Aye, jaffa jelly joke you all

Ah, customers.  You can't reason with them and you can't poke them in the eye either.  I had one of my regular customers in the other day, a Mr James Brown.  Quite different from the 'hardest-working-man-in-show-business and drug-fuelled-maniac James Brown' in the sense that he's white and if he tried to get up offa that thing, he'd probably put his hip out. 


James Brown was actually a republican!  Seriously!

Anyway, he usually has a go at me for being a bit of a lefty and reading the Herald and the Guardian.  And I belittle him on his choice of Nazi periodical, the Daily Mail.

However, when I was talking to him, we actually managed to agree on certain points.  Not just concurring that it was indeed a sunny day but he mentioned something about the Icelandic volcano,Eyjafjallajökull (probably the most copy-pasted word this year) causing havoc with our airspace.  I mentioned about how this was Iceland's revenge on the British and European economy and he laughed and told me that he also said this and I was the first person to say that to him.

Now, naturally I don't actually believe that Iceland deliberately set about causing European airspace to remain plane-free for the past six days, but he's read the Daily Mail so there could well be a venomous letter from "Disgusted, Turnbridge Wells" about it and he's got it from there.

We then decided to talk about Kraft buying over Cadbury and then screwing-over the British workers when they said that the jobs were going to be secure initially... until they actually completed the purchase then they changed their mind.  I said that they were then going to outsource production to Poland and the chocolate wouldn't taste the same.  He agreed, and I also told him how Kraft did the same with the Norwegian chocolate company Freia.  Moved production to Eastern Europe and the chocolate that was once "a small piece of Norway" is now "not-quite-as-tasty imitation chocolate of Norway via Poland".

Plus, we also agreed that Kraft didn't exactly make the best cheese... instead it was all just... well... processed crap.

Then he told me about Santander being in financial trouble at the moment, which I can see why when the Spanish mortgage market has taken a nosedive and repossessions are rife.  Plus, with their UK banking division offer high rates... I think we know exactly what happened in Iceland with them offering ridiculously high rates.

And finally, just to prove his Daily Mail paranoia and to get in another kick at Gordon Brown he says "the only reason that Brown saved Northern Rock was because him and all his pals had their money in there."  As much as I consider myself a conspiracy theorist, i'm just not buying this one.  They couldn't allow Northern Rock to go to the wall as it would have had a worse effect on the economy.  Mind you, i'd quite like them to nationalise all the banks and shoot all the directors.  That would certainly save on compensation packages.

So from one surprisingly agreeable conversation with Mr Brown to one that was very different.  My boss says to me today "Did you speak to a customer that was complaining about his interest?"

I thought about telling her to narrow that down slightly as in the past month it could have been anyone.  "Anyone specifically?"

"A man that's complaining about your attitude." she says.

I pause for a moment before repeating "anyone specifically?" with a wry smile.

"He says he phoned the other day about his interest and then he proceeded to say about how we got a bad press in the Daily Mail and you told him that 'you don't read that paper'."

"Well it's true, I don't read that paper because i'm not a racist moron!"

"Yes, but you don't need to say it like that.  He seemed quite angry."

"Of course he's angry!  He reads the Daily Mail!  Christ, even I can feel my blood-pressure rising just reading the headline of it.  For different reasons though."

"You can't just give out your opinions like that."

"He gives me his opinion... I give him mine.  The difference is that mine can be justified rationally with sense and logic."

"Right... well... I said i'd have a word with you... so consider this it."

And so I went back about my day.  Satisfied that i'd pissed-off another Daily Mail reader.  Just giving them their daily hate.  That's what they want, is it not?

~Stripes

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One of the things that annoy me greatly is being told what to do. “Being hassled by The Man” as Peter Fonda said in ‘The Wild Angels’.



However, when you're in a job, it's difficult to avoid being told what to do by your superiors. Unless of course you work for an organisation where no-one really makes any decision whatsoever. In which case the word 'organisation' is very much symbolic rather than an accurate reflection into how they work. And indeed, for how long left they would have in any marketplace. This is why stoner hippies aren't generally CEO material. "Like, couldn't we just, I dunno.. make some money, man?" Good idea, see how that plan goes.

But it is not The Man that is the cause of such consternation today. It is that other demon, The Customer.

Now, we're all aware that my attitude to customer service was very closely modeled on Dylan Moran's approach to it. I sat down with a customer that said they needed some assistance with their account. Which, let's face it, can mean a number of things.

"I'm looking to set up this standing order." ah yes, a simple administrative procedure. And she slides over a sheet of paper from the council on it. Naturally, she hadn't bothered to fill any of the details out. I hate customers that naturally assume that i'm going to fill out theirpaperwork. That's why the council send it to them.. for themto complete it. I look at the form and ask for her account details. Then I notice that it's a weekly standing order that she wants set up.

"Ah" I say, "we can't actually set up weekly standing orders."

"But the council said I could." she replies pulling a considerable eyebrow frown that would rival Sam The Eagle.


Alistair Darling regretted eating all those blueberries

"Yes, it’s not to say that it’s not possible from other places, but we don’t do weekly standing orders.” I tell her into order to explain the rationale behind the council’s claims. “The minimum we do is monthly.”

“Are you sure about that?”

I ponder my next tact. Keep it nice and simple. “Yes. Yes I am quite, quite sure about this.” Excellent. A double yes and a double reinforcement of the word quite. That should show exactly how sure I am with that.

“Do you want to double-check with someone?”

No madam. I do not have to double-check with someone. For I have worked here for six years, eleven months and twenty-two days. I do not need to check this out. This is the thought that was in my brain. However, it seems that my brain took a decision to relay this sentence to the customer verbally.

“So I can’t do it then? My other accounts elsewhere can do it.”

SO WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING TAKE IT THERE THEN AND STOP HASSLING ME ABOUT THIS?!!?

“Well… unfortunately, we cannot do it here.” I figure this is a better thing to say. ”You can either set up a monthly standing order, or you can do the transfer manually.. yourself.. every. single. week.” I raise my finger (not that one) to illustrate my next point “or you can set up with your other place, where they can apparently do it weekly.”

“Why don’t you do it here?” she says shaking her head in a level just short of an epileptic seizure.

“I don’t know. It could be a policy decision, but the minimum we do-”

“Oh so you don’t know?” She says in a patronising yet satisfied tone. “Could you find out why not?”

What is this woman? I have the urge to look at her account and see if her job title is fact-fucking-finder.

“No. Look, we can’t do it.” I have no need to look anything up at all, I know I’m right. “Nothing is going to change that fact, the minimum.. is.. monthly.”

She seems to finally accept this and puts her paper away.

Then, suddenly, “I want to cancel a standing order.”

Alright, that is simple enough. I ask her which one and she tells me and I duly cancel it from the system by pressing a couple of buttons.

“Can I get confirmation of that?”

“Well… it actually takes 24 hours to update on our system, so it won’t actually show as cancelled until tomorrow. But it is cancelled.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Wait, what? She just fucking watched me press the buttons! What possible benefit would I have of not cancelling it for her?!

“Oh. Well… as I said, it takes 24 hours to update, so there’s not going to be anything showing on the system as cancelled yet. So… umm… yeah.” I drop the plan of saying ‘well tough shit’ at the end of that.

“So… nothing then?”

I repeat that point for the third time, showing her quite clearly on the screen the little button that says ‘cancel’ that I pressed. There is a long pause and we appear to be inadvertently in a staring contest.



But as Tom Petty sang, ‘I won’t back down.’

Then the silence is broken by the eyebrow cousin of Susan Boyle saying “I want to set up a direct debit.” Oh for FUCKS sake. As if we haven’t had enough banking facility disasters. And so she pulls out another form and slides it right in front of me using the whole of her palm.

Again, it is incomplete.

I look at the form, knowing full well what she can do with it. “We don’t actually set these up here. You need to send it to your company.” And I slide the form back towards here, and I point at the section at the VERY TOP of the form that states IN VERY BOLD LETTERING that the form is to be returned to them.

“You’re not very helpful, are you?” I toy with the idea of telling her a similar retort except replacing a word with her level of intelligence. Or lack thereof. “I mean, your answers are all one-words.” If this doesn’t show that she didn’t listen to what I said, I don’t know what does.

“Well I’m sorry about that, but there’s no point in offering you any sort of grey area. It’s either a yes or it’s a no… and I have given you factual information.”

“What’s your name, I think I’ll be writing in a complaint letter about you.”

“Would you like me to tell you it in one word or two?” I could think of an appropriate two-word phrase to tell her right now. The second being a verb.

So off she went on her merry way and I went upstairs to do a bit of training. Which meant lie on the couch and pretend to read a stupid workbook that has to be finished by the end of the month. I open it at a page;

Module two: Understanding your customer.

I closed the book, knowing full well that understanding customers requires a lack of logic, reasoning and brain cells. Perhaps eyebrow-size is relative to cranial capacity.

~Stripes

PS – This was a picture I took from the workbook.



If you write on the page, it is no longer blank, correct?

Happiness is clockwork orange shaped

I was listening to the rain and thunder last night while trying to read ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ . For those of you in the Glasgow area wondering where this freak weather occurred, it was here. And how delightful it was too. Especially after the stressful day that I had at work… basically being told that they want me to jump rather be pushed out of the door due to my “serial underperformance.” It’s not that I’m a bad guy, of course… it’s just that I don’t do the things that they want me to do. Such as abandon my morals and principles by being a cold, ruthless, pushy, conniving and sneaky bank bastard. No thanks, I like to live by my rules.

So what they want me to do, is to give a date of my future notice, and they won’t hassle me anymore. They spoke about how much “happiness” the other people had once they left the office. Yes, because they paid those people off. Now they want to make us redundant too… but not actually give us any redundancy money. Cunts.

You’d think that working in a financial institution that they’d know fine well that “happiness” doesn’t pay the bills.

“I’d like to make a payment to my credit card please.”
“Certainly, would that be cash or cheque?”
“Actually, I drew a smiley face on a colourful post-it note… I assume that will be sufficient for you.”

Yeah, good luck getting that one past the counter monkey.

After passing out around 1.30 last night… I had a dream.

I dreamt that I was at my usual underground station at Kelvin Hall… and it was busier than usual. When the train pulled into the station, the other commuters started squeezing against me and I was forced into the carriage… where I felt that my wallet was being forced out and it dropped behind me. Despite my protests, I was unable to get back off the train. “I had £70 in that wallet!” £50 of regular cash and my emergency £20. [I always like to keep an emergency £20. In case I need it for dire situations… like… buying a final round of drinks. Ahaha.]


Not exactly a complicated Subway

I saw a girl pick it up and we made eye-contact as the train was pulling out and I gave her a thumbs-up in the hope that she’ll know it was me and will want to do the right thing and give me it back.

My plan was that I would get off at my usual stop at St Enoch… and wait for her there to be reunited with my wallet, bank cards and my Japanese language card. Then a thought occurred… ‘what if she gets off at Buchanan Street? A lot of people get off there… then we’d miss each other.’ So then I decided to get off there.

Then I realised that there’s nothing stopping her from getting off at any of the other stations before then! She doesn’t need to get off at Buchanan Street! So before the doors closed, I managed to get my way through to Kelvinbridge… where I waited on the next train.

I got on the last carriage, it was a lot more quieter and sure enough, there she was. She gave me the wallet back and I sat inbetween her and her friend. Foppishly explaining my crazy thoughts about what station she was going to get off at. She nodded and said that I was correct in that thinking as she was getting off at St George’s Cross. Rather than give her a cash reward for her honesty, I asked if I could buy her a “beverage of some description” and she smiled sweetly.

I woke up at 5.30 after this dream. And since I was wide awake, I decided to analyse it.

I get the subway to go to my awful job… and I was being forced onto a carriage. Much like they want to force me to submit my resignation. This, of course, has certain financial implications attached to it which is where the dropping of the wallet comes into play. No job means no money, so it’s only naturally to be worried about that.

However, after fighting my way through some crazy thoughts, coming up with a rational plan with justification for my actions and breaking from the awful carriage, I find myself in a better one… reunited with my money and having a pleasant experience.

What I find that this dream is telling me is that… everything will be fine. I might be on that difficult carriage for a little bit… but I’ll be able to get through it… my money worries will be unfounded… I’ll be happier and free from the madding crowd.

~Stripes

Stress Relief

I'm generally a bit stressed about the prospect of a Tory government this year, given that their leader is a vacuous ninny and their shadow chancellor a swivel-eyed fool.

However, due to the wonderousness of the interwebs, I've been given a handy stress relief kit:


Thanks, @scarpagirl!

The Beatles Friday

So with the mighty spacechimp defecting onto pastures new, the email conversations have been pretty dull in work. Usually they demand to know where certain figures are and I tell them where they should stick their figures.

In an excel sheet, of course.

Or that they want me to call certain customers. Sack that, if they’re that important they’ll call me back. Fools.

Cooper came in and said that he’d been playing The Beatles Rock Band all night. Incidentally, he doesn’t like any of The Beatles individually, only collectively. I said that George was my favourite… and that I would go gay for George Harrison. He said that there were a few men that he would go gay for but George wasn’t one of them. He didn’t specify who and I didn’t ask if it was only because George was a bit decayed now.

Then the emails started...

09.45 Cooper
Baby you can drive my car....

09.46 Stripes
Wouldn't that invalidate your insurance?

09.52 Cooper
Possibly, however, I Am The Walrus!

09.55 Stripes
You shouldn't be in these climates... Get Back to where you once belong!

10.02 Cooper
I'd rather not.... I'd like to be, under the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade.

10.03 Stripes
You can keep the garden, we all live in a yellow submarine.

10.23 Cooper
What about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? They can hardly play in a Yellow Submarine, although I don't suppose under the sea is ideal for them either.

10.25 Stripes
Of course they could play there... their instruments are made of Norwegian Wood.

10.37 Cooper
And what about Lady Madonna and Dear Prudence, how will they occupy their time on said submarine?

10.41 Stripes
I could say on some Norwegian Wood!! Perhaps having some fun on the Helter-Skelter?

11.17 Cooper
Ah of course, I Should Have Known Better.

11.34 Stripes
However, there's Something you should know about Michelle?

11.37 Cooper
She's Got A Ticket To Ride?

11.39 Stripes
She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah!

11.40 Cooper
That's great because All You Need Is Love.

11.50 Stripes
With Love and A Little Help From My Friends you can enjoy life on that Long And Winding Road.

11.55 Cooper
Here's hoping, and It Won't be Long, When I'm 64, i'll be looking back, wondering why the hell it was your friends that gave me Help!

Luncheon interlude.

Not that we were getting up to much work anyway.

13.22 Stripes
As a socialist, I sent them With Love, From Me, To You... I said to them "Don't Let Me Down" and I know they won't, they'll only Please Please Me.

14.40 Cooper

I’m tired now, I don’t see me coming up with anything else witty and relevant……

14.43 Stripes

Wait... Get Back to this email thread or else there will be a Revolution!

14.47 Cooper

Fine, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, but know this, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey, so I’ll Get You!!

14.59 Stripes

Oh Darling, nothing to hide? You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away!

15.42 Cooper

Don’t be silly, All I Need To Do is Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and All Things Shall Pass.

15.52 Stripes

Back In The USSR, we didn’t have any ‘diamonds’ like that. But we did take Eleanor Rigby on a Magical Mystery Tour... she was a real Daytripper if you know what I mean!

16.24 Cooper

You Can’t Do That!! I think When I Get Home, after A Hard Day’s Night, I’ll call up Lovely Rita and With All My Loving, we’ll Come Together.

After that climatic finish… I thought I should just Let It Be.

~Stripes

Ninety percent of SF is shite, but that's because ninety percent of *everything* is shite.

The title of this blog was, of course, a simply hilarious reference to the fact that me and young Stripey are a tad on the indolent side.

Great stuff.

The problem being that me and young Stripey are a tad on the indolent side, which has tended to mean that this blog has been on the quiet side.

However! This all changes today! I have a new job and am all fired up and fizzing with energy.

I thought I'd get things going with some nonsense about good old Science Fiction.

I have, over the last few months, been indulging my love of SF possibly a little more than is really healthy. I've taken in literary SF, audio plays, TV SF and SF-infused gaming.

There was a point, a few years ago, where I'd kinda stopped reading new SF books. That was a mistake, I missed out on some excellent stuff, which I'm only just catching up on just now. Ian R. Macleod was someone that I hadn't read until recently, but I'm a convert now. The Light Ages is excellent and his recent Song of Time is as worthy of praise as any vapid and enervating so-called “literary fiction;” this isn't to suggest that lit fic is inherently bad, far from it. It's just that I do tend to feel that it is as much a genre as SF, crime or romance and is far more self-regarding than any of those mentioned and, much in the way of American indie films, it can produce hollow and tedious art. Anyway: my other discovery (or rather, rediscovery) has been the excellent Paul McAuley. I had actually read 400 Billion Stars in my beard-free days and not, in truth, really enjoyed it. I also read Fairyland about a year or so ago. Again my response was a little “meh.” However, I finally decided to give him another go as The Quiet War had been the subject of much positive spluh on the web (mostly from authors opinions that I trusted) and, wow, can that man write. Fantastic prose, believable, rounded characters and (haha, as with all good SF) some nice commentary about how we choose to live our lives.

I've also been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now disclaimer: I am far from a Trekkie. My interest is pretty dilettantish, in truth. In spite of (because of?) that, I feel that I can safely say that TNG is a far superior beast to the original series and Picard pwns Kirk every time. Yes, yes, there's no Spock and there are far fewer orange swirly blob episodes than the original run, but it doesn't have that slightly embarrassing campy feel to it that the original series had. Although I did like the one where Kirk had to fight Gorn.

My other recent(ish) discovery has been the Doctor Who audiobooks, featuring the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th and 8^th Doctors. In fairness, part of my good disposition to these is based on the fact that Peter Davison was my first Doctor and hearing the theme music from then does have the usual reminder of more carefree childhood days. That said, the standard is generally pretty decent. They get a chance to do some stuff that probably would be hard to do for telly. I like the character of Evelyn Smythe, she seems to be a bit more of a match for the Doctor, intellectually and emotionally, which one tends not to find with the youngsters that usually trail around after him.

And finally, "SF gaming?" you say? Indeed, yes! Dead Space is as much as part of the SF quilt (hmm...I want one of them) as a book or a film, I say (actually, so do lots of people). Multi-platform geekery got even better when I heard the excellent news that Richard Morgan is involved in writing for some games just now.

Listening:

Agitation Free – Malesch

The body parts phone call

I hate answering the phone in the office. More often than not it leads to trouble. Trouble from arseholes that can't be bothered to actually come down and visit and instead want me to do all the running around for them. A sure-fire sign of such fuckwittery is the opening phrase of "I've been trying to call you for ages." Yes, sorry about that, idiots keep seem to calling with problems of a trivial nature.

So when the phone was ringing off the hook [A hook? Is Abu Hamza holding your phone? - ed] earlier at lunchtime, I was in no hurry to go and answer it. An excellent commitment to customer service. Except that there were no customers in front of me. After letting it ring around twenty times, I finally decided to answer it.

"Hi this is Paul from the [name deleted on legal advice] Garage in Renfrew. We have a woman going absolutely mental in the shop here."

So why the fuck are they phoning me? Last time I checked we weren't negotiators trained in psychiatry.

"Oh right." I said.

"Yes, it's because your cash machine swallowed her card."

Pisskidney.

"Well there's not really a lot we can do about that. She'd need to wait until the card was sent back to us at the office before we could give her it."

"No you don't understand, she needs the card, she's got body parts in her car."

I blinked a good couple of times. "Sorry, did you say body parts?"

"Yeah." he said.

"Right. That's what I.. feared."

"She's going crazy here."

I started to wonder where she acquired these body parts. Had she butchered someone that didn't give her a receipt in Tesco?

"Umm these body parts you speak of.... wait, what?"

"Hang on, i'll put her on."

Oh Christ.

So he does. He puts me onto the psycho. "YourmachineswallowedmacardandIneededthatmoneyanIcannaepayforthepetrol!"

Mmmm that is quite a predicament that you're in. "Right... yeah."

"I mean, what am I going to do?! I've got body parts in my car."

"Yeaaaaah, so I heard. So uhh.... what's the deal with that?"

She sighed short and hard like she was clearing a bit of phlegm from her throat. "I'm a government official, i've had to pick up body parts from Glasgow Airport and I need to deliver them as they're in ice. But now I can't pay for petrol because your machine swa-llowed my car-ddd. I need my card right now."

I said i'll see what I could do and would phone her back on her mobile.

Christ. That's a good one to explain to the ATM department. And while I was on hold to them, I was wondering what kind of body parts she had. Did she have arms? Legs? Breasts? Or was it internal organs? Perhaps she wasn't a Government official. Maybe she had the bodies of small children and their bones were going to ground down and taken as a cure for impotency?

So I explained what was happening. Naturally, because they were miles away, they didn't care about the situation and would do nothing to open the machine. This meant that I had to phone her back and tell her this. Aaaarrrgh!

However, a back-up plan was just to take her the money.

She wasn't too pleased that she wouldn't have her card. In fact, she did scream at great length down the phone. Charming. Once she calmed down, I said we'd be on our way with money for her.

Before we were about to leave, we got another call from the garage. She'd left! Hah! Done a runner with bits of body in her car!

Later on in the afternoon.... some email correspondence from my boss went like this...

Boss: "Did you pay the money back into the body parts woman's account?"

Me: "Yes, I didn't want to be out on a limb."

A reply hit my inbox a couple of minutes later...

Boss: "I torso."

I torso? That doesn't even make sense!

Me: "Now, you can do better than that? Do you need a hand?"

Boss: "I don't finger so."

Now, i'm kind of seeing what she's doing here. It's still not on the same level as mine though.

Me: "I was hoping for a comment that would make you stand head and shoulders above the rest."

I was praying that she wouldn't think that I was talking about shampoo and conditioner. A full tweny minutes later...

Boss: "Are you going to have a leg of lamb tomorrow night?"

Me: "I think i'll just have a light finger buffet."



Photo: A picture I took a couple of weeks ago of a body part belonging to the blonde one....


only blondie could have a quote written on his hand in Latin. In pen. On a Saturday night. Apparently it means "there is a middle course in all things." Interesting way to sit on the fence.

~Raccoon.~