200 OK

This is just a quick rant post really.  A couple of weeks ago I was on the way to Milton Keynes to geek it out with a load of peeps at toy soldiers. On the way we stopped to get a bit of food but mainly stock up on drinks of alcoholicyness.

The Tesco’s extra was packed out with shoppers so we decided to use the self service machine – what a mistake.

First a little rant about this machine, its supposed to be easy? pffff, I scanned all my beer through and of course not thinking at the time, some fkin member of staff needs to come to the self service machine and check you look ’25′ and push a button before you can continue.  Ok fine we’re done it’s asking me for some cash, at this point i’m thinking this is one of the most clinical shopping experiences of my life. I love technology but I must be a bit oldschool in the back of my head.

I was actually missing some spotty chavvy teen chewing gum, or a sour faced old crow who resents the fact shes 60 an working with chavvy teens or a foreign student who smiles far to much and utters words you understand 50% of. Not stereotyping till workers of course but in my experience those are the groups that 73.7% of them fit into.

So I get my card out, my brand new shinny HSBC debit card which i’v already used in a few places. My mate Neil who’s just done the self service thing before me advises me I might need to hold my card in place as the cradle is a bit dodgy. So I do this, enter my pin….  errror wrong pin, ok I might of entered my pin in wrong, the same pin i’v used for the last 11 years, eeerrroooor, I continue and then eventually the machine says ‘Last chance…’ on the screen! like its mocking me, like i’m actually a thief trying out 9999 possible combinations so i can get my hands on a few cans of Heineken.

At this point the machine tells me my pin or chip or something has been locked and by this time a queue of people are amassing behind me, no doubt pissed off with some bloke punching number after number into a machine, I know i’d piss me off.

So in the rush my mate Neil still stood there, uses his card… which works and we get the fk out of there.

So panic sets in on the way back to the car, what’s wrong with my card? has it been locked? I need money for the rest of the week…. argh I best give HSBC a call. So stupidly but understandably not having HSBC’s number on my phone I called good olde 118118 and got a bloke called George, (George must be a popular name in Asian countries) and asked to be put though – second mistake

Good thing about HSBC is once you actually get through they are one of the few companies that most often have someone you can tell is from the UK on the other end of the phone, I’m not racist I think most people are equally rubbish but when a telephone service is concerned you’d hope for someone who shares your first language as their own first language, it kinda makes sense don’t you think?  Do you get a lot of disabled folks in wheel chairs acting as PE teachers? no, no you don’t its not practical is it!

Anyway I have a chat to this lady at HSBC and she just says it’ll probably be ok, I just need to go to any cash machine and it might ask me to reset something and I need to call again while at the machine if there are any further problems.  So as it happens we need to get some petrol which luckily has a HSBC cash machine!, I put my card in, type in my pin and what happens? success.. normally screen normal options everything normal…  So i gets me a tenner out to pay Neil back for his card aid and we jump back in the car for a night of beer, games and good times.

I swept this little episode under the mental carpet until this morning when my phone bill came through:

27 Feb 10 19:15:02 118118 All Day 00:05:25 £6.915

holy fucking titiyfucking muther son bitches! NEVER call 118 from your mobile, NEVER EVER let them put you through, you get charged through them for the call! at whats that? £1+ a minute! What if it had been a big problem with my card or I was on hold for a lot longer….  Fuck 118, i’m gonna start calling them from phone boxes drunk and giving them abuse like a 12 year old from now on.

This has more or less convinced me i need a smartphone with the interwebs on the move, it’d of avoided this horrible situation. Now if only they made one with a decent camera ugh woe is me.

This is a bit of a rant. Much to many commentators opinions of how shit Windows Vista is, including the king of all geeks Chris Pirillio I decided to install it back in October. Now I have a very technical job in the IT industry where I develop websites, databases and shit loads of other Internet type solutions (on windows XP i might add) so when I get home all I wanna really do PC wise is check out some websites and maybe play a game or chat to some mates.

For the most part Windows Vista does this alright, well maybe not on the game front as I’v had several games just refuse to work, I can’t claim this is Vista at fault however as I’v never tried them on an XP machine. 

Try ANYTHING, anything else on this pile of shit and all you get is frustration and bullshit. For example today I got a new MP3 player and have been now trying for 3 hours to get 30GB of songs onto it. I’v tried the software that’s come with it and i’v accessed it as a direct link in my computer and every so often what happens, cluck clucjk bang fuck i’m dead vista gives up. It kinda doesnt die and hang if you drag 3-4 albums at a time, which is a cunt to do for about 260 albums and even then it still seems to do it at random. 

I’v now resorted to my server machine which is running XP, and guess what! no fucking problems what so ever. It’s chugging along pumping album after album onto the device with no issue. 

Fuck Windows Vista time after time it just ends up being the operating system equivalent of taking a turd and getting picasso to paint a pretty picture all over it, its still a fucking turd.

Windows XP, Oh look... it works.

As in coins… does anyone notice that after a rather brutal night out you are left with coins, lots and lots of fucking coins. 

Take last night for example here is the state of my wallet:

There is at least 10-12 quid in there in coins is it not just funny how when you get drunk you loose the ability to count and the urge to even bother. How simple it is to just hand over a tenner for a few drinks and drop the change into the ever growing collection in you pocket. 

One of the worse places I have found for this kind of behaviour is the Pad club in bedford because its so fuckin dark inside, in fact I don’t think i have ever bought a drink in there with coins I can’t see it working.

The problem with having so much change in your pocket is that you get this (well i do) feeling that it isn’t really money, it does not hold the same significance or pride of place in your wallet than a tenner ot twenty pound note does. In that regard you just fritter those coins away on anything while at a shop or something and don’t feel bad when they are gone. Which is what i’m gonna do right now…  diet coke and whatever takes my fancy from the local shop woooo.