The grumpy thread

[jakebullet]

Try being sympathetic so you and kinky girl can score a free holiday in new York.

 

Ha Ha. She'll not go and lose all the money, but if I was to suggest we went instead she'd want full price paid. She's now thinking about insurance scams. I'm quite happy to help by running over an arm or leg with my discovery.

 

Oh, and just to bring balance to the universe I've got an ebay tosser who thinks "Estimated delivery: Friday 22nd" = Guaranteed Friday, and I've ruined her life by none delivery of 10 dice.

 

It's Friday night FFS. I should be having unfortunate sexual accidents with Kinky girl by now.

[Cheggers]

 

 

 

It's Friday night FFS. I should be having unfortunate sexual accidents with Kinky girl by now.

 

So why aren't you?

 

 

Cowboy up, cupcake.

[jakebullet]

She's not back until tomorrow. Hilarious* accidents start at 1pm.

[DeeJay]

Cowboy up, cupcake.

Genuine Laugh Out Loud.

[Coprolalia]

Jesus wept, I've just been ripping some wiring out of my house cos I'm doing the kitchen. It's getting rewired professionally but I'm just going through running cables for the new sockets and wragging the old stuff out to fill the hole etc.

 

Anyway, it's got a wooden Wylex fuse box, installed at least 40 years ago. There's two 16A fuses. One feeds 5 or the 6 sockets in the kitchen, and also the entire rest of the house.

The other feeds a single socket in the corner of the kitchen. The circuit is ran with Aluminium cable, which after the socket then goes down the wall diagonally behind the plaster, behind the skirting board all round the room and up two flights of stairs (literally up each stair under the carpet) to the single socket in the back corner of the attic. 

 

There's also a wire coming out on the wall adjoining our neighbours that use to power some old lights in a kitchen cabinet, but I think it's powered off nextdoors electric because it's still live even when I take every fuse out of our box.

 

I know this pain.

Currently broke and can't afford chod because renovating house deadline prior to move for work in August. Part of the job is we just get posted odd places at random - this time is Wales!

2 years ago we bought our 1890s terraced place as a wreck as MsJ fell in love with it. I've done building in the past, so a bit of DIY ain't a problem, and we've been gradually going room to room.

 

Stuff we found:

Carpet never removed, just more carpet laid over. If they couldn't afford to add more carpet staples, nails and electrical tape will do to fill wear holes. Smoking 60/day meant this was interwoven with 50 years of fag ash and old newspapers.

No electrics ever removed. Rewire in 2011 by industrial cowboys, who put a good fuseboard in that corresponded to the square root of fuck all as they spurred off whatever they wanted. We have an underfloor void that was like venturing into the Temple of Doom, except some of those lovely cotton wrapped wires were live. FUN.

No plumbing ever removed. See above. Old lead pipes crimped and left in the wall dripping mains water.

No gas pipes ever removed. Quite cool actually, as we could have put gas lamps back in the rooms.

Second story extension for bathroom part single skin, part... ?structural render with some asbestos concrete board and studs. Sketchy.

 

 

Amusingly* the intensive expensive building survey only noted the wiring as an issue.

[MarvinsMom]

There is something about Range Rovers - newer ones anyway.

 

I saw an Overfinch in town today (parked in the pedestrian area) in a lovely metallic blue with reasonably subtle wheels and an inviting looking leather interior.

 

Did I think, "ooh nice" or "I'd love one in a few years when they are worth buttons"?

 

No. I thought "Prick!" I never saw the owner, but I bet I was right.

two words-

 

wayne rooney. 

 

or- 

 

footballers wives (car)

 

that is why range rovers have gone from been the height of style and class to chav central.

[bub2006]

Cowboy up, cupcake.

New bumper sticker material right there

[cobblers]

I know this pain.

Currently broke and can't afford chod because renovating house deadline prior to move for work in August. Part of the job is we just get posted odd places at random - this time is Wales!

2 years ago we bought our 1890s terraced place as a wreck as MsJ fell in love with it. I've done building in the past, so a bit of DIY ain't a problem, and we've been gradually going room to room.

 

Stuff we found:

Carpet never removed, just more carpet laid over. If they couldn't afford to add more carpet staples, nails and electrical tape will do to fill wear holes. Smoking 60/day meant this was interwoven with 50 years of fag ash and old newspapers.

No electrics ever removed. Rewire in 2011 by industrial cowboys, who put a good fuseboard in that corresponded to the square root of fuck all as they spurred off whatever they wanted. We have an underfloor void that was like venturing into the Temple of Doom, except some of those lovely cotton wrapped wires were live. FUN.

No plumbing ever removed. See above. Old lead pipes crimped and left in the wall dripping mains water.

No gas pipes ever removed. Quite cool actually, as we could have put gas lamps back in the rooms.

Second story extension for bathroom part single skin, part... ?structural render with some asbestos concrete board and studs. Sketchy.

 

 

Amusingly* the intensive expensive building survey only noted the wiring as an issue.

 

 

Bingo! Ours is also an 1890s terrace and has all the same bodges. It was council owned until about 20 years ago.

There's four layers of carpet in the attic. The top layer goes 8" up the walls and is stuck on to them with nails and no nails.

The bathroom ceiling is lath and plaster, followed by 6 layers of plasterboard, then tongue and groove panelling over that. There were three layers of tiles on the wall round the bath, which stuck out so far that someone had ground the knobs down on the taps so you could actually turn them.

I pulled 15 foot of lead pipe out of the kitchen wall and yep, we've also still got the gas lamp pipes in the walls. 

The stairs and landing has three layers of heavily textured wallpaper on it. Whoever layed the final one (vertical stripes) started at a door frame in one corner and worked their way around. The slight wonkeyness of the corners and walls added up bit by bit until they got to the final corner, (the bit you see directly at the top of the stairs) and the whole thing was running so far on the squint the final sheet is 2" wide at the top and 11" wide at the bottom.

Luckily* it's grade 2 listed so we've not had any major structural work to undo. 

[michael1703]

We should have a "shite house" thread.

 

Ours isn't too bad apart from all the species in the loft,water dripping through windows and lamps that fizzle

 

I reckon some of our houses must be as neglected as our cars

[Mr A Lawrence]

Constant dissing of new cars on here.

 

If we didn't buy new cars then in 10 years time there wouldn't be any chord to buy for peanuts would there??

 

How can a new car that, 1, starts first time, 2, gets you to your destination without drama, 3, doesn't break down 99% of the time be "all new cars r shite"??

 

I don't mind old shit, I drive a 10 yr old jaguar and have a 18 yr old mgf in the garage and access to a 2015 abarth.

 

Buying new cars is what we in the free world call choice!!

 

Rant over.

[Craig the Princess]

I know it goes a bit far Andy, but I think that is a reaction to all the bits of helpful* advise we get to buy a new car, don't drive that old shit, please stop lowering the tone of the street, its not you it's the oil stain left by your Allegro.

[Timewaster]

Re new cars are all shite.

 

My company car is a 2014 Focus.

It is brilliant. In 2 years and 33k it has had one service which was about 2 hours, 3 or 4 bottles of screen wash and about 5 washes.

That's it.

It sips fuel at 62mpg average and will probably save me from harm if I crash.

 

It is however, 100% dull.

 

That is the problem. It is as reliable and interesting as my washing machine.

[cort16]

I'm going too stop advertising on gumtree. I put my old Panda wheels on for 35 quid. The advert is very clear that 3 of the tyres are knackered.

Nearly every response has asked "are the tyres all okay?" They can't be reading the advert.

 

What's the weigh in price for alloy I might just take them to the scrappies to get them out the way?

[Mr_Bo11ox]

I get sick of the never-ending ranting & moaning about new cars and the 'cunts' that drive them, its nonsense and boring as hell

[Timewaster]

To be fair, there is quite a good mix of stuff we are communally grumpy about.

 

We do repeat ourselves over and over but that's grumpy old men for you.

 

During the war........

[MarvinsMom]

i remember when all this was fields......

[scaryoldcortina]

i remember when all this was fields......

I had a drive along green lane and up through grove hill the other day, I turned to my son and said

 

"you know, I remember when this was all houses....."

[strangeangel]

I'm going too stop advertising on gumtree. I put my old Panda wheels on for 35 quid. The advert is very clear that 3 of the tyres are knackered.

Nearly every response has asked "are the tyres all okay?" They can't read the advert.

 

FTFY

[Skizzer]

I live in South Wales.  Plenty of fields round here that I remember when they were all factories.

[mercrocker]

I am not an un-generous old bastard but when I agree to sponsor somebody for something - DO THE BLOODY THING FIRST.   couple of blokes at work are doing various runs tomorrow and came and chapped me up for the dosh this morning.   WTF?   

 

I am only sponsoring sky-dives from now on.  Do every bloody metre or you will get fuck all.

 

Oh, and they all drive new cars too.

[myglaren]

I am not an un-generous old bastard but when I agree to sponsor somebody for something - DO THE BLOODY THING FIRST.   couple of blokes at work are doing various runs tomorrow and came and chapped me up for the dosh this morning.   WTF?   

 

I am only sponsoring sky-dives from now on.  Do every bloody metre or you will get fuck all.

 

Oh, and they all drive new cars too.

Just watched QI and there were some figures quoted there that - on average - each skydiving to raise money for charity, and most are for the NHS - raises £30 and each £1 raised costs the NHS £13.70 or thereabouts to treat the resultant injuries.

[Craig the Princess]

Never understood why a skydive (a great thing to do) is a sponsored event. Especially if the dive is paid for from the sponsorship.

 

Tonight I'm having a fish supper, could someone sponsor me to do that.

[purplebargeken]

I'll sponsor you some salt and vinegar.

[DeeJay]

Never understood why a skydive (a great thing to do) is a sponsored event. Especially if the dive is paid for from the sponsorship.

 

Tonight I'm having a fish supper, could someone sponsor me to do that.

 

I'll chip in.

[dave21478]

Been away for a while, and have been saving these up, so as I said to the hooker last night, "apologies for the length....."

 

 

Courier companies. That old favourite. 

When I become Emperor, every empolyee from the MD down of every courier company will be executed in a horrific, grisly, agonising manner probably involving having a running chainsaw shoved up their arseholes. The event will be televised live around the world and will be mandatory viewing for all. This will create a huge number of job opportunities in the courier industry and those who apply, having seen what happened to their predecessors, should be suitably motivated to not make a complete cunt of one of the oldest and simplest professions in the history of civilisation. Seriously - carry stuff from A to B and get paid to do it. Its not hard. Yes, there are a lot of As and Bs to deal with and lots and lots of things to carry, but perhaps....oh I dunno....maybe employing more drivers would be a good start.

I get it....I live in the ass-end of nowhere and you are on a delivery run with less time than is needed for all your parcels. All you need to do is let me know. My number is on your paperwork and usually written on the box, just call me and say you cant make it on Thursday as planned so it will be delivered Friday instead. I will be ok with this....nothing I am waiting for is that important and this way I can do something else on the Thursday instead of waiting in all day for you to not show up. What you dont do is blatantly lie to my fucking face. If I sit in all day and then check the online tracking to see it marked as unable to be delivered because there was nobody home, that makes me want to go and lube up the chainsaw.

 

 

This forum.

I havent exactly been here a long time but It is interesting me less and less. Granted my car mojo fucked off a few months ago, but this place is becoming very negative. I dont want to read multi-page threads about how shit new cars are. "Well dont fuckin read them then you twat...." yeah, true...I suppose.

 

 

American reality TV shows. Calm the fuck down, eh? 

"Tonight on ice road lumberjacking towtruck drivers deep sea fishing in the oil field...." shows a preview of what you are about to watch. You watch it, commercials cut in with a cliffhanger where something exciting* is about to happen, comes back, recaps the last five minutes you just watched, finally gets to where it was and nothing happens. Just stop with the repeating and jumping around with the timeline. If there are two locations in the show it always cuts back and forth between them but every time it also jumps back a few minutes with each cut so you see the same thing over and over and over. Fuck off with that. Also fuck off with the hyper cameraman... zoom in, zoom out, shake camera a bit, zoom in. Oh, and the dubbed sound effects.... tyres screeching on dry tarmac is  a little out of place when the vehicles are driving slowly on packed snow.

Are people really this dim and their attention spans so short that then need this sort of thing, or is it just a cheap way for producers to fill 40 minutes of airtime with 20 minutes of content?

 

 

Toasters. 

I studied product design at university and flunked out after two years. But even as a failed designer I know that a two slice toaster should perhaps be able to hold two fucking slices of bread. Mine appears to have been designed by someone who has heard of the concept of bread but never actually seen a slice up close. And the settings. 1 slightly warms the bread. 2 gives undercooked toast. 3 gives slightly overdone toast, so the ideal is about 2.75 on the dial. Why does it go up to 8? 4 is properly burnt, 5 ejects two slices of pure carbon, 6 involves nuclear fusion and creates an entirely new state of matter, 7 is a reenactment of the Chernobyl disaster and I assume number 8 allows time travel, but I have never tried it in case I destroy the universe.

And a side rant thats vaguely related, my preferred brand of sliced bread is marketed as "sandwich bread", yet comes in a loaf of 21 slices. 21? an odd number? Have these people ever actually seen a sandwich?

 

Life.

 Man, I dunno. I work myself to the bone making wealthy people even richer and in return they throw a few pennys in the dirt for me.  I then have to give a load of these away just to exist....bills, taxes, insurance policies and so on and on and on and fucking on..... The sooner we develop some kind of Star Trek style utopia without money the better. Maybe I should move to the American Midwest and join an Amish community, spending my days making sturdy wooden furniture and growing a ridiculous beard.

 

 

All modern batteries are shit.

I bought a couple of new batteries for the mowers this season and all was fine. For about 4 days anyway then one of them shat out. Alternator is fine, giving a solid 14.2v, but the battery is just dead. Return it....well, I bought it online and I have to pay the return postage, which will be refunded if they find the battery faulty. Problem is I slightly modified the battery terminals to accomodate the mowers wierdo clamps (no damage to the battery cells though and yes, I realise I should have changed the clamps instead) so they have refused to accept its fauly since I have "misused" it. So now I am out the price of the battery plus the fucking return postage. Great.

 

 

Smoke detectors.

In another typically French ill thought out law it suddenly became mandatory for every house to have smoke detectors. As with hi viz and breathalysers in cars and various other kneejerk laws, this probably has little to do with public safety and lots to do with some government minister whos brother in law owns a factory that makes the fucking things.

Anyway, Being a handyman, loads of my clients turned to me to fit these in a big hurry, assuming as the French tend to that CRS teams will be kicking in doors and abseiling in through windows at 3am to check they have smoke detectors.

13 to fit, I bought a load from Le B et Q....not the cheapest for obvious reasons, but a decent upper mid range thing. Over the last few months 8 of those 13 have failed, beeping error codes that cant be reset. As the guy who fitted it, it comes down to me to replace them, so thats a trip to the house on my time, pick up the dud, a trip to the shop on my time to get in changed and another trip back to the house on my time to refit it with plenty of apologies from me. Not acceptable, so when I saw they were unreliable I bought a load of replacements so I can just swap them straight away and return the duds to the shop later. Of the 8 that I have replaced, 4 have failed again. Fucking bullshit man. Not chinese shit either, these are made in France to conform to the new laws. (I will bet real money they are still made in China anyway and just assembled here) So I have swapped them for different brands, but one was dead out of the box and one other has also failed. Fucking joke. I have a different type again in my own house and one day I lit the kitchen log burner and accidentaly left its door open, then went out to the garage where I must have been distracted by something shiny. 40 minutes later I came back in to find the whole house smoked out....seriously I had to crouch down near the floor to breathe as I opened windows to vent it out. Not a peep from my detector. It "works" in that it has a red LED that flashes every 30 seconds and beeps if you press the test button, but it does fuck all in the way of actual smoke detection. And people are trusting their lives to this shit? Farce.

 

 

Kids education.

My nephew is 11. He doesnt know what half of 26 is. Worse than that, he doesnt know how to work it out given a pen and paper. However he is a fucking champion and sitting slack-jawed, prodding at the screen of a cheap tablet playing utterly pointless mini games that involve no skill or strategy. Apparently this isnt unusual amongst his peers. Thats the future generation right there, folks. I think we might be in trouble.

 

 

People accuse me of being a grumpy old hermit, deliberately avoiding contact and given the way I see the world, This suits me fine and isnt likely to change any time soon.

[dollywobbler]

I've never understood how charity car rallies supposedly work. How does merely driving a car generate any money for anyone (except petrol stations, that is)?

 

Indeed. I did a car rally seven years ago that started out as a bit of fun, but somehow developed a charity fund-raising angle. Felt like a right twat asking friends and family for donations for what was going to be a really nice holiday.

 

Actually, two weeks in a car with a mate of mine proved a far bigger challenge than I originally expected, and at least all money raised went to charity - not like these bloody treks around Peru where your donations are used to pay for the cost of the trek! The 3000 miles of fuel and the hotels came out of our own pockets (and added up to a frightening amount). Still, it felt rather too much like "sponsor my holiday!"

[chaseracer]

Kids education.

My nephew is 11. He doesnt know what half of 26 is. Worse than that, he doesnt know how to work it out given a pen and paper. However he is a fucking champion and sitting slack-jawed, prodding at the screen of a cheap tablet playing utterly pointless mini games that involve no skill or strategy. Apparently this isnt unusual amongst his peers. Thats the future generation right there, folks. I think we might be in trouble.

 

Your hypothesis makes the false presumption that the fault for your nephew's lack of achievement lies necessarily with the education system and those who work within it.  

 

I know many teachers, I'm married to one and I used to be one myself - having one's professional ability constantly criticised and used as a convenient scapegoat is tiresome and insulting.

 

Has the possibility been entertained that the lad and his peers may simply be lazy and/or a bit thick?

[dave21478]

He is thick as mince, but is also completely unmotivated to do anything at school because the school has no interest in trying to motivate him.
Bear in mind this is France where things are significantly different to UK.

[chaseracer]

Ah, bon point m'sieu!

 

"Thick as mince" - brilliant.  Can I nick that?

 

[wuvvum]

Going a bit against the grain of this thread I know, but Fantasio, I just want to say I love your signature pic.  I don't think I've ever seen the strip where Lagaffe actually bought his old Fiat - I've just seen it in later stories looking rather more sorry for itself.