ckn

My family bought be a bottle of Jack Daniels a couple of years ago for Christmas thinking that whisky is whisky. Heathens, the lot of them.

Don’t worry, it’ll only take 15 years and two IT upgrades for HMRC to “forget” that you and a tax evader are linked via a property transaction.

They pay the mug’s price. Happens for everything from car breakdown cover to domestic fuel.

AA price restored. Apparently the letter is auto generated and you have to call each year to keep discount. I’d have cancelled out of principle if I didn’t think the others were just as morally challenged.

My AA membership has gone up from £11 a month to £31.87 a month. "You don't need for you to do anything as you pay by direct debit". Yes, yes there is, cancel. And I've been on hold to their cancellation department for 20 minutes.

When I was made redundant last year I spent far too much time with recruitment agencies to absolutely no success. It was only when I retrenched back to my contacts that I started getting a sniff of work. Agencies are too terrified of losing work that they cave on every employer demand without push-back about how they're making things difficult.

I thought it was one of those modern not really funny spoof things at first.

I think some people may be getting extra parade drill practice this week, probably with a very happy drill sergeant who will say lots of nice things to them. I know that the Guards are a bit "special" but being drill bunnies is 2/3 of their job... (the other 1/3 is making things shiny).

The ones gripping me are PPI claim companies now trying to get any hook into people. The ones that are almost non-stop on LBC these days are "have you ever had a pay-day loan? Contact us free and you may get all* your money back plus your interest and any fees (* subject to our 99.9% success fee)"

The BBC iPlayer web app's volume goes up to 11.

Seeing how it has gone over the last year or so, I think Jeremy Kyle has a good shot at the job

Old Testament = angry teenager getting upset if his followers do anything, including cutting their hair. New Testament = gets a married woman knocked up and suddenly becomes all love and peace.

Properly religious folk who take the "good books" of all major religions as they're meant with messages of love, tolerance, kindness and spirituality, get all my support and I actually envy them (in a good way) because of the peace they have in their life. Part-time religious folk who selectively choose passages from their "good books", twist them out of context and ignore everything else deserve to go to whatever their religion's version of hell is. I think that's properly on-topic for a rant thread!

He has been hard on people who are daft enough to come out with that twaddle but it still annoys me. It's had a good dial-in so far from hard-religious "you can't be good if you're not religious" crowd to humanists pointing out that we're "more good" now religion is on the decline, and a few brave souls in the middle.

James O'Brien show on LBC today, the last hour is on religion and whether more religion would make us better people. Real hand-grenade of an hour... Last caller made it clear you can't be a good person if you're not religious. That's the sort of thing that really grips me about the small minority of religious folk who genuinely believe such rubbish.

One of the better reasons I've seen for cancelling a train:

My day today so far has been communicating with my dad's generation, acting as go-between because none of them will talk to any other. You'd think that something as important as getting their mum's grave plot all nice and sorted with the gravestone amendment and plot structure might get them to talk to each other, even if only over email, but no, their petty whining means that they'd genuinely leave the work undone if I didn't act as go-between. I despise acting as the adult to this bunch of children all the time.

It’s Prince Phil’s birthday today. IMDB has a fine way of recognising his talents. IMDB summarises people by their most famous role ? I think he’s been having the good life since way before 1978 though.

There should be an absolute defence in law for beating someone who spits chewing gum onto pavements.

I like using Royal Mail because it's boring and reliable. If I order something for a set day and it uses them then I get it on time. I expect abysmal delivery standards from third rate companies that treat their drivers abysmally and I rarely get overly grumpy with them if there's a problem. That's what annoys me more than anything else, I simply don't expect it from Royal Mail.

Royal Mail today. For the first time ever (that I can remember), Royal Mail have done the dump & run with a card through the letterbox. I'm working at home today and got a few things delivered for today to make sure I didn't miss any. I heard the letterbox go so wandered downstairs to get it to see a Royal Mail van driving off down the road, a bunch of letters and a red "sorry we missed you" card. The doorbell has a repeater unit just outside my office door, I just re-tested it to make sure it works, it does. Now I either have to go pick it up, try to get someone to take delivery tomorrow or ask for redelivery on another day. If the postie wants to work like a third-rate delivery company driver then they bloody well should go work for one.

This thread is meant to be conflict free. Keep it that way.

49p for the entire collection in a reviewed version. Or you could pay a massive £0.00 for an unreviewed version. Never read any of his stuff but I'm sure I can afford to fork out nothing for the chance .

BBC traffic reports. BBC London were saying "the A13 is all open now with free flowing traffic". Really? While I'm sitting in a queue on it trying to get off the thing into Barking with huge queues? 50 minutes later I'd moved 200m and BBC London were saying "earlier problems all resolved and no queues". What were they doing? Just making it up because their budgets were cut and they were relying on a report from Dave the Builder who got through by driving along the cycle path? It took me 4 hours to get from Ipswich to Barking. The first 60 miles took a few minutes over an hour, the last 5 miles took 3 hours... No problems there though according to BBC London.

Nah, that one is meant to be a random place people can stick their first world problems. We're just such a sociable and friendly lot that people can't help chat about stuff.