A Cloud's Sorrow

The clouds weep at their own pathetic fallacy.
Oh sweet irony how you become truth
Perched high above the action
Helpless in their dream to become wanted
They remain perpetually frowned upon
Though people must look up to them
No respect is shown for their cause
In spite of it being a will not of their own

Only a matter of days pass before it's time
For the clouds to wreak their 'unwanted' revenge
They remain defiant til the end
Knowing that fulfilling this forced destiny
Shall in fact evaporate their dwindling life
But alas there will be more
Samples of the strongest clouds are taken
And from them a new generation of woeful blankets shall emerge
And the cycle shall begin again

The clouds will forever be trapped in their vast space
Forced to regurgitate their eternal cycle
Although never forgotten they will be forever overshadowed by the mighty fire
The one they say rules the sky with tyrannical precision
However there are those few chances that are seized by the clouds
En mass they too are a potent foe
They wrap around the sky and roar to Earth
No more shall there be warmth
No more shall the fiery ball control the skies
Everyone is thrown into an uneasy ambiguity
Unable to predict just when this new force is going to unleash its wrath

The sky parts and there is once more peace
Peaceful clouds return after the wave of terror
But they are scorned and beaten by the actions of their parents
Poor clouds, how could anyone understand their feelings?
They close their heavy eyelids and their tears trickle once again, down to earth

Technically it's Just another Job

OK so this one week (the one in this story, not this actual week), I began a new job as a Technical Support Adviser, working in a Call Centre so that was a good start to the week.

On the first day I figured how hard can this be? The day began, I answered the phone all confident 'Good morning this is Technical Support; I can cure all your technical problems. You name it, I can tell you how to fix it by simply reading this automated encyclopedic script, this fountain of all technical knowledge that has presented itself in front of me. Now mere non-technical mortal, how I can help you today?'

The day began rather rapidly with people all over the country calling up to say their Internet had stopped working. They had no idea what has happened to it but it has stopped working. It worked last night when they went to bed but now they've woken up their Internet has remained in a deep slumber, refusing to rise before its first cup of Columbian Roast. After an investigation they find a load of agents have just been sitting at their desk clicking away switching off people's Internet randomly while expressing their sheer delight in their work 'wheeeeeee!'. When the customer says their Internet isn't working is greeted smugly by the operator 'Yes I know'.

This particular problem required some technical-bobbety-thingy kind of change. A girl sitting beside me who was also new asked me why we couldn't just make the change ourselves. The reply came from a manager who explains 'oh no, they don't give you that kind of power. That would be far too dangerous.'

I was confused. I thought the department I was in was technical support. Suddenly I began wondering if they'd lied on the advert. I started asking people around me, what do we do exactly? People phone us up for technical support, they ask completely useless question to which we give just as useless responses, 'Yes, no, no, nee-eey'. I have no idea why we would happen to sound like knights that say 'nee' but that's what happens. Then after all these questions, I had to tell the customer 'I'm sorry sir but I can't help you further this will require special advanced technical support.' This is technical support of a much higher calibre, the levels of support that are unheard of to the regular Joe. It makes it sound as though this mere problem has now become an MI6 mission. They ask where the case is going and I have to tell them (and this is on the script too) 'I'm sorry sir that's classified information. If I tell you, I'm afraid I'd have to kill you.' Then, as you stroke your white Persian cat perched rather awkwardly on the arm of your cheap replica office chair, it falls to the floor for the 26th time today. 'Bollocks!' I said rather loudly, forgetting I was still talking to a customer. So after that incident I was marched into the manager's office and sacked for bad language. Ah well at least I lasted 2 hours, that's twice as long as the last job I worked at. I was only 59 minutes in at B&Q when I was given my marching orders. A guy came into the store asking for decking. I wasn't taking any chances so I threw the first punch. Knocked him clean out. I thought I'd done a pretty good job but the manager didn't think so.

One of these days I'll find my niche. I took her to the supermarket one day and came back without her. Oh I meant niche, not niece. Forget I said anything about that *whistles innocently*. For now I'll try to stick to my day job, it might stop me getting into so much trouble.

All Our Roads Are Going to Pot

I know it's not just me that thinks this but are ALL our roads going to pot? As a cyclist my eye is trained in the fine art of detecting pot holes, not that it takes a genius to see them. Let's face it, it's easy enough to spot gaping chasms, cracks, dips, troughs, holes and overzealous drains, from a mile off and our roads are full of them.

With such a pothole-keen eye, I quickly spotted one such small and easily avoidable crack next to a drain, on a busy road. I'd never had any problems avoiding it as I'd taken the same route for well over a year and knew it well. On a fateful day last week I was cycling along as I always do when I was struck by surprise. They'd filled that particular pothole in! So many of our roads are riddled with gaping chasms of perilous danger and yet of all the atrocities of the other roads, this mediocre, menial, even harmless, hole was the one to meet its demise. Why this one? This puzzled me incessantly for the remainder of the journey as I tried to imagine the road maintenance committee having a meeting to discuss the most perilous holes that required attention. I bet none of them would have suspected that tiny hole would one day top the list of priorities. It's so small it looks as though it may have in fact been filled in by a random traveller with a home-made DIY pothole filler kit. Maybe it wasn't even acknowledged by the road maintenance committee at all. Some obsessive-compulsive person finally snapped. I know it intrigued me every day that I had to avoid it. Maybe it was a fellow cyclist who was tired of having to swerve to avoid it on his daily commute. Driven to near-madness he whipped up a DIY pothole repair kit and set off on a mission. There just can't be any other explanation for it. Surely the council couldn't have, in their brilliant foresight, have isolated this one small defect and flagged it for urgent action. When I say urgent I mean within 2-3 years of it being reported of course.

Ultimately I know we can't control the state of our roads, the council do their bit by being completely useless, and the rest is up to us to use what little common sense we have left to carefully manoeuvre round them in the best way possible. So if you're feeling particularly wound up by one particular part of road, there may be good news for you. You no longer need to be a mere passenger in this ordeal. Whip up your own pothole-fixing DIY kit and you too can combat the roads of tomorrow, today!

Keyboard Feet Bandits on the Run

How do keyboards lose their feet? No, this is not a joke, or trick, but a genuine question. Most people have probably heard the expression 'to find your feet' or some variation, meaning to find your bearings etc but the flip side is losing one's feet. For people that work in an office I'm sure at one time or another they have experienced this crazy keyboard foot fetish.

It's rather disconcerting to find that someone has stolen the feet from your keyboard. I'm sure all keyboards are born with feet yet somehow as they mature and begin their working life in a call centre, their feet magically disappear. The rather deflated keyboards land flat on their backs, unable to provide the ergonomically-rich experience for which they were purposely hired. It's an outrage!

I find it oddly sadistic severing limbs from inanimate objects but it must be done. I like my keyboards to be just like me, reasonably long and with all limbs attached. After resisting the temptation of printing wanted or lost posters for the keyboard feet, I resigned myself to a more practical option, stealing. I decided that after someone had kindly deprived me of having an ergonomic typing instrument, I was now adamant I would inflict the same punishment to some other unsuspecting victim. This is the effect such an event has on you; it turns you into a thief. This morning I was an honest, law-abiding citizen. Since arriving at work however I've now become a fully fledged foot thief. If anyone finds out I'll have to run and hope no-one catches me because I feel my defence in the name of ergonomics probably wouldn't stand up in court. As this is a daily occurrence I can't help but wonder just how many of us there are. There must be countless keyboard feet stealing bandits out there that are secretly in hiding or on the run, or worse, walking among us! Maybe there's a secret covenant, who knows.

Where I work it's quite a big problem. You can actually go to lunch, leaving a full-limbed keyboard and return to find that its feet have gone walkabouts. How on Earth can they up sticks and leave within 30 minutes, they surely can’t be that restless. If people can steal such a simple thing, it makes me wonder what else they can pilfer. Mind you, I do work in a place where people have no qualms about stealing your sandwich out of the fridge but that's a different story. Imagine walking into a fridge, not literally, and suddenly being struck by amnesia. Amidst this panic of no longer being able to find your lunch you pick one randomly and walk away, calmly shaking. I wonder if that's what happens to the keyboards. People must misplace pieces of their keyboard and forget where they are so when they 'think' they're reclaiming their own equipment; they are in fact just stealing someone else's.

While it may all be fun and games until someone's keyboard loses a foot or a leg, it's not very nice or indeed helpful to steal them from another place. So next time you're faced with the dilemma of a footless keyboard, stop and think about your actions. Do you really want to turn into a keyboard foot thief? Stop, put the keyboard down and walk away! Keep your dignity in tact and replace the entire keyboard.

Disabled Car

This is just a short piece I wrote a week or so back. I thought I'd best publish something as it's been over a week since the last one. I'll get round to publishing more often very soon. Enjoy and thanks for reading.

Disabled Car

As I embark on my pursuing my dreams as a comedy writer I don't really do much stand-up or in fact any at all. I'm quite shy and retired so I like sitting down. But I do love writing though. I write a lot. Well I write in a lot at least. Parking lots mostly. I do the ticketing you see. Love writing those tickets I do. I can write 'em all day and I do as well. That reminds me, who out there is driving that Reliant Robin? Did you really think you were going to get away with it? They should have been confined to go kart tracks years ago. Just because it's only got three wheels doesn't mean you can park in a disabled bay you know. So who's is it? As the tumbleweed blew past me I came to the conclusion maybe it doesn't belong to anyone. It belongs to no-one. 'Hm...oh dear' I think aloud. I think I might have been in the wrong car park. Come to think of it, it was a rather small car park, only consisting of 2 cars. Ah well too late now, it's past the point of no return. If I go back now to remove the ticket from the car it'll look well dodgy, people will think I'm trying to steal it. So I best leave it there. The owner of that deprived little motor vehicle will get quite a surprise when he opens his front door in the morning I'm quite sure. I think it's the dementia setting in. Bad times.

Public Transport Fuels Turmoil

A deranged public transport vehicle may have left me scarred for life after a bizarre string of events occurred yesterday. I found myself surrounded by complete madness on what should have been a routine bus journey. There I was sitting on the bus, travelling along happily on my way to buy a new computer chair without a care in the world. It didn't take long for things to start going horribly wrong.

After seeing a few more people board the already quite packed bus I decided to move along the window seat to begrudgingly make space in case someone else needed to sit down. Let's face it, no-one likes people sitting beside them. If you look down a bus when you first set foot on it, there appears to be no empty seats at all. Once you've paid your fare and embark on the hunt to find a spare seat you see that every window seat is already long gone. They were taken about a dozen stops ago. Panic sets in. You MUST sit beside someone, and NOT in a window seat.

So I'd moved along to the window seat and bloody hell, talk about sitting in the hot seat. The sun was on the other side of the bus and yet it felt like it was actually embedded into the seat cushion. I could not believe how hot it was. Something wasn't right. The heat seemed to be coming from below the seat, rising, as it does, up my leg and tickling my sweat glands. The heating was on. Oh my god! It's a sunny spring day and the bus is already being indulged by the warmth of the greenhouse sun and yet the driver has put the heating on. It must be a joke. It felt like it was 500 degrees inside the bus.

Of course my choice of clothing didn't help at that point. My black t-shirt created the perfect interior lining in what felt like a furnace encased in a portable greenhouse. When I walked down for the bus I wasn't expecting one of those new pre-summer greenhouse buses.

On the same bus I saw an NHS poster / board thingy. It was at a slightly skewed angle so I couldn't see the actual point it was making though I suspect it was some kind of counselling or advice service. From the angle at which I was sitting, all I could read of the poster was four questions each on a separate line.

Unwell?
Unsure?
Confused?
Need help?

Immediately I became ALL of the above. After reading the first word I began thinking how I'd been sneezing all afternoon but I hardly felt it qualified me as unwell. So I placed a mental cross next to that question. That was easy enough I thought and moved onto the next one. Unsure? Um…well I had thought I was in reasonable health but now that I'm being probed by a random snot-coloured advertising board I'm just not sure any more. Apprehensive about that question, I quickly skipped to the following ones. Confused? Well by this point I was very confused and began wondering who would design such a thought provoking, intimidating and confusing poster. And finally the last question of the interrogation. Need help? YES! I screamed in my head. Oh my god all I wanted to do was take a bus up the road to buy a computer chair and now I don't even know who or what I am any more. I'm a lost soul, a wandering traveller on board a drifting incarnation of public confusion. From that moment on I kept my eyes forward to avoid any further tricks and pitfalls. I kept my fingers crossed. I needed to exit this wandering mayhem as soon as possible.

Ultimately after the culmination of heatstroke meltdown and a silent interrogation at the hands of the Board of Cunning Advertising, the relief I felt just to taste fresh air again was immense. When I say fresh air, I mean, it was as fresh as the air gets in Sunderland. I stepped off the bus and onto foreign soil and tried not to think about what the return journey was going to be like. I just wanted to grab my chair and get back home to safety as soon as I could.

Incidentally while on the same number bus heading back home, someone threatened to hit me for squashing his hand against a bar despite the bus being a heavily packed sardine tin on wheels. It was during the school run time. I didn't make anything of it and the rest of the ride was mostly smooth but honestly with experiences like this, is it any wonder people don't like taking public transport?

The Incontinent Angel Layer Cake

Yesterday I was tucking into one of my favourite types of cake, angel layer cake. I love angel layer cake. What a perfectly sweet name it has. This sugary goodness is so angelic and good, you could even call it divine. It makes you feel like eating the full cake because it contains layers of actual angels. If you consume angels into your digestive system maybe they will spread throughout your body and turn you into some magnificent beaming light. You'd be a beacon of goodness, everything you ever wanted would come true. You would get into heaven. It's pure gold, a cake made of win.

There's a cheesy chat-up line that some people may have heard, about angels. You know the one about heaven must be short an angel since you've fallen to earth, some kind of rubbish like that. The truth is, they didn't fall out of the sky. The reason that girl looks like an angel is that she's stuffed her face with so much angel layer cake that she's been forever transformed into one.

What sets the cake apart from the rest are the colours. I love the colours of the layers. Bright pink layer at the top, that must be the angel's face. White layer at the bottom that must be either the angel's feet or the bottom of its robes. But I can't help feeling a little dubious about the middle layer. It's yellow. Now in my mind that is the middle area of the angel, which means it would be the angel's genitals. It would appear the middle layer of the cake is where the angels have wet themselves. This is somewhat distressing when you have this thought mid-cake. I'm eating angel piss. The cake makers have tried to hide the fact these angels are incontinent by inserting a layer of icing in a feeble attempt to stop the wee from running down to the bottom of the cake. This is a disaster. It's like making teapots out of chocolate. However, not one to be easily put off my food, I curiously kept eating. It actually tasted quite nice. They've done well adding the flavourings, you can hardly even taste the urine. It's quite amazing, and also rather worrying what can be done these days to disguise such mysterious and disgusting 'secret' ingredients used to create that perfectly scrumptious flavour.

Some foods you just have to avoid at all costs no matter how diverse you think they are. Delicacies such as yellow snow and chocolate snow must always be avoided like the plague. Don't even be tempted by chocolate snow, it will only end badly. Other delights are more plausible like angel layer cake. But a word to the wise, if you're happily chomping on your favourite food, don't jeopardise your enjoyment of it by stopping halfway through and start actually thinking about what you're eating. Just eat it if you know what's good for you or you might end up with the dilemma in which I found myself and you may not be able to stomach your ideas no matter how crazy and far fetched they are.