Crunchy Credit

So, we're in the middle of some sort of major financial crisis. Now, I won't pretend to know all the details, only that the papers are full of pictures of city traders looking very depressed after a hard day losing money. Two things :

1) You city boys have had it good for a while now, and while you won't be getting your £500k bonus this year, I'm sure you've been sensible enough to squirrel a bit away somewhere. Haven't you? What - spent it all on champagne, Porsches and laps dancers? Oh dear.

2) The pics in the papers show you all looking very sad, angry and slightly perplexed at what happened on the trading floor today. Surely when you got up this morning you knew it was going to be a really shit day. I mean really, really shitty. Even I could have told you that. More of that tomorrow I should think. Better take a sickie and take Chardonnay out in the Carrera.

You Can Do Better

I work for a large American company, who you will have heard of. Obviously, being based in England it's not as 'American' as it could be, so generally it doesn't make any difference. But occasionally you get a glimpse of what the full-on experience would be like. And lately one theme has got to me.

"What I'd like you all to do now is write on a piece of paper what you want to achieve. Then imagine you have already achieved that objective, and write down how you did it. Then put that piece of paper somewhere you can see it every day, so you never lose sight of how to achieve your objective"

When faced with this statement in a recent 'training' course, I was a bit stumped. I don't have a masterplan. I don't have a target salary. I don't want to be managing director by the time I'm forty.

Why is there the automatic assumption that we are not happy with our lot? Why do we always have to achieve more? Is it impossible to think that some of are actually happy the way things are, and content to sail through life on a wave of satisfaction? As smug as it sounds, I have a lovely wife, a nice house, good job with a reasonable salary, a baby on the way, good health and great family and friends. What else could I possibly ask for?

Sick

Isn't it funny that we like to be reminded of when we were sick?

For me it's Lucozade, the smell of Dettol, a towel on the pillow, Lemsip, Heinz tomato soup, toast with Marmite, toast soldiers with a boiled egg.

Any of these can instantly take me back to a day off school. All very comforting.

Tatty Tats

I used to work as a lifeguard in several swimming pools, and I'd recommend it to everyone thinking of having a visible tattoo. Firstly, you get to see how many people have the same tattoos, and therefore invalidating the quest for being 'different'. Secondly you get to see what they look like after 10 years or so. Not pretty I'm afraid.

The way I see tattoos are like scars you pay for, which is fine as long as you are sure you're going to feel the same about having Mickey Mouse on your arse in 10 years time as you do now. I have a few scars myself, just a few visible marks on my arms. The difference is that I got these through medical trials and got paid thousands of pounds to take ketamine. Result.

Don't get me wrong - some tattoos look great, they really do. But these would be my rules if any of my kids wanted one:

1) Don't get anything on your face/neck/hands. That job as a lawyer/newsreader/model won't be quite as easy to land.
2) Don't get something 'of the moment'. While Spongebob Squarepants may be fairly popular now, your grandchildren will wonder what that faded yellow stain is when you're in your sixties.
3) Don't get your boyfriend's name done on your lower back because a) he doesn't want to look at his own name while he's on the job, and b) neither does your next boyfriend
4) Be realistic. If you haven't got a great figure, a tat isn't going to change that.
5) Be careful with Chinese symbols. One guy had "At the end of the day this is an ugly boy" in Chinese on his arm for years before being told what it said.
5) Get something erasable - while a dragon over the whole of your back might be very artistic, it's also going to take a long time and a lot of money to laser it off if you change your mind.


And remember, we all change our minds.

As Ross from 'Friends' puts it - "Having a bad tattoo would be like having a bad haircut for the rest of your life".

Cash Points (again)

I'm just about 6ft tall. Not unusual in this day and age. I think the average is something like 5'10" for a bloke and 5'6" for a girl. So why are all the cashpoints in the country built for midgets?

I can understand a row of three cash-machines having one slightly lower one for wheelchair users - of course I have no problem with that. But why all three of them? Surely we're disciminating against anyone over 4 foot tall?

Pins

I don't buy new clothes that often. I generally can't be bothered to shop for the damn things, so much of my wardrobe is bought for me, which is fine.

However, it seems that on more than one occasion recently I have been in mortal danger from new clothes. You unwrap the cellophane from a shirt, or take the cardboard out of a polo-shirt, and slip it on. Ooooowwwww!

What sort of sadistic bastard puts those pins in the collars of shirts?

Slow Slow Slow

My computer can probably calculate more sums in five seconds than I could in a lifetime. My sat-nav sifts through a million roads in a few seconds to plan my route. Even a digital watch can out-think me a hundred times over. We're surrounded by amazing technology of lightning speed, quite literally. So why does everything seem so slow?

My phone takes over a minute to 'restart', and my PC about the same. I have something like 4GB on my internet pipe, but pages sometimes still take 10 seconds to download. After pressing 'play', my DVD player thinks for about 20 seconds about whether it can be bothered to do anything about it. The cashpoint takes a fraction of a second to register each digit of my pin number, to the point that if I put it in too quickly it fails to recognise it.

So what's happening? Incredibly, it feels as though we are out-thinking these machines that are supposed to be the key to getting everything done faster, but instead seem to hold us up at every step of the way.

Pirates Ahoy

Piracy. The bane of the music, film and software industries. They lose tens of millions of pounds/dollars a year in lost revenue due to people buying cheap duplicates of their products. But I have little sympathy.

First, in the 90s, the music industry stabbed itself in the foot by continuing to keep the price of CDs at a ridiculously inflated £15. Yes, we all know the cost of signing artists, recording albums and promoting records is high. But when your customers also know that the price of producing a CD with inlay etc is around 20 pence, they won't stand for it. Especially when you see how much record companies and artists make in profit. The record companies' arrogance was beyond belief.

So what happened? Well, companies like CD-Wow imported genuine CDs from Hong Kong for £9, and the market was forced to lower prices across the board. But it was too late. By then, users had got used to copying CDs, downloading them and CD sales had plummetted.

Then we look at the DVD industry. There was a time when you had to wait 6 months from when a film was out on DVD rental to when you could buy that same film on DVD. Is it any suprise that people were copying them when there was such huge demand?

Now this problem has been solved with simultaneous rental and buying releases for DVDs. But there's still a major issue. Firstly, let me explain that I'm not really into piracy - the quality isn't that great, you can get viruses on your PC and I can pretty much afford to buy/rent the DVDs I want. However, there's one thing which will turn my to piracy quicker than anything else - anything other than a film on my DVD.

I don't want trailers, I don't want copyright messages, and above all I don't want messages telling me not to buy pirate DVDs. Why are these messages there? I've just rented a genuine copy, so you're targeting the wrong person surely? At least let me skip through these messages, or I'll get myself a copy without them on. And the film company won't benefit from that at all.

D(isagreeable) F(urniture) S(ales)

DFS say they only have two sales a year. In that case they are absolute genuises at making it seem like only one sale that lasts a whole 12 months. Annoying.

On top of this, their lastest radio advert had the audacity to inform me that "Every sofa in our sale is reduced". Wow. What an amazing concept. You mean to say that all the sofas in the sale are discounted, instead of having sofas in the sale which are the same price as before?

As I said - genuises.

You can't put a price on life

Really? Can we justify a multi-million pound rescue operation for some posh chump who's decided to capsize himself in the middle of an ocean just south of nowhere? Or should we just donate the equivalent amount of money to a worthy charity in his memory?

Round of Applause

Applause. Sometimes I'm clapping and I look around at the people clapping with me and I wonder what the hell we're doing.

I mean, it's such an effort and it always seems to go on too long. Looking around at my fellow clappers, it seems that not that many people seem particularly happy about having to do it (apart from one or two smart arses who have to have the last or the loudest clap), and we're only doing it because social convention tells us it's the right thing to do.

Now don't get me wrong - I'll happily applaud or stick my fingers in my mouth and whistle loudly if I've seen something truly great. But if you ask yourself how often this happens, it's extremely rare. These days we clap when someone at work does a presentation, when we see a mediocre stage show or a crap band at our local pub. The Americans, gawd bless 'em, even applaud the pilot when a plane lands without bursting into flames. "Yey, we're all alive!"

Does the Captain hear this applause and turn to his co-pilot "Your hear that buddy? High five! Soak it up baby, yeah!! We landed the plane so well, they love us back there! Not like Jim the other day - smashed right into the terminal building and didn't even get a ripple of applause. Loser."

I doubt the Captain hears the applause over the roar of the jet engines on full reverse thrust. In the same way actors can't hear you applaud them when you're in the cinema. Think about it doofus - you're clapping at a projected image on a screen.

So, clapping unnecessarily is annoying for most of us. But for me there's something worse than that. When the show is over, we are all clapping - for what seems like forever. The cast are taking their bows, and we're still clapping. This is when some bright spark at the front decides that standing up and clapping is a much better way to show his appreciation. "Look at me everyone, I appreciate these outstanding performers more than you, and unless you all stand up with me then you're a bunch of socially inadequate cabbages". So we all stand up. And continue clapping until our hands bleed.

If you must clap, how about we limit any applause to five claps per person? Even better, I propose that we adopt the deaf community's way of showing appreciaton - they wave their hands in the air. At least we'd all look like we're enjoying ourselves.