Hardcore shit.

Dave: Do you know physics?
Me: I did a little bit at school.
Dave: Well physics is in this building, in that building, in those buildings over there, physics is inside all of them.
Me: Cuppa?

Paypal: Bloodsuckers

A week ago and for the preceding 7 days, I spent a large amount of my time resolving my suspended paypal account. The old Samsung recently gave up the ghost after 4.5 years of abuse, so I ordered a shiny new netbook. Or so I thought: I received the receipt email and it showed on paypal account that the transaction had completed. Only it hadn’t. Only the money had left my bank account. It was only when I sent an email to the buyer asking him when I can expect delivery that he told me there was a stop on the order. I went back to my paypal account and began a series of hoopjumping that only confirms how far we haven’t come.

After a 7 days, 3 emails, 7 phonecalls, 5 uploads – a mobile bill screendump, a credit card statement screendump, a credit card statement in pdf format (edited to show my card number, my address and their address), an image of my driving license and the edited credit card pdf yet again, I got my account back on track. I spoke to people in the Philipines and Ireland, had no single point of contact, seemingly no coherent method to their madness. I’m obviously not the first person to encounter such creativity. Yet they don’t learn.

I know it is not the fault of the individual who answers the phone to me and I do start off all calls as calm as that cucumber. But as soon as I get the hint that I am not being listened to, that they are not doing their best to help me, that they are referring to intangible excuses like ‘the system’, then I begin once again to bang my head against the desk. Surely we know that a badly managed outsourced call centre has a detrimental effect to a business’s image.

The sad thing is, I will probably use them again on eBay because in the 5 years I’ve been with them I’ve had no other problems and because when it works, it works well, but when it doesn’t, bjesus it doesn’t. Where possible, DO NOT TOUCH PAYPAL.

You don’t “axe me a question”, you “ask me a question”. You “axed your friend” did you hmm? I sincerely hope not as that would be dreadfully messy and can get you in a lot of trouble. What you did do however was you “asked your friend”. See, much better, no one gets hurt and no one gets to sound like a cretin.

Seriously people, learn the lingo.

And they’d had it since Monday. This meant that I had almost a week’s worth of storage to pay for also. Apparently there had been a ‘parking suspended’ notice there at the time which I simply didn’t see. Total cost: £420. Four hundred and twenty pounds. FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY OF YOUR HARD EARNED POUNDS. STERLING. An absolutely dispropotional punishment for a relatively innocent, tax paying monkey like me. But then it’s not like I need the cash, what with me being rolling in it an’all.

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St Stephen’s Road: Scene of the crime

And this is on top of the £150 that I paid the day we moved in, almost 1 year ago to the day. I’d hired a van, eventually unloaded it with Kate and the old man. Parked up in the ‘visitors’ bay. Had a sit down for 15 minutes to gather our breath and a quick drink, came down, van gone. Bloody bastards, the lot of them.

In better news however, the wedding was great. Photos to follow.

I thought this was lost forever more until my sister Em just called saying she’d looked it up to show brag to my brother-in-law Neil about it.

Recorded at the Teddington studios in February 1994. To our right of Dani Behr is stood m’chums Pete, Rick and Foz. Foz recalled the infamous quote from Rick’s father David Way soon after: “Heath, you’re a f***ing disgrace! Chewing gum on television!”

We also got to see Nirvana, Blur and Soul Asylum whilst there. They were some good old days.

And I hadn’t previously associated that performance with this recent one. Oh dear oh dear, he doesn’t change does he.

It’s pretty much up there with “At the end of the day” or “I am lacking in humour and original thought”.

There is a need to point out a few things to the average ‘user’. Let’s clear a few things up here.

• The difference between when to click and when to double click?

The first consists of 1 click, this comes in handy for hyperlinks, just like they’ve got on the world wide web these days. The second option here consists of 2 clicks, this comes in handy, say if you want to open a shortcut that you’ve placed on your Windows desktop.

• The difference between logging off and shutting down?

The former logs you off the machine. The latter shuts the machine down.

• The difference between wallpaper and a screensaver?

Wallpaper stays static on your desktop (your desktop is your basic screen that you have when nothing is maximised open on it). A screensaver does what it says on the tin. It saves your screen from screenburn, as seen on old ATM monitors, because it keeps refreshing the image shown on screen. This is the same for you phone too. Clever huh.

• Why does it take so long to load up my profile at work?

Because you have a multitude of files saved on your desktop. This means that whenever you log on or off, these files need to be sent between your machine sand the server where your profile lives. Keeping these files in My Docs clears up this problem. If you want somewhere to store files temporarily, it’s best to create a folder within your ‘My Docs’ called something like ‘Transient’.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, and relax.

At about 01:30am Kate and I woke up to see her sleeping soundly between us. In our bed.

Not a clue how she got there.

The stealthy little ninja.