A report yesterday informed us that a well known supermarket had thrown away over 25,000 tonnes of food in the first half of this year, an incredible amount to waste then went on to explain that it was going to combat this by, guess what? Remove all special offers and reduce the quantity size of its fresh produce to encourage us to waste less.
Let me get that straight, your policies created all this wastage but you are actually blaming and penalising the consumer instead. Great, welcome to backward Britain. It's one story in a long line of stupidity that made me withdraw and avoid the daily news many years ago but try as I might they still keep cropping up to torment me.
One such story that made its way through my personal media filters was a story about road signs being shot at using a variety of guns ranging from shotguns to high velocity rifles. We have seen a lot of this around the country as we travel but this particular news report concentrated on Devon where a former Royal Marine had found 13 gun damaged signs in a fifteen mile area, some had been blasted with over fifty shots. A serious enough problem you would have thought but after raising the problem with the local authority their insightful response was 'I haven't really got a clue who'd do it, but it's nobody I would like to share a pint with'.
See what I mean? That's exactly the reason I don't read the news because every story ends in either stupidity or I sit shaking my head in disbelief. You may wonder what's bought this on this morning, well, it's down to this, light bulbs.
No it's not the lightbulb shelf at B&Q it's the massive variety of light bulbs we have to keep because every time we either buy a lamp or install new lighting the style and type of fitments have changed so we now have over twenty types of bulbs with fitments ranging from bayonet, two prong, screw type and even side clasping halogens. All this apparently is due to A) Retail profits and B) The stupidly ineffective 'green' government policy, either way it makes me rather cross. And whilst we are at it the new cleaner 'mercury filled' energy saving bulbs take so long to warm up it would be quicker for me to light my own farts for illumination.
Anyway, the lightbulb in question was one of our kitchen lights and it should have been a simple enough procedure to change it, however, the designers thought it would be rather jolly if you had to dismantle the thing using a variety of tools then make sure that the bulb you need to change is a low voltage, easily breakable and highly expensive thing that only comes in packs of eight and can only be purchased using Alderbarran Dollars every full moon from branches of a shop that appears every eight years. In short it's easier to staple jelly to the ceiling than it is to find replacements.
It's not hard in today's world to find some irksome problem that has you tearing your hair out as I found out last Friday. I had an email thanking me for something I was doing, only I had never been told what it was and from the tone of the message it was assuming that I had received an email instructing me to do it. Strange I thought, none of my computers had picked anything up along the same lines and strangely emails from my website had recently become quiet but thought nothing of it. It was only through further investigation that I found out that my internet provider Virgin Media who had bought out my previous supplier NTL had decided to sell a portion of its mail service to Google, all this had apparently gone on rather transparently to myself but in the process I was now a Gmail client and not indeed a Virgin Media one. As an NTL customer, now a Virgin customer with a Gmail account I had a problem, I didn't exist. A significant amount of time had gone by that historically most people working at Virgin didn't know who NTL was so when they transferred their email service over to Google, customers with a long standing legacy tended to get overlooked and shoehorned into a miscellaneous pile, the upshot is that Virgins front end to access their webmail system was so badly coded that it refused to acknowledge NTL customers at all. In the end I had to essentially bypass their email logon system to fool the thing into giving me the correct security cookie so I could access my emails. Then, much to my dismay I discovered that their spam filter had decided anything sent to me through my website contact form was classed as spam and fifty emails were awaiting replies spanning the last two months.
See, through no fault of my own we get a massive problem, so apologies to anybody who has not received a reply yet I'm busy deciding who at my internet provider to punch first and exactly where to ram my new mail protocol and how far I should shove it up.
And so starts my day, changing light bulbs, catching up with two month old emails and lighting my own gases so I can peer into dark corners, you know, I may even nail my ears to the table later, that should brighten things up.
P.S. I'm not really that grumpy today and to prove it here's a picture of me taken a few moments ago.
www.petersmithcollective.co.uk Home Of Foreverbunny and the Impossimals
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