Phones4U is a shitty horrible chain of mobile phone shops in the UK. Their sales assistants must be on 100% commission because you can’t get more than a yard into one of their garish hell-hole shops without being ambushed by at least two of them. I went in once for a bean-on-a-string handsfree kit (cost: £4.99). I was met at the threshold by two chaps who wanted to know how they might serve me today. “I’d like a handsfree kit for a Nokia Whatever-it-was, please,” I said. “Not a Bluetooth one, though. Not even a Nokia one. Just your cheapest tangly-nasty-wire-type-one.”
“No problem, sir,” said No. 1, lunging between me and No. 2. “Come on in, the water’s lovely.”
Honestly, he really did.
I bet that night he told someone how he’d “closed the sale at four nine nine”, conveniently omitting the decimal point. Actually, no: I bet that night he sat eating a microwave lasagne for one and imagined telling someone he’d closed the sale at four nine nine.
No, wait – I bet he told the lasagne.
One day when I’m really bored I’m going to set myself a challenge to touch the back wall of Phones4U and get all the way out again without being asked whether I need any help there mate.
I tell you something that can really spoil my day from the get-go: when I’ve just made my first cup of tea in the morning, and invested patience and craftsmanship squeezing the tea-bag to get it just strong enough but not too strong, and I go to put the milk in, and one of those crusty yellow milk flakes falls off the neck of the milk bottle, into my tea, floats around for a bit, then sinks to the bottom just as I try to fish it out.
That can really spoil my day. I struggle to recover from a blow like that.
A decomposing headless swan writes:
I told her it was flu, but she said stop making such a fuss, it’s just a bad cold. Well I hope she’s happy now.
Did you know? Dead swans make a delicious terrine.
Well what indeed?? Just one pertinent question raised in response to the maroon avocado.
I reckon it’ll just be, like, a pinkish colour, a bit like houmous.
Photo: A smile for the camera, please! by Reciprocity
I felt I ought to write regarding that phrase I used earlier: “a tiny bit of milk”. You see, up where I’m from that has quite a specific meaning, namely: “just a very small quantity of milk”. In fact, you’ll often see it accompanied (as demonstrated earlier today by myself) by the thumb and forefinger held just a hair’s breadth apart, indicating smallness or sparsity.
It does not mean (as you appear to have interpreted it): “please take a tea-bag, wring it out under the tap, and then drop it into a cup of hot milk”. I accept that both phrases use the word “milk”, which perhaps is where the confusion arose. But there, as I think you’ll begin to see on closer examination, the similarity pretty much stops.
Can I take this opportunity to apologise for any distress caused by my vagueness on the milk issue, and to assure you that it will not happen again?
Thank you,
Pig on Wheels.
I just registered for a YouTube account.
I wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known it was going to be so bloody frank.
The Welsh are doing their bit in the war against terror by selling Al Jazeera a children’s TV series about a family of multi-racial sheep.
The Greco-Welsh flock uses the show to inform kids about the highs and lows of running their recycling business, communicated through the media of opera and rap. The show is known to English audiences as “The Baaas”, although the proper Welsh title is “Meees” (translates literally as “Spoilt For Choice”).
Executives at S4C are hoping that Bin Laden tunes in and decides that we’re all too mad to be worth bombing.
