The Grumpy Old Blog

Retail DFS will buck the new year trend for sales by not having a sale at any time during 2016. Instead, they will just maintain their normal retail pricing structure of 50% off everything. Christmas 2016 decorations, selection boxes and mince pies will go on sale in all the supermarkets from January. The Friday of every week will be designated a special sale day by the marketing people - Grey Friday, Techno Friday, Lunatic Friday etc Education Christian Faith Schools in Birmingham will announce that their new school uniform dress code will consist of a nun's habit for both male and female students alike. The nun in question will be livid. The Nation Union of Students will announce that anyone with an IQ higher than 40 will not be allowed to join Politics Donald Trump invades the Isle of Man. Dublin builds a wall around the city to keep residents in. Michael Foot returns from the afterlife to lead the Labour Party and immediately helps it shoot up seven poi...

I was totally dismayed this morning. Those of a certain age (in the UK) will remember the weekly ritual of popping into the newsagent (for those on their phones 24/7, a newsagent is a place that sells newspapers and banned substances such as cigarettes and cans of sugar masquerading as fizzy drinks - if you want to know what a newspaper is, google it on your phone) on a Friday for their weekly fix of the New Musical Express. Diving into its tabloid newsprint multi-ring, nitrogen-containing compound (dyes) covered pages that on the one hand ensured you were fully-up-to-date on Alice Cooper's follow up to "School's Out" and whether Debbie Harry was shooting a calendar topless, while on the other, you covered your shirt in ink. You could also check when and where Ian Dury tickets were going on sale, a mere four weeks before the event, by ticket collection in person, at the price on the ticket and with no booking fee (as was the case for all major acts in t...

There is no doubt that airports can be quite amusing places. That is apart from being told by a burly security supervisor at the x-ray gate that thanks to the only contribution Yasser Arafat ever made to society, I had to remove my belt, shoes, watch and place my AK-47 in the tray provided. Watching people going around their travel ‘business’ in airports and on board the aircraft is hilarious. There are those who are plainly not very good at it, continually checking all manner of minutiae with the other members of the party. “Do we go to the gate?”, “Have we time for a beer?”, “I MUST get a pizza”. There are those who have plainly not done it much before and like their fellow travellers to be made fully aware of the exact opposite, as they point and gesture to the monitor shouting out their destination and boarding gate at every passing opportunity to one and all around them. There are those who think they are something special – despite the fact they are travelling via bu...

We all detest booking fees. Or at least I certainly do. Those hidden extras which totally negate the "from £9.99" ticket price that is written extremely large while the "plus booking fee" needs a microscope to be seen.  The instant translucent coating painted over the so-called  transparent price-ticket. There is the straightforward daylight robbery fee that the wonderful concert ticket agencies place on their tickets, as if the profit from exclusively filling an arena with 15,000 ticket-payers nine-months prior to the event is not enough.  One single event from a nationwide series of concerts producing in excess of £100,000. £1million in profit from fees for a series of just 10 major venues.And that's before their profit from the tickets themselves. And in the days before the internet, the venues had to put in a much greater effort to sell their tickets. All without booking fees. Of course, sheer greed and the ability to get away with it le...

Yes, it's that time of year. With the advent of dark days where daylight is at a minimum, hordes of wonderful HR people throughout the land are emerging, clipboards under their arms, to "reach out" (i.e. irritate) staff in organisations nationwide. They arrange staff meetings where they don't just take minutes, but take hours. Proving that personnel is not a word, but a sentence. Yes, it's annual review time. The time of year where acres of pointless questions occupy reams of paper, all printed-off despite the twee "don't print this unless you have to" messages. Reams of paper that are filed in the HR office, never again to see the light of day, apart from any of the ideas from staff that can be stolen, adapted and used by the HR department claiming them as their own. These annual reviews are by and large totally farcical and completely irrelevant. There is no proof that anyone actually takes any notice of them. "Where do yo...