The long road to the Olympics

My Olympic tickets have arrived, for events in the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff. This is approx a mile from my house, maybe more, but certainly less than 2 miles away. When I go to events there I amble quite happily. It takes about half an hour max - even if I have to walk round the stadium to get in the other side.

The Olympic organisers are very worried,though. They keep emailing me asking if I've planned my route yet and telling me to research it thoroughly in advance.

Maybe if the emails weren't being automatically generated by machines, I wouldn't get the frankly ludicrous emails. But then, machines only do what they are told to. The stupidity is human.

Irritating turns of phrase

These are some of the phrases people use that grate with me, some of them more than others…

Do you know what I mean? repeated frequently. Yes. I speak the same language as you. I can follow the thread of your argument. I have a brain. I know what you mean.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I have two female friends who will suddenly sing a loud ‘la’ note for no apparent reason other than that they’re not the centre of the conversation. Possibly the most annoying way to grab attention.

Guess what I did today… You gave yourself a full-frontal lobotomy with a spork? No? But what else would explain your prob…? Er. I don’t know. What did you do today?

Would you like to…? I’m on dodgy ground bringing this up because this is my lovely wife’s favourite prefacing question. “Would you like to empty the bins and recycling?” No, not really. Or, classically when I’ve just sat down on the sofa after a hard day, “Would you like to go out to the kitchen and do a random chore involving heavy lifting?” (Okay, that’s not a literal report, but the gist is true.) Used as a ‘non-nag’ nagging method. ‘I’m not telling you that you ought to phone your dad, but would you like to phone your dad…’

I’m not being funny but… Good thing you said that or I’d have burst out laughing at your point. You will let me know when you are being funny won’t you. I might miss it.

Have you got two minutes to [insert random charitable endeavour]? Yes I do have two minutes, thanks. And I’d like to keep them.

[In lilting sing-song] Thank you. One of my colleagues uses this method to signal the end of a conversation; say ‘thank you’ in a sing-song voice and then walk away. Thank you for listening to me; I’m bored of you now. Or, thank you for allowing me to interrupt your work; I don’t want to hear why my idea will create a lot more work for you because frankly I don’t care. Goodbye.

“Hello, can I speak to Mr Mattius/Mathis/Matthews/Matt-i-ass please?” No. Get lost.

I’m sure you’ve got your own - add them in the comments…

Little things which annoy

While in America I bought my first Hellboy merchandise, a Qee Chain Hellboy figure, and a BustUps diorama of Hellboy using the right hand of doom to punch the daylights out of a ‘bat god’. Both of them are from the Hellboy animated series, and I’m quite pleased with them. I would take them into work, but having little model demons on my desk might not go down too well in a Christian charity…

(Judge for yourself)


But anyway, one annoying thing is that the BustUps model came with a part of another model. Each of the five toys in the range had a different part of a skeletal ‘graveyard demon’, which looked just like a skeleton to me. The ploy is to make you buy all the toys, so you can assemble the bonus figure, but I’d only buy the other Hellboy ones. I’m not interested in the ‘Thunder God’ or whatever else is in the range.

Other toys do this too. I bought a Zapp Brannigan figure and he came with the Robot Devil’s arms. The idea is you buy all the Futurama figures and build the Robot Devil. Except, that would mean me buying the reissued figures I’ve already got, which I’m not going to do. So, like the Hellboy bonus, I’m left with some miscellaneous action figure body parts I’m not going to use.

The thing is if the RD was released as a figure in its own right, I would definitely want it. Making you buy all the toys to get all the parts is just annoying. In fact, it’s so irksome I’m considering not buying any more Futurama toys just on principle. And, as far as the Bust-Ups Hellboy is concerned, a skeletal foot is just a waste of time. I binned it with the box.

Another little thing which annoys me immensely is when bands release CDs with ‘hidden bonus tracks’. You know the sort of thing - there’s three minutes of silence in the last track before a random new track kicks in. I’d have thought now everyone rips their music onto a PC, this would have died out, because it completely messes up your listening when you’ve got your playlist on shuffle. But, no!

When the Killers released Sawdust last year (a compilation of their bonus tracks and oddments - well worth checking out) they added a minute of silence onto the brilliant Jacques Lu Cont remix of Mr Brightside before breaking into what sounds like a drunken rugby song recorded for a laugh. I love the remix more than the original song, but that added nonsense is so irritating.

Apparently

Work thing. (So if you're googling me because you're reading my CV, don't hold this against me - you know who you are, potential employers!)

I used the word apparently on a web page and was asked to change it because I shouldn't be so cynical. I wasn't being cynical when I chose that word; I was just in a hurry.

And the person who asked me to change it didn't ask me directly. They asked someone else who asked someone else who asked me. So three people had to take time out to 'fix a problem' and I ended up so far removed from the original complainant there was no way I could explain that I wasn't actually being cynical, it was just a word on a web page.

Now here's the thing - if the complainant had said 'Jon, change that word', I'd have done it. But they decided to waste other people's time, because they assumed I was being cynical and subversive.

And apparently it was too much to check whether their assumptions were true or not...