The Grumpy Old Blog

I walked into a local café yesterday on a lazy mission to grab some lunch (many cafés do specialise in this particular type of meal at lunchtime), have a sit down and read the Times without fear of a family member looking at me disapprovingly for reading at the table.  A lovely waitress, most likely in her early twenties (final year at university reading accountancy she later volunteered), came over, sprayed the already rather clean table top with liquid guaranteed to kill 99.9% of all know germs (I always tend to worry more about the other 0.1% of germs that could potentially be fatal) and then asked me that damning of all questions. "Can I help you today?" Now given that I hadn't yet thought about what I might consume for lunch, that she asked if she could help, was indeed appreciated. But I was now worried that quantifying the timing as she did, namely "today", might infer that if she couldn’t help me at that particular juncture, I may have to wait over...

Firms are becoming extremely silly. Extremely. Beyond-belief silly. Sending out vacuous emails and surveys before the money you have paid for their goods or service has even left your bank.   " Based on your experience, on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 means orgasmic and 0 means sh*t, would you recommend Curry's to a friend? " As a rule I tend not to recommend anything I pay for myself to anyone, especially if it is from one of the internet giants or one of the many impersonal multi-million pound large businesses. They have marketing and advertising budgets smaller enterprises could only dream of as their annual turnover, let alone for advertising and marketing. And I also work on the basis that if I recommend a firm to family member or friend whose products and/or services turn out to be Currys, I would then have to go on a guilt trip and spend the next three years apologising.   Ah! That caught your attention, didn’t it! “Currys”.   What the blazes do I mean by “C...