Which do I hate more? [Part II]

... this week - Leaners or the EDF?

In the second instalment of the Which do I hate more? I look at two Parisian phenomena which have recently pissed me off.

I'll start with the EDF since that is the easiest to explain. The EDF is the electricity supply board of France. Like every organisation which the French government has any control over directly it is a heaving sweating bile-spewing lump of bureaucracy. Anyway, now and again an embodiment of this organ in the form of a technician has to inspect your meter. Fair enough, standard procedure in any country. I routinely manage to miss these visits though for whatever reason and I thought it was acceptable to fill in the form they leave with the level of the metre and get on with it... but apparently not.

Since I've not had my metre read in a year a technician must call at this hour (which is completely inconvenient to me) and check your metre. If you want to rearrange the appoinment - you'll have to pay! This is three weeks in advance of the appointment and I have to pay €30 when if they could come 30 minutes later than the stated time I'd be fine! Anyway I'll be spending the hours of 14:00 to 18:00 waiting around for the technician on that date. Exciting stuff.

I think the winner of who I hate more is fairly clear though as even as I realised I was coming to the end of my previous point I began to feel a tension across my shoulders thinking about the Leaners.

Imagine if you will a crowded metro carriage in the morning rush-hour. Not completely packed to the point where you are pressed against other but crowded enough so that everyone is standing and fairly close to each other. If there is a sudden jolt of the carriage you'll surely give a should to the sternum of one of your fellow commuters, so most people are holding on to the poles in the middle of the floor for support as this is what they're there for.

Now imagine five people are holding on to this pole when some twat decides that they want to lean on it. Where they are going to crush your hand, press it into their sweaty back or have your fingers moulded into the abundant fatty tissue of their ass. They don't care, they're going to lean on the only source of support in the fricking carriage!

Vainqueur - Leaners!

Special mention has to do to DHL who are really pissing me off right now!

Angry Morning

I woke up angry this morning.

Not a particularly pleasant state, perhaps induced by not having a big enough dinner last night perhaps by wasting time over the last 24 hours or perhaps by some sort of dream, which I now can't remember. Anyway, here I am awake at 8am and pissed off... what am I going to do with this?

It's tempting to roll over and go back to sleep till 2pm and forgetting about the world for a little while longer but that's probably not the most productive solution. Getting up, getting some breakfast and doing something with my day would probably be the most sensible solution...

Right off I go...

Good Morning World

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, all is as it should be...

SSSSSSSCCCCCCCCCHHHHHMMMMMMAAAAAACCCCKKKKK!

And this is life.

I'm A Fidelista - Where Do I Get My Tracksuit?

I really really want one of Fidel Castro's Adidas tracksuits! Does anyone know where I can buy one?

Since July 2006, the last time the leader of the Granma invasion, was seen in public he seems to have only sported the most astounding array of Adidas Cuban tracksuits the world has ever seen. My suspicion also is that every time he has been seen on camera since then his tracksuits have been getting more modern. This suggests to me that Adidas have been sending him new ones all this time.

Anyway, I want one... people haven't seen me in public (outside of fencing competitions) in a similar length of time... and my rhetoric on the bourgeois Yankee devils is just as relevant!

I was nearly that guy...

I arrived on the RER platform at Nation this morning to find a packed train waiting there already unloading passengers. I scurried down the platform a bit in order to try and find a carriage that wasn't so packed. I saw a space and casually squeezed in, my bag trailing behind. What i couldn't hear was that buzzer for the closing door was already sounding as my iPod was up too loud.

The precise moment i stepped on the train i felt the doors closing; my backpack still trailing behind me. I pulled it inside as the doors scraped it's sides.

Phew! I relaxed and let my bag drop down to the side... Only to realise that a rubber tab hanging off my bag was stuck in the door. Even more alarming was that I knew that the doors on that side of the train wouldn't be opening again before i got off. <Queue dramatic music>

...

So, I suppose what I've illustrated with this story is that things have been relatively quiet. Training is back to full speed and work is keeping me busy. It's still on my mind to fully update this blog for all the time I missed from May to August. It was a busy time with the Europeans, Cuba, the universiades and holidays in Thailand.

I certainly might have a different perspective on some of the events of the last 12 months now but I'd like to have a record of them somewhere. So, interesting times ahead, I promise, even if it means dredging up the past.

A+

I Hate Ikea...

...My first experience of the Swedish mega-store leaves a taste of MDF in my mouth.

'I need a set of drawers' I thought to myself. 'Furniture' I thought, 'Where does one buy furniture?'. Four years of being bombarded with case studies about the behemoth of fürni left only one name in my mind. Added to this I happened to be teaching (did I mention I started teaching?) in a centre not far from a modest sized Ikea store (only a couple of square kilometers) - the stars were surely all aligned and pointing me in the direction

Once I finished work at 4 o'clock I got a bus to the Ikea store about ten minutes away. To enter the place is like entering another world - a yellow and blue one. I'm apparently too negative a person but the trouble started nearly straight away. Having headed the warnings about people being lost for days in the place and nearly starving to death before reaching the café, I had the piece of furniture selected well in advance of my visit. Aneboda, or some such, was the name of this modestly priced chest of drawers but where the hell was it?

The showroom section snake on for ever before I came to the sprawling storage space area. All of a sudden there it was - the chest of drawers of my dreams. So this piece of furniture could be collected in the warehouse section of the building; row 25 dock 48.

Another twenty minutes of walking through beds, wardrobes, TV units, wardrobes, kitchen storage, shoe racks, kids bedrooms, kitchen wear, crockery, plastic tress and baskets and I finally found the warehouse section and with a small jaunt through the warehouse I located my chest of drawers.

They were heavier than I though. At 30kgs it was going to be a long hour long metro ride back to my apartment at rush hour but I assumed that a magical solution would present itself; perhaps I could buy this small yellow trolley.

Firstly though I had to deal with the check-out. I'm sure I've posted previously about the speed of service at any french check-outs. This ranges from a man buying a loaf of bread taking 10 minutes to a jar of pickles taking 5 hours. Imagine then French people having to check through hundreds of kilos of furniture. A long wait was in store as my flimsy yellow trolley (with a max load of 30kg) began to buckle. When I eventually paid for the drawers, I was told I could not bring my branded trolley any further. So I had to drag the box to through to the delivery area - stopping to get an ultra cheap bulk produced hot-dog on the way.

It was becoming apparent to me that Ikea did not want people without cars shopping with them as they didn't want people placing small orders and clogging up there delivery system. I was looking that my small set of drawers was going to cost €50 to deliver and that having already paid for it, I had no other option, save for giving myself a coronary trying to carry it on the metro. €100 for a chest of drawers that will probably barely last the rest of my time hear, no matter how short of long that is.

Bah, so there you go... that's how exciting my life is these days apparently. Without being directly exposed to the incompetence of Irish fencing I'm left to get angry at harmless multinational corporations (albeit ones with bizarre tax dodging religious status). I'm sorry Ikea, it's not you... it's me being negative...

No more whiskey after training...

Which do I hate more?

... this week: dog-owners or smokers?

In what may turn-out to be a regular feature, I contemplate to of the most ignorant groups of people on the planet. Don't get me wrong I know plenty of smokers who are good friends of mine and likewise plenty of friends of mine own dogs but as groups they have certain ignorant and infuriating traits.

I'm working from a sort libertarian / utilitarian outlook whereby people should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn't do harm to others. I've spent the last twenty minutes cleaning dog-shit off my shoe because someone saw fit to use the footpath as a toilet for their dog. All my clothes stink like shit and my chance of cancer has increased because smokers still enjoy the right to smoke indoors in Paris.

Hmm... the jury is still out on this one...