Category: Annoyed

Avatar Flimsy Floppy Bendy Batman

Everyone needs a mascot, everyone needs a prop. When you’re doing things with people (waaaaaaaaay!) it’s always good to have one particular item that everyone can focus on or channel their thoughts into when times are hard. The best example of this would have to be Dr Who, whose exploits of an eccentric flopping through dull science fiction stories would be even more boring had he/she been doing it on their own.

Heading down to Didsbury for a large selection of pints with scale perfect philanthropic Mexican-Chinese genius Kevin and grey-haired family man and insurance savage Tom, I decided that we needed something to drag along for our adventure. I already had a wealth of junk in my pockets (because that’s who I am) so I was immediately drawn to Lego Santa Claus. Yes, he’s small and likely to get lost however he’s made of the firm stuff: he can take twelve hours of drinking, easy to transport, brimming in playful colours and millions know who he is.

Cut to Tom’s wife Claire practically handing me an item that she is done with. “I don’t want to see it again, I don’t want it back. Please take it with you.” It’s a kid’s toy; Stretch Armstrong but it’s Batman. Bendy Batman. What possible harm could this have done to Claire? What evil lies within this rubbery realm of innocent fun? It didn’t occur to me, I placed him in my coat pocket and we left.

As it happens, even with my poor memory, I struggle to remember most of that Saturday. The tweets I made are baffling even by my standards. Photos are non-existent. Vague, sepia-tinged memories of being too drunk to go in the Slug and Lettuce, someone needing a jump start for their car outside a restaurant and pretending to care about football in the most crowded pub on the whole street are all that remain. Floppy Batman was there for all of it. He survived the night and came back in one piece, like a boss. There is a lot to admire.

As it happens, a few weeks later, I’m driving home from work and what do I see? An advert for Very.co.uk virtually on every single bus stop showing, in all his glory, Floppy Batman. It could have been another Batman toy, as there’s many many out there, but no, it’s him, the one and the same. Now he’s whoring himself out for Christmas everyone is going to have one soon. He’ll be accompanying other goons on other alcohol-fuelled Saturday evenings. It’ll take away the magic once the world is doing it. The tart.

I should have stuck with Lego Santa.

Avatar Stationary Harassment – Part 2

Following the harrowing experience I encountered in Asda car park last year HERE, there is another dog looming on the horizon who clearly has something against me.

The kind of job that I do involves a lot of checking windows. I mean I love windows me, even if it wasn’t part of the job I would happily peruse lists and lists of properties with the same postcodes of the people I know to see who has got the correct certification and who hasn’t. Some people have hobbies, some people spend hours looking at double glazing; that is my life and I am sticking to it. What greets you though as you load up the lovely FENSA website is this (apologies for the poor quality photo):

What is his problem?

The woman is happily discussing getting new windows, possibly for her semi-detached house that desperately needs refurbishment work because the rest of the street has already done it and it she had to wait for her aunt’s inheritance to come through before she could pay for everything, and hiding above her shoulder is this grouch, this Grinch, this menace. The prospect of double glazing means that the house will be adequately insulated against the bad weather types so the dog should be actively encouraging this behaviour. Instead he squints and grimaces his way each time you come to the website.

He looks as though instead of serving him doggy kibbles and sweet cheeks for breakfast (I’m not quite sure what dogs eat) he received a massive turd garnished with dandruff. He looks as though he’s been waiting for his PPI refund cheque for over four weeks and the company isn’t responding to his emails. He looks like Eamonn Holmes gave him a right good telling off for not observing the strict kitchen rules, carefully printed on a wooden plaque, hanging over the doorway.

I am doomed to repeat this each and every single time. If you want to have a peek with your peeking eyes, and have the stomach for it, you can witness his face HERE

 

Avatar I’m better at someone else’s job than they are

I don’t say things like that lightly. I don’t walk around, smugly declaring myself better at other people’s jobs. Most of the time I trust that if someone has a job they got it because they can do it.

But I make an exception for the people who write adverts for the tube. Most adverts on the tube are in the form of a jokey tube map. In the winter, every other advert is for cold medicine or cough syrup or something similar, and every single one for years and years has been in the form of a tube map-style line diagram with stops labelled “sniffly nose”, “tickly cough” and “aches and pains”. There’s no imagination. If you’re advertising on the tube apparently the only advert any advertising executive can come up with is a tube map.

All these adverts are crap, but I have now definitively found the worst one. It’s for one of those new companies whose whole existence is to make one kind of mattress that they claim is the best mattress in the world and which they only sell online. I don’t know how this is suddenly such an exciting business model but there’s a lot of them doing it. Anyway, here’s their crap, predictable tube advert.

Oh, look! It’s a fake tube line diagram. This one has tube station names on it, altered to make puns on words to do with sleep. I can live with that – in the same way I live with all the other crap adverts like this one, living with it while silently hating and resenting everything about it. What I can’t live with is how bad the puns are.

“Snoredon” is the worst. That’s the one that got me worked up. I’ve lived in London for 11 years, lived in all parts of it, done the Tube Challenge where you go to every station in a single day, and it still took me several minutes to figure out what that was a reference to.

Eventually I got it when I said it out loud. Morden, the southern terminus of the Northern Line. Morden, which ends “en”, not “on”. Morden, which is at the furthest extremity of the one line that goes a significant distance into South London, used in an advert on a transport network that exists almost entirely in North London and will be seen almost exclusively by people who will not be familiar with Morden at all. If you want a pun on “snore” using a tube station name, go for “Moorgate”. A tube station in Central London on four different lines that far more people will have heard of. A tube station with a distinctive ending that makes it easier to guess what the pun’s about. “Snoregate”. There you go, Casper. I did a better job than your advertising copywriters and I did it in about a minute.

I don’t mind that I can come up with a better crap joke than they can. What irritates me is that someone pitched that advert idea – the one that’s been used a thousand times before and which can be seen in multiple adverts for all sorts of products in every tube carriage already – they pitched it like it was their own brilliant original idea, and they got told it was a good idea, and they got paid for it. And then someone sat down and came up with four of the most half-baked, half-arsed puns on tube station names – so bad that at least one of them is obscure to the point of not working at all when a moment’s thought is all it takes to find a better one – and they put their pen down because they thought they were good enough. And then someone else agreed, and they paid money for it. People got paid for being this bad at their job.

That’s why it bothers me. Because I know I could do bedder. I just need snore of a chance.

Avatar How to name a company

You will probably remember that, some years ago now, Ian and myself decided that the best way to name a company was to use the name of the person followed by the thing their company did. That way, everyone knew where they stood and there could be no uncertainty. “Peter’s Window Cleaning” is a good company name. “Lucy’s Cafe” is another.

You can see the problem of badly named companies everywhere. “Boots”, for example, is a bad company name because it’s actually a chemist and doesn’t sell any kind of footwear. Having been founded by a man called John Boot, its name should obviously be “John’s Medicines”.

I bring this up because I would like to share with you the worst company name in the world. It’s a hair salon I pass every day on the way to the station. It’s called “www.comb”.

I find it hard to understand how anyone thought this was a good idea. “www.comb” sounds stupid when you try to say it out loud. It’s not actually the web address for the company (that’s www.comb.org.uk, itself pretty misguided because “.org.uk” is meant for non-profit organisations, but whatever). The name is, however, specifically designed to look like a web address, so for some reason the company has deliberately been given a name that is formatted as a web address but which isn’t the web address of the company. The only way you can use the company’s services is by physically going into a shop, and there is no sense in which this is an online company, so having the abbreviation for “world wide web” in its name is meaningless. And of course if you go into a hair salon, you would hope that using a comb is not the pinnacle of their skills. You’d hope they’re good at scissors, and hairdryers, and styling tongs, and that sort of thing. Being good at combs shouldn’t be their big sell.

Let’s be clear: the name of this business should probably be “Helen and Lisa’s Hair Salon”. Choosing a different name would be sub-optimal but acceptable. Choosing the name “www.comb”, though,  is madness and must be stopped.

Avatar Not Very Good – Shopping

What constitutes as not being very good? Who gets to decide these things and why should we listen? In this new series, the Beans goes undercover to try to answer some of these questions. Take for example this photo here:

Whoever this person was, they clearly were not very good. In this instance they were not very good at shopping. All they were going to buy was a bottle of Diet Coke and some mineral water. They have completely missed the sweet, biscuit and crisp aisles, and thus eliminated the opportunity to binge on Haribo and Jaffa cakes at home without anyone pointing and shouting out rude names. They were planning on only buying beverages. There’s not even some bacon and eggs for the following morning.

It’s very frustrating to come across this. I expect that this shopper realised how not very good they were mid-shop and fled Tesco in embarrassment. Here’s hoping the CCTV pictured up their rosy red cheeks as they sprinted towards the exit, blushing and squirming in equal measures.

The Not Very Good do have the advantage of being able to take hold of their lives and try to be less Not Very Good in the future. I bless all the holy pigs of Portugal that this person did a lot better the next time they went shopping.

Next time… Animals!

Avatar Things not to do

In the last 24 hours I have learned a lot. Here are some things you should not do.

  1. When making a very short journey of just a few minutes in your car, don’t empty your pockets in the normal way, placing your wallet, phone and keys into the space below the radio. You might forget them when you get out.
  2. Don’t time your journey to arrive at your destination – for example, a garage where you’re leaving it overnight because it’s booked in for some work in the morning – eight minutes before they close.
  3. In your rush to get through the door and hand them your car key, don’t forget to take everything you need. For example, when you’ve picked up your wallet and phone and put them back in your pockets, don’t forget to have a look and see if your house keys are still in the car before you get out and lock it.
  4. Don’t wait until you’ve made a 25 minute journey home (including some walking, some waiting for the bus and some sitting on the bus) before looking for your house keys. If you wait that long you will only realise you haven’t got them when you’re standing outside the building where you live and you’re unable to get into it.
  5. Don’t make a 25 minute journey back to a now-closed garage (for example, it’s just an example) because when you get there you will find that your car has been helpfully moved by one of their staff inside a gated and locked compound, and is now tantalisingly visible but completely inaccessible behind an eight foot metal gate with spikes on. If you happened to leave, I don’t know, your house keys in it, you will not be able to get them.
  6. If you decide to ignore this advice, and you are welcome to do that if you want, then at least heed this warning: don’t do all the things above on the one night in several months when your flatmate is three hours away seeing his family and there is nobody at home who can let you in.

If there are any more things you should not do, please rest assured I will end up inadvertently doing them at some point, and I will come back and let you know about them so you don’t have to do them yourself.

Thanks.

Avatar Questionable Truffles

Having spent a good five minutes looking at this, just what the hell is this?

Truffles I get. Commerce and purchasing items I get. Walking around in supermarkets taking photos of curios and novelties I get. But squiffy truffles? Can you describe a truffle as ‘squiffy’?

Were it not for the fact that my phone recognised the word ‘squiffy’ without much input from me, I would be inclined to start screaming about why such a word should exist and who the Ben Nevis is actually using it in polite conversation or any conversation at all?

I used the word once, maybe twice, in my whole life of lives.

Would you eat a squiffy truffle?