How horrifying. I was not even raised out of my utter indifference by sending out an email without reading through it and then discovering that not only had I written "As DSE operators are required to shit for long periods of time at their workstations" but I'd also catastrophically mis-spelled 'Northern Counties' for the second time this year. One little 'o' can make such a difference.....

So what is the answer? How do I get my angry back? Answers on a postcard, preferably with a really vicious insult or a picture of yourself giving the one finger salute. My angry is AWOL and I miss it.....

Looking out for news

A long time ago now, in fact when I was at uni ten years ago, I went to party of a friend who was going to go to the States for a year. There I met a bloke called Ben.

Ben moved up from Eastbourne to Lancaster to live with me and we went out for two years. When it ended, it ended amicably and we were the best of friends for a long time, so much so that he lived with my family for a while. During that time he joined the army and it was me that drove him to the airport to see him off to his new base in Germany. Our friendship came to an end when he met his now wife, who banned him from speaking to me. She had a few issues...

A year or so I got back in contact with Ben through Facebook and learned that he's still in the army. He's currently deployed in Afghanistan, Helmand in fact, which is where the UK is suffering its heaviest losses. The odd thing is that even though we've had minimal contact for a long time, every time I see a headline about another British soldier being killed out there I read through it, just to check.  If the article doesn't give a name then I look it up the next day, just to make sure. And if it isn't Ben then I feel a little tiny bit of relief, which I know is very wrong because it's someone's friend or family. So when is it, do you think, that you lose interest enough to not check and be concerned? And how much worse must it be for the families of the serving soldiers out there?

Updated nursery rhymes for Britain today

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Having recently spent some time with a friend's little boy and heard her singing nursery rhymes to him, it occurred to me that these little rhymes are now hopelessly out of date and are teaching today's sproglets nothing about living in modern Britain. This is no use at all, we don't want our kids growing up with a ridiculous romantic notion of the world (which I'm sure is against government guidelines, as most things are) and it's time to update the rhymes so kids learn about Britain today.

Georgie Porgie
Georgie Porgie pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry
This is technically known as 'sexual assault'
And explains why Goergie has been put on the sex offender's register until he's 50.

Twinkle twinkle little star
Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are,
However if I want to find out I'm going to have to look it up on Google
Because the national curriculum no longer has time for science in between learning about socialism, diveristy and why James in 5B has 3 dads.

The Grand old Duke of York
The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men,
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.
He then marched straight into an industrial tribunal,
Where he was charged with breaching the European Working Time Directive by not providing adequate rest breaks and welfare facilities
And done under the equality rules for not having enough women, transgender or ehtnic minorities numbered among his ten thousand.

Dr Foster
Dr Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain
But it was alright because on call doctors drive fancy-pants Range Rovers which can cope with most adverse weather conditions.

Jack and Jill
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
This is what happens when you embark on an activity without proper analysis of ground conditions
And a full risk assessment.

Ladybird, Ladybird
Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
They've been taken into care by Social Services
And are now learning how to pick locks and hotwire cars
From some miniature delinquents in a children's home in Dagenham.

Baa baa black sheep
Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes, but I prefer to be referred to as a 'sheep of alternative coloration'
and I can't guarantee that my product is 100% free of any traces of nuts.

Half a pound of tuppenny rice
Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle
Will not only cause all your teeth to fall out but can also lead to obesity, diabetes, strokes, heart disease, the collapse of the NHS, the end of days and being referred to as 'lard arse' at school.

It's raining, It's pouring
It's raining, it's pouring,
And this is because of climate change, caused exclusively by your evil parents who don't like taking the bus because it's full of weirdos and people that smell of wee so instead use the Audi. If they don't cut this out then you're definately going to drown in the resulting 500ft tidal wave before you're 20.

Sing a song of sixpence
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,
Is not only against RSPCA rules on animal cruelty but is also a faff to make. It's miles easier to wang a microwave dinner on than piss about with pastry and live birds.

There was a crooked man
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile,
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
However they aren't going to be living in it for much longer as the local council have issued a notice ordering the crooked man to tear down the house and rebuild as it didn't have planning permission and contravenes the building regulations. It will be replaced (at the crooked man's expense) by a nice, square-built semi-detached in a mock tudor style.
 

Advice to our politicians in the run up to the general election.

Another debate in the house gets underway

Well once again that time is upon us. Just when we'd begun to forget the revolting display of poor grace, bad manners and pointless mud-slinging that was the last general election, another one rolls along and since the competition is promising to be more closely run, it promises to be even more stomach churningly ridiculous than the last one. In fact the shit-slinging has already started. So, in light of this, I'd like to offer a few pieces of advice to our politicos.

Stick to policies, not personalities.
Ever since Tony "I am Satan's Handmaiden' Blair ascended to power, politics has been less and less about what a government is doing or promising and more about the brand the PR people manage to weave around each character. Let me share a little secret - I personally do not give a fuck if David Cameron was brought up in the Queen's household, put to bed in a solid gold cradle and encouraged to spend his childhood chasing peasantry round the countryside on horseback. Neither do I give a rat's backside if Gordon Brown was brought up in a shoebox blessed by the Methodist Church, with 48 other poor-as-church-mice children and now spends his time hanging researchers by their feet from the chandeliers of Westminster in order to make it easier for him to beat them with birch twigs. I would make some comparison with Nick Clegg as well but frankly I know nothing about him and he's too nondescript for me to bother researching. What I care about is what Labour/ Conservatives/ Lib Dems will do about the fact that the country's finances are screwed, the government has vastly overspent and the books don't balance. I want to know when we're going to pull out of Afghanistan, not whether the shadow treasury minister is so posh that he learned Latin at school. I don't give a bugger about the individual ministers, they're interchangable and will be replaced as soon as they're caught in bed with someone who isn't their spouse or fiddling their expenses claims. I want to know what the party stands for and if the politician is opening his mouth to tell me that someone or other's wife earns loads of money yet he still claims housing expenses then he can just bloody well shut it again because I'm really not interested. Stop behaving like kids in the schoolyard and stick to the matters that count.

Stick to the issue and don't bore me with irrelevances
This election is looking increasingly like it's going to be fought on class lines and the latest crap about Lord Ashcroft is a perfect case in point. Conservative donor Lord Ashcroft has come out and revealed that he's a non-dom and hasn't been paying UK income tax on money earned abroad. Leaving aside the fact that I don't see why he should be paying income tax on money earned somewhere else, he's now come clean. What he did wasn't illegal and is being done by a couple of high placed Labour personalities as well. In other words they're all at it. So no, Lord Mandelson, we don't need a fucking inquiry into the matter. We don't need one because Ashcroft has come clean about his tax status and so that should be an end to it, there's no need to waste more public finances on an inquiry that will reveal what Ashcroft has already revealed. It may suit your class fight agenda to drag this out for frigging months but it's already grinding the gears of the public. Added to which, politicians rattling on about others not paying all the tax they should are on something of a sticky wicket, given how many of them were revealed to have flipped their second homes to avoid paying capital gains tax.

Cut the class crap
I've spent a week listening to ridiculous debates about fox hunting. Let's be clear - if something isn't done to curb government spending we will go bankrupt, the NHS is a mess, a large number of kids are emerging from state education illiterate and unable to count once they run out of fingers and we've run out of prison places. Do these people really think that I count whether or not red-faced colonels on horses should be allowed to chase the 'ickle fluffy foxes across fields as one of the most pressing issues in this election? Because if they do they're even more fucking insane than I thought. It's another tactic from the revolting spin teams at no 10 to rouse the rabble to the flag and paint the opposition as toffs who spend all day sipping claret out of the hollowed out skull of a tenant farmer. Which is ludicrous given that a cabinet minister earns £120k basic plus expenses so Labour's key figures have hardly stepped straight out of 'Oliver Twist'. The Conservatives have not yet let rip with their own spin salvo but I suspect it'll be on its way very soon and it'll no doubt piss me off. Let's be clear - I don't give a shit about class issues, especially since these days ALL main parties are middle class, not the traditional working class Labour, middle/upper class Conservative. Those days are gone and I don't need some tit with a qualification in PR trying to resurrect them for political gain.

The election isn't likely to be until May, that means a whole two months of this crap. Give me strength. Or, more pertinently, give me information, information on what you're going to do about the economy, the increasing state interference in our lives, the encroachment on our civil liberties, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lack of equipment and compensation for our troops, antisocial behaviour from feral kids. Just don't tell me that the Health Secretary's uncle is a bin-raiding alcoholic who once got nicked for stealing cider from Tesco. Because I really don't care.

It's just another turn on the rollercoaster ride of fun.

For the love of god what now

You know when you have one of those days that is just abysmally shit from the very beginning to the very end? Well today sits firmly in the category of 'proof that someone up there hates me'.

I got up at 6am, a half hour earlier than normal because I've got to go to a water treatment works in the backwaters of fuck knows where to find it's fricking snowed again. Great. So I defrost the car and put the postcode into the sat nav, which promptly informs me that it can't find any satellites. Naturally, because there are absolutely no satellites operating over the Manchester area. I drive down the road thinking that it'll pick up some signal as I go but it doesn't. What it does inform me is that there has been an error in programming my route. I press the off button but it's not working. At which point I lose my temper and drop the sat nav, something that might not have been so bad had it not had the car charger plugged in to it.When I pick it up I find that the jack point that the charger plugs into has somehow bent into the gadget. I instantly make this better by trying to prod the end of the charger into the jack, something which doesn't achieve charging but does achieve forcing the entire jack into the body of the sat nav. Fabulous. Now not only have I fucked up the Tom Tom but I'm lost in the foothills of christ knows where, with no idea where I am, how to get where I should be or how to get home. And I'm going to be late for the meeting.

Eventually I arrive at the meeting, late, and am treated to 2 hours of utter tedium and professional faffing from the meeting holders. Could anything be more fun?

After the meeting I get back to the office to find that not are the jobsworths in a complete tizz about something stupid and pointless but I also have a raft of emails asking me to do things that people higher up can't be bothered with.

I'm meant to go to the gym on the way home but can't be arsed so go straight to my house.

Where I discover that the dog has got the shits again. Perfect.

I'm now sat here waiting for the meteor to hit my house and the avalanche to destroy the garden, just to finish off what has been a truly momentous day. Lovely.