The end (probably) of #TapSagaThat’s it. It’s over. For now at least anyway.
If anyone ever suggests to you that changing the taps in the bathroom is a quick and easy way to ‘refresh’ your room, my advice is to punch them swiftly in the face.
Let me give you a summary of what has gone on so far in #TapSaga in abbreviated bullet list format:
A Cry For HelpHi, my name is (deleted for legal reasons) and I have a problem. My problem is that I am drawn towards fake doctors, some of which I create in my own mind and some of which are presented to me in my daily life.
I suppose it all started a couple of years ago. I was on a friend’s stag do and go violently sick for no particular reason and had to abandon everyone at the restaurant we were dining in. My food was wrapped up for me and I retired to the hotel room feeling very unwell. The next day the only thing that made me remotely better was Dr. Burger, a delectable cut of meat wrapped in salad and soft white bread. She looked after me as I recuperated, watched over me in my time of need and when we had to part I felt a great sadness.
A year or two passed and despite a brief fling with Dr. Pepper nothing seemed to emerge. That is until I met Dr. Pepper’s sexy sister, Dr. Fizz. Whereas the former was very sweet and accommodating, the latter was dark and adulterous. She was all over me. I just couldn’t get enough of her and, every weekend, I would hide away with her and refuse to come out until we were done. I’m trying to distance myself yet no matter what I do I seem to end up with her.
So here I am, a wobbly mess, unable to cope without my hit of Dr. Fizz. Sometimes I find myself wandering the 24hr supermarkets at 2 in the morning sniffing around Dr. Oetker. Sometimes I’m found crying into Dr. Beckmann and his Glowhite Sheets. Dr. Karg and his organic cheese and pumpkin seed crisp bread offer me no salvation. Dr. Fresh and Dr. Salts stand at the back and point and laugh at my plight.
I need to know if there’s an end to this all because if there isn’t, one day you’ll break open into my flat and find me buried under a large mound of Dr. Brown’s wide neck silicone teats… and then it’ll be too late…
Wiping away historyToday I did a kind of cleaning I’ve never done before: I cleaned the keys of my computer keyboard. Not where crumbs have landed in between them – the keys themselves. Some of them were dirty, you see, with a sort of browny-grey film on them. The keys I use all the time were white, the ones I use occasionally had a white middle and dirty edges, and the ones I never use were just dirty all over.
It’s annoyed me for a while but today I hit on the solution. I took a rubber to the keyboard and rubbed out all the dirt. Now it’s sparkling clean and all the keys are white. But while I was erasing the filth, it occurred to me that in its dirty state I effectively had a keyboard-sized infographic showing which keys I use and which I don’t. For some reason, the square brackets were completely filthy, even though I’m sure I use them sometimes, while the weird § key had a clean spot, even though I can’t remember ever having used it before typing this sentence. Comma was dirtier than full stop. Q was cleaner than Z.
Even weirder, the numbers got gradually dirtier from left to right, so 1 was clean while 9 was pretty mucky.
It’s nice to have a clean keyboard again but I feel like I’ve lost a historical record of the letters I type and the keys I don’t need. A little bit of history wiped away.
The stingI was going to make a content-free post that would be blatantly and cynically intended just to get me up to four posts for December and win me a coveted bean. But then something happened that was worthy of making a whole post, so actually this will have something in it.
I’ve decided to buy myself a big Lego set as a Christmas present to myself, because I want one, and I’m a grown up so nobody can stop me. I was going to do it on Friday night, but now I have plans on Friday, so I set off to do it after work yesterday instead.
What actually happened was that I got to the Lego store, found the shelf where my Lego set should be, and saw that it was empty. So I asked one of the staff.
While he was explaining to me that it was sold out, and looking up when a new delivery would come in, I felt something odd on my head, and put my hand up to see what was in my hair. It felt like sticking my fingers into a ball of needles. A spiky black thing fell on the floor, crawled away for a bit, and then flew off. “Oh yeah,” said the assistant, “we’ve had wasps in here today”.
Wasps? In the Lego store? In a big shopping mall? In December? Unlikely, yes, but a wasp is what it was. A big bastard of a wasp who tried to sting me several times and did actually get his syringe of doom into my little finger.
So last night I went home, very very late, with no Lego, but with a wasp sting on my finger.
That’ll show me.
Sexatronic evictionGentlemen, we have a crisis. Sexatronic – my oddly named neighbour and subject of a hit single by The Papples – is about to be evicted from her ground floor hovel overlooking Church Road.
I suggest you do as I have done and write to your MP (remembering to CC the Queen) demanding that the Government steps in to prevent this impending tragedy.
Best Laid Plans – UpdateEvery man has a dream.
Unfortunately it seems as though every dream comes with a cost and a price tag. Yes, both.
Not too long ago I stole someone else’s dreams. I wanted to have coast to coast goats in order to satisfy the need for goats. The world was crying out for goats and nobody was delivering them. Who was I to deny the world their dreams whilst satisfying my own at the same time?
So it happened. I wheeled out the goats and in one long, glorious line they stretched from Blackpool in the West to Scarborough in the East. It resembled something akin to Hadrian’s Wall, except with goats. It was like the Great Wall of China, but with goats instead of walls. And so the people came together and decided to name my wonderful wall of goats. It’s just a shame that they didn’t think to put more effort into it; Goat Wall.
The Goat Wall was an immediate success, even if Joey Essex did travel up and tried to cut it with a huge pair of novelty scissors. Fanatics took to patting the heads of each and every goat in the Goat Wall. Postcard enthusiasts took pictures and start selling photos of the Goat Wall several minutes before it had even opened, much was their frenzy. Members of the mailing list were picked at random and given signed photos of the most popular goats. It was exactly the kind of support the Goat Wall needed to get up and running.
That was it though. It seemed as though I had overestimated the need for goats and no matter what I did, even selling tickets from door to door like a common bed-wetter, the bright spark that once fuelled my dreams was dabbled with mascarpone. Even if I wanted coast-to-coast goats nobody else did. So now they stand, once titans in their field, now reduced to squabbling amongst themselves for the last blade of grass. I want to keep them but I’m sending them away to the farthest parts of the globe in the hope that maybe the world will appreciate them more than Great Britain. Maybe Global Goats is the way forward, and thus my dream morphs into something else. Maybe this time next year Global Goats will be one of the eight wonders of the world…
Mild Frustration (a short play)A young man, not feeling too great, has a nice face, decides to try to attend to his illness by calling his doctors. It’s Monday morning.
Man: Hello, I’d like to make an appointment.
Receptionist: Right what we normally do is not make an appointment but ask the doctor to call you instead.
Man: Oh right.
Receptionist: I’ve got your details so let me see when the next telephone appointment is instead… there’s one free at 9.10am on Wednesday.
Man: Wednesday. In two days time.
Receptionist: Do you need to see anyone as a matter of urgency?
Man: No, I guess it can wait another two days.
Receptionist: Great well the doctor will call you at 9.10am on Wednesday.
Man: Great. Thanks.
Cut to Wednesday morning. The young man leaves his desk and goes to a quiet room to await the doctor’s call. The times is around 9:09am.
Man (thinks): Let’s give him a window of five minutes. I can’t leave my desk for too long, so five minutes is sufficient waiting time before dismissing this as the joke that it seems to be turning into.
The time ticks away. 9:10am. 9:11am. 9:12am. 9:13am. 9:14am.
Man (thinks): I’m sure he’s just about to call.
9:15am.
Man (thinks): Well that was a waste of time. I better haul ass back to work.
The young man returns to his desk. The work phones are busy so he carries on answering the various enquiries and assisting where necessary. at 9:21am, in the middle of a conversation with a client, his phone starts to vibrate.
Man (thinks): Ah great. Great timing. Wonderful. If only I could express my dissatisfaction with this level of service with the client I’m currently talking to. I wonder if their surgery is an inept as this.
Voicemail. When work gets quiet the young man listens to the message.
Doctor: Hi Mr McIver, I’m sorry I’m a little later than arranged, if you still need to speak to me give me a call at the surgery.
Man (thinks): What? He didn’t even leave a direct number? I have to call the general number? Of course I still need to speak to him; I would’ve cancelled the appointment if I was flippin’ better!
Work gets busy again. There is not a time to return the call. Around 10:25 his mobile starts to vibrate again, same number, clearly the doctor trying again but he can’t stop to answer it due to work commitments. Ten minutes later, with a small break to his name, he steals away into a room and calls the general number. No voicemail the second time around.
Receptionist: Hello.
Man: Hi, could I speak to Dr *******? I think I just missed a call from him.
Receptionist: Oh right. Let me see if he’s available… (brief pause) I’m sorry he doesn’t appear to be in his room. The only thing I can do is arrange another telephone appointment for him to try to call you again.
Man: You know what, I’m feeling so much better, so much much better I don’t know why I bothered calling…
Cue a series of head shakes and excessive tutting. The young man decides to visit the walk-in centre at the end of the week, because even though it will mean sitting in a room for two hours or more waiting to be seen this process makes more sense than the series of hoops he has to try to jump through just to speak to a doctor at his own surgery.
The End.
Things on my Desk: Unloved SaucesToday I looked round my desk and was faced with a sight that is all too common in modern Britain.
The grim truth is that we all take too many sachets of sauce from the cafe or canteen, we just do. Whether its some sort of instinctive nesting impulse or just the fact that we can get something for free so we do. The untold story though is what happens to all of these unwanted sauces once they are taken from the relative comfort of the canteen stainless steel container. Do they ever make their way home? No, for once they have been removed they somehow become dirty. Nobody has opened them, nobody has licked them, but they can never go back, they are alone. Destined to see out their expiry dates in the back of an office drawer, or become a ticking time bomb in the pocket of someone who never checks their pockets before doing the washing.
Spare a thought for the unloved sauces.
