All 16 entries tagged Rants

Love you long time?

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I have just been violated in the mouth. I was poked, prodded, polished and flossed in a violent manner. Yes, i mean flossed.

After this rather painful experience, I had the pleasure of being told that my teeth were fine, and shown a rather patronising video about how to brush them. However my wallet obviously wasn't looking as good as my teeth, so they decided to perform emergency surgery and extracted £50 from it. What the hell happened to NHS dental care??

Note to self: Get a new dentist.

: 25 Aug 2005 12:09 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Oh HELL!

Follow-up to Why doesn't anything ever go smoothly? from The random scribblings of a diseased imagination

Right, so.
£300 of computer upgrades.
Installed in case.
Turn on power – nothing but some motherboard beeps. No help from the internet, no one knows why. Tested different RAM, took all the PCI cards out etc…everything you can think of. No change.

So tonight I got bored and decided hey, I need the internet. So I rebuilt my old system. It is currently sitting on a plate on my desk, not inside the case. Wasn't going to fiddle with that again. The upshot is that I discover my PSU is fried. The thing is only 2 months old and I don't have another one compatible with the new motherboard.
To make matters worse, I didn't buy that PSU. I asked someone on campus to get it for me, as he had an account with the website that sold it already. So now I have to get him to sort warranty stuff out for me.

/Cries

(Pictures of my struggle will follow when the new system is operational. When, not if.)

: 10 Jun 2005 23:43 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why doesn't anything ever go smoothly?

Two packages are dispatched from the same warehouse to the same address on the same date. One arrived yesterday afternoon, the other isn't here yet.

WHY??

/Hits Citylink with a stick

: 09 Jun 2005 12:18 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Have passport, can travel

The 4 month saga of my passport renewal has just come to a close, and I am here to breathe a sigh of relief and tell you about it, no doubt in great length.

It started way back in November, when the lovely Rachel and I decided, on a slightly insane whim, to take part in the Jailbreak challenge. Shortly after this I discovered that my passport (once it had been sent up from London) was due to expire a mere 4 days after the Jailbreak weekend. Panic ensued, as I ran to the Post Office to obtain a renewal form. After successfully negotiating the task of filling out the form, and having not-too-terrible photos taken, I went to find the only person on campus who could legally counter-sign it – my tutor. As he couldn't find a black biro anywhere, he filled in the form with a fountain pen. The ink leaked through the paper and the Post Office refused to accept the form. I was given another one, filled it in again, and took it for counter-signing, this time bringing my own pen with me. Everything seemed fine, until I took the new form back to the Post Office, only to be informed that, as part of my tutor's signature lay approximately 0.5mm outside the box, they would have to reject the form.

Dejected, I gave up. We opted for the 12 hour Jailbreak, on the assumption that anywhere we could get to in that time would be fine for me to enter on an almost-expired passport. As it turned out however, we never quite made it out of the country, and instead spent a rather stressful 6 hours running round airports in the naive hope that an airline would be feeling charitable. More fool us…but that is another story.

And so my passport expired. I wasn't going anywhere so I pushed it to the back of my mind. But then, 5 weeks ago, I suddenly realised that I had booked a holiday to France, without having a passport (or driving license) with which to identify myself. I got another form and headed, with great dread, to see my tutor once again. For the third time, he failed to write inside the boxes provided, and the Post Office rejected the form. This time however, I'd had enough. I decided to take my chances with the "incorrect" form via Royal Mail, saving me the £6 that the Post Office charge for checking the form and guaranteeing its correctness. The only problem now was the extra week the Passport Office claimed it would take if you didn't use the Checking Service – that and the possibility of rejection again.

Three weeks later, I received a phone call from my dad in London. He told me that he had just been given my returned documents – namely my old passport – by the people living at number 4 in our road. Our address is number 9, and while I'm pretty sure I filled in the form very clearly, the Passport Office people obviously couldn't tell the difference. The problem now was that this was the second piece of mail sent to number 4 addressed to me. The first – my new passport, had already been put back in the post by the people living there. It wasn't until the second letter that they became suspicious, opened it and discovered my old passport, with my correct address in it. My dad informed me that he had phoned the Passport Office, and they would be sending me a Lost in the Post form directly, to arrive the next day (this was last Saturday).

Unsurprisingly it didn't, and hadn't turned up by Monday either. Rather stressed, I phoned the office myself, and got them to fax me the form to fill out and fax back immediately, along with details of my travel arrangements for a week's time, to show them that they needed to HURRY THE HELL UP.

After a day of hearing nothing, I called again. I was told that, as they had not received my passport back, and if sent via Royal Mail it could take up to 4 weeks for them to do so. However they were confirming that they address they sent it to and the address I was telling them they sent it to were the same before they would issue me a new one.

The next morning (Wednesday) they woke me up with a 10am phone call, to tell me that they would be phoning me again later. Which really made my day, obviously.

When that later call came, it was to tell me that everything was fine, they would be printing me a passport and sending it by special delivery, to arrive at my London address before noon the next day. Of course, come noon yesterday, it still wasn't there. Another call home revealed that they had been "trying to contact me all day" (despite the fact that my phone had been on and I hadn't received or missed any calls) to tell me that there had been a problem with printing and it would now be arriving before noon today.

And it finally has. So now I can go to France on Monday to visit this bitch, and take some rather more impressive photos of my own.

: 18 Mar 2005 09:46 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Today is going to SUCK

So…got to sleep some time after 4am last night. Was woken up this morning by the cleaners at 9, yes, 9, during a holiday. Then again at 9:30, when they started hoovering. It's 9:30, it's the holiday, almost all of us are still here. Can't you find a better time? >.<

Then, to make matters worse, just as I'm sliding back into a doze, the Passport Office phones up to tell me that they will phone me again later. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT?

Suffice to say I am tired, cranky and stressed already, with a day of vising ahead of me which certainly won't help matters. If you cross me today, expect painful retribution.

: 16 Mar 2005 10:57 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Saga of The Toaster

Hooray for Warwick Hostility Hospitality. Last night at about 1:15 I decided I wanted some toast. So I wenr to the kitchen, took two slices of standard-sized Hovis, and put them in the Warwick Special Burns Unit toaster. I set the timer for 2 minutes with the plan to take them out after one (as if you set it for 1 minute the elements don't properly heat up). After that 1 minutes I turned off the toaster and attempt to remove the slices, but for some unknown reason all that happened was they got squashed and jammed inside. What followed was 15 minutes of rooting around inside the toaster with a knife, attempting to remove all the bits of my toast so that the fire alarm wouldn't go off the next time someone was in need of late-night snacking. Not only did I fail in this regard, I would like to point out that what I was actually removing from the toaster was indeed bread, not toast.
Here is a simple chemical equation for how the toasters work:

Bread + Heat -> Bread Crumbs + Smoke

So I make a simple plea to the Hospitality people: Give us toasters that are not screwed into the work-surface. It would make it much easier to avoid things like this occuring, and its not as if anyone is actually going to steal them anyway.

Thank you for your time.

: 09 Feb 2005 09:46 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spitting Fury

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/4148155.stm

I cannot express my anger enough. If I try to, the rest of this entry will look like this:

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#s#sd#sd#'pdr'#pojdro[igh sbjse [drg r

: 05 Jan 2005 12:59 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Where is everybody?

So I've been back for over 24 hours, and there's STILL NO ONE HERE!
If it weren't for my lovely acoustic guitar I'd be going crazy. I can't believe I've been bringing a nasty electric to uni until now. How stupid I was…

Oh, and the pre-breakfast Tesco trip was fun. No milk and no bread. Rather careless of me…

Sadly, boredom has dulled my mind and I can't think of anything of note to say. Except that firewalls make you paranoid. If you don't have one, you don't know about all the port-scanning that is going on, so you don't worry about it. Odd that.

[Update] Oh. Oh. I just went to check the post box. Guess what…a bill from the university. Suprise suprise. To make matters worse, this bill is for an amount that exceeds my loan for this term by £400. So come January 15^th i shall be £1200 in overdraft. Eeek!

: 03 Jan 2005 18:10 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Injustice

I wrote probably my longest entry ever a couple of hours ago, on the rather uninteresting subject of how I can never get to sleep on Thursday nights due to (probably) excess adrenaline caused by playing badminton. However, when I pressed Publish now, I got the dreaded blogbuilder error message page. You know the one, with what looks like the world's largest exception error. Worse, I realised that, unlike all my recent entries, I had forgotten to copy this one beforehand, on the foolish assumption that, should anything go wrong, I could just press the Back button. Oh how naive of me.

Anyway, it is sufficive to say that I don't have the willpower to type it all out again, and thus I will instead leave you with a small homage to the only good Christmas song ever, Fairytale of New York.

"When you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve, you promised me Broadband was waiting for me"

Merry Christmas to everyone, except for blogbuilder, which can go rot in a corner. (No offence to the guys who created it, I know you do a good job, but it can just be so goddam annoying sometimes.)

: 24 Dec 2004 13:54 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Where has the opposition gone?

Today's Badminton Stats

• Played: 9
• Won: 9
• Put effort into: 2
• Total game-time: 2.5 hours
• Cost: £5.80
• Satisfaction: Not a lot

Bah!

: 23 Dec 2004 23:27 |  Tags: Rants |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem