Not Happy

Jonse yakked his guts up in my car on the way back from Birmingham on Saturday night/Sunday morning. My car now stinks of sick. Rank

Elephants never forget?

It seems that certain ones do. Elephant.co.uk to be precise

It would seem they have forgotten to post my cover note as it still didn’t arrive today.

They also seem to think that it costs £7 to send a letter by Royal Mail Special Delivery. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ich don’t think so

Greatest Moment of 2008 so far - MY CAR IS FINALLY SOLD

Unbelieveable. After months and months of trying - and heafty advertising fees - my car is finally sold. I ended up having to take a fair bit less than I wanted but at least it is gone now and not going to cause me any more stress or cost me any more money. To say I am happy is an understatement.

The same day, I replaced it with an absoultely fantastic BMW 323i coupe which is in pristine condition. It was slightly more expensive than most cars its age but it is by far the cleanest example I have seen in a long time. This picture doesn’t do it justice plus I had just driven it 90 miles back in terrible weather so it got dirty

Unfortunately, due to unfathomably idiotic policies at the DVLA, it is still sat on my drive and I have had to get the stinking train, tram and shanks’s pony to get to work the last 3 days.

I have transferred the insurance to my name and I have sent the log book off, all I need to do now is to tax it - easier said than done so it seems. Woe betide anyone who dares pay their road tax slightly late - you will be publically flogged, fined 7 squillion pounds, then left to rot in jail for the rest of your days. I am actually TRYING to tax my car and I have been told point blank that I can’t. This is because:

• To tax it at the post office I need an insurance cover note - which hasn’t arrived yet. And for some hair brained reason they won’t accept a faxed copy from the insurer
• To tax it over the phone the DVLA need to have processed my log book - which I am told can take up to 3 weeks.

I telephoned the DVLA and explained the situation, and I was told that I could proceed no further as they have not processed my log book and there was absolutely no way round it. When I enquired as to why this was the case, I was told that it is because without doing this they won’t have an address to send the tax disk out to! Seriously, you could not make it up. I am on the phone, talking to the tax person and they say I cannot tax my car as they don’t have an address to send the tax disk out to. When I offered to provide one over the phone, I was spoken to as though I had suggested that the operator was an illegitimate child.

Proof, if ever it was needed, that unless there is a tick box for it on a form, Government departments are unable to do anything about anything at all

It’s robot or India - take your pick

I’m just about fed up with trying to contact any form of large company. Banks are the worst offenders in this case - most noteably, Lloyds TSB.

To start with, you get the automated system that makes you talk at it and type in 4.2 billion sets of numbers, account details, shoe size etc etc etc. Once you have done that, 9.999 trillion times out of 10 trillion, it will not recognise the information you entered and boot you out of the system and into some other automated service which will present you with 496 options and sub-options whereby each one links you back into the automated system you have just been ejected from.

If you are lucky (or unlucky, in this case) enough to get through to speak to a real person, then you will have found that your call has been beamed half way round the world to some call centre where they have only just learnt how to speak English and speak in that now increasingly familiar monotone that sounds like the ruddy automated service you just came from - and they are always overly pleasant. Don’t get me wrong, I like pleasant people but over-pleasantness is too much.

My latest experience beggars belief……….

My partner lost her job earlier this year so we ran into difficulty paying the credit card bill. The account got passed to collections and it turns out that collections is actually another name for the Delhi Harrasment Squad. I appreciate I have to pay bills on time, but I contacted the bank, explained the situation and said that the full bill can be settled in a matter of weeks once my partner starts her new job and gets paid. Happy days. I then start getting what only can be described as harrassed, by some overly polite monotonous chap who’s only English words in his vocabulary were “token” and “payement”. Pretty much every day this chump would call my land line (as I barred the number on my mobile) at exactly the same time in the evening and insist I make a “token payment”. After explaining the situation to him 376 times and being completely ignored I started to get quite cross.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, when time came to settle the debt (the same date as I agreed with the bank initially may I add), I rang up and offered my debit card details so the payment could be processed. Low and behold, monotonous “token payment” man proceeded to tell me that he could not accept my card as form of payment for one completely idiotic reason or another. He spends weeks blatantly harrassing me, then as soon as I phone up to pay my debt of my own accord he says I can’t pay it! It really does beggar belief.

The little red briefcase of doom

Afternoon campers, let me point something out before I continue. I know sod all about politics. This is my viewpoint of what is going on at the moment and is based on absolutley no facts whatsoever, mainly because I can’t be bothered to go find any - therefore, i think this is very accurate account of the matter in hand how Joe Public sees it.

So then, Alistair Darling has shown everyone his little red briefcase for the first time and then explained away how the government are going to bleed us dry for the foreseeable future - no change from any previous budget then.

Much noise was made about the alcohol issue - and quite rightly so. Tax on alcohol has been put up by more than the rate of inflation. Many will argue this is to hit out at “binge drinking” and “yob culture” and what not - and I agree, although not fully. If it is, it’s disgraceful. I can go out of a weekend and I am perfectly capable to get “a little bit worse for wear” and I am still able to behave myself and not mug/rape/murder anybody, so why should I have to suffer because of some ferrel spawn that are incapable of behaving in a civilised manner at all - let alone after a sniff of the barmaids apron. Even then, I’m still paying for it as I suspect that those cans of cider or whatever they are drinking were paid with out of money they got for signing on as they are unable to work due to a “bad back”.

I also see this fuel tax has been delayed. That is as transparent as I don’t know what. By the time it rolls round to putting this 2p on a litre of petrol, everyone will have forgotten about it so 4p will get slapped on. Remember just after the major petrol blockades a few years back? Petrol went down to about 65p a litre. Granted, it was a nuisance during the protests, queueing for an hour to put a tenner in your tank but still, we reaped the benefits afterwards. I think something serious needs to be done in regards to petrol prices. It is just ridiculous now.

The thing that really really made me guffaw about this budget though was making supermarkets charge for plastic carrier bags. That is possibly the most idiotic idea in the history of bad ideas (apart from the 39th game abroad, obviously). All these do gooder eco-mentalists out there have worked themselves up into a tizz and are convinced that unless we all take to the streets and set our cars on fire, demolish all our houses and start living in trees, the world is going to explode at some point in the next 12 minutes. What absolute twaddle. Yes, the world is going to die a slow and horrible death, but not for the next umpteen million years! We’ll have wiped ourselves out in a global war way before then so stop stressing and thinking up stupid ideas that aren’t going to save the planet!

Anyway, to sum it up in a short and sharp fashion, taxes are going up and up and up and up. Wages are staying where they are. No wonder people are always are - to coin a phrase - “in the shit” financially. I would like to buy my first house soon. I’ve worked out that if I save £200 a month, then by the time I am 756 years of age, i’ll just be able to afford the deposit to buy a 8 person tent (check out the political correctness there. We all know it’s an 8 man tent really). I will then have to work 9000 hours a week to afford the mortgage repayments. But as long as Mr Brown and co have their nice hefty Christmas bonus and expenses bill that stretches from here to the moon and back 27 times, I’ll feel a warm sense of gratification that all my hard work is not going to waste *sigh*