Tag Archives: Culture

Pet Hates Of The Office

by in Random Rants and tagged , | 14 Comments
Any questions?

The office joker – Usually a man, he loves to be centre of attention and is blissfully unaware that some jokes are inappropriate or corny. He establishes pecking order by talking at the speed (and volume) of gunfire to ensure that no-one else can steal the limelight; he doesn’t like others to be funny. He is guaranteed to wear a  ‘comedy’ tie to the office Christmas party, probably featuring Homer Simpson. He often mentions his housemate yet he secretly lives his with mother. Riddle me that funny man.

The officious manager – He really loves showing you who’s the boss. Know your place underling. Tells you that to be promoted you have to start acting like a manager yet he withholds responsibility like Gollum covets the ring. Questions whether you really have the drive to do well for this company. You mentally envisage whether you could drive a staple between his eyes and claim temporary insanity. His work/life seesaw balance is tipped so far in favour of work that life’s innocent and playful child that is inside us all is left dangling 10 ft up crying for mummy. He wants staff to be automatons; his ideal team member would be C3PO or possibly Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (agreeable and doesn’t answer back). Continue reading →

Stop Surprise Encounters With Naked Men

by in Random Rants and tagged , | 11 Comments
“Well, that was a good workout!“

Arguably, there is little on God’s majestic Earth that is more ugly than the sight of a man’s naked body. Especially a body that appears out of nowhere, confidently striding across everyone’s eyelines, as I enter my gym’s changing room, looking for a spot facing the wall.

No, this isn’t merely an encounter with someone who is getting changed. These men are lurkers.They are far too comfortable in their own skin. They gladly let it all hang out. They don’t feel shame in their bodies and seem to have missed the unwritten social rule that says ‘one must change as swiftly as possible, so as to avoid inflicting one’s dangly bits on an unsuspecting fellow gym attendee’. There, it’s written now, God dammit. Continue reading →

Extreme Frisbee

by in That's Life! and tagged , , | 8 Comments
I agree – I’ll have a pint of Glory thanks

The sport of Ultimate is colloquially known as Ultimate Frisbee. Probably because it was a stupid idea to name a sport using an unaccompanied adjective. To the uninitiated Ultimate seems like an incomplete sentence. Sorry, I missed that last part… Ultimate what?! You might expect that a sport would be named after its components, such as football, or after the place where it was developed, such as badminton, and quite reasonably so. Of course, Frisbee is a trademarked name, but couldn’t they have mentioned a disc somewhere? And what is so ultimate about it? Certainly the way I play it wouldn’t surprise me to be filed with a lawsuit accusing me of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act. To be honest, the sport that I play is usually just Adequate Frisbee, although sometimes Lucky Frisbee, and commonly Sorry-I-Didn’t-Mean-To-Do-That Frisbee. Continue reading →

Just Too Obvious

by in Dating Disasters and tagged , , , | 20 Comments

“Oh my God… he just asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. He’s just too obvious!” So says the excitable twentysomething to her closest friend. Well, the police didn’t like it when I waited outside your house to ‘accidentally’ bump into you. And you screamed when I sprang from the back seat of your car with a bottle of wine and two glasses. So what’s a guy got to do to get date these days?

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but what ever happened to the days of boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy asks girl out to share a glass or three of bubbly alcoholic liquid? Am I now supposed to believe that this transparent declaration of interest belongs in a bygone era? If what this girl says is now the widely accepted belief, then I guess that I can stop wondering where I have been going wrong.

There will now follow a period of enlightenment. My behaviour will change from rational and logical interaction with the fairer sex to increasingly confusing and erratic interplay, as I seek to find ways to ask girls out without actually asking the question. Continue reading →

This Little Thing Called Theft

by in That's Life! and tagged , | 30 Comments

This week  I discovered that someone had started a new blog using the same name as mine! Surely this is blatant theft and an infringement of copyright? Er, well no, actually it isn’t. Names are a tad difficult to copyright, unsurprisingly. So why would this bother me?

Firstly, I can’t understand why someone would choose to use a name that was already in use. I think that most people would want to avoid such a scenario. Regardless of the fact that the name bears a resemblance to well-known phrases, or at least has a feeling of familiarity, it wasn’t actually in use before I launched this site. I ran several Internet searches to check the suitability. There are a handful of sites with similar names, but nothing identical. So it was a variation on a theme, containing elements of well used expressions, and certainly espousing a common sentiment.

In a way I initially felt violated. I doubt that this was a deliberate case of theft, as there would be little point in doing so. Continue reading →

Dating ‘Mother’

by in Dating Disasters and tagged , , , | 15 Comments
I know how you feel, little guy

Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those Oedipus Complexes that would make Sigmund Freud turn in his grave, twiddling his moustache quizically. It is the tale of another dating woe, from when I had recently moved to London.

There I was, a single man salivating at the thought of what seemed like an endless line of available women, all just a Tube ride away. The world, it seemed, was my oyster. I just had to search amongst the sea of opportunity and grab a shining pearl, whilst obviously avoiding the perils of any non-jewellery producing molluscs, if you catch my drift. But enough of the analogies…

Not knowing where to start, I signed up to Match.com and started the whole ‘getting to know you’ process with London’s finest. With little success. What was wrong with these career girls? Maybe they didn’t actually believe that I was a millionaire playboy with a very big house in the country, his own horse and an interest in polo. It wasn’t too big a lie, I thought. Well, I did sometimes eat mint flavoured polos. Continue reading →

Obama vs. Osama

by in Newsworthy and tagged , | 4 Comments

Bin Laden loved yoga

More than a week has passed since the apparent ‘assassination’ of Osama Bin Laden on the command of Barrack Obama and, as the days passed and more information came to light, it gave us all the chance to fully digest the implications of such an act of revenge.

Most puzzling of all, is the inability of the American hierarchy to have an agreed story of exactly how events unfolded. First there were reports of a firefight, during which courageous special forces stormed the building and shot Bin Laden as he was reaching for a gun whilst shielding himself with his wife. Now it turns out that he was unarmed and that his wife was making a run towards the special forces (or perhaps for the door) and only one of Bin Laden’s party was actually firing a weapon.

Whatever, despite the inevitable conspiracy theories, it does now seem to be undisputed by those in the know, including Al Qaeda, that the figurehead of the 9/11 attacks is no more, which is the biggest loss to the worldwide beard community since the wacky Joaquim Phoenix sobered up and remembered where he’d put the razor. Continue reading →