The Grumpy Old Blog

This missive is aimed at readers who, like myself, may remember when there were only three television channels, the Nokia 3310 mobile phone was considered a technological marvel, supermarkets were closed on Sunday, and, if you wanted a holiday, you needed to visit your travel agent. Social Influencers These are predominantly young people who have a penchant to become celebrities but lack any perceivable talent to otherwise become one. Instead, they garner an incredible number of millennials, who, for some reason known only to themselves, follow their every word on social media. These social influencers wax lyrically, in very bad English, about products and services they actually know little about and in fact sometimes never actually use themselves. But they do have the last laugh. They receive payment for their cultured pearls of wisdom. Passwords We are told to use complex passwords. While this is sound advice, we of a certain age never input them correctly first ti...

Grumpy old observances - watch the pennies as the pounds will NOT take care of themselves (warning, this is a long read) All around us, there are companies that appear to do their level best to fool us, if not con us altogether. And we fall for it hook line and sinker. Continually. Reliably. Helping the owners of these businesses to maintain their position on the Sunday Times Rich List. National lottery The odds of winning the National Lottery (Lotto) are 1 in 45 million. However, it used to be 1 in 7.5 million, before the National Lottery added another number to the ticket and increased the ball pool from 49 to 59 numbers. The odds of winning EuroMillions are 1 in 139 million. So, entering Euromillions offer a significantly lower chance than that of winning than the National Lottery. You would have had a 1 in 39 chance of winning the Grand National in 2023 (admittedly not such a big prize as Lotto, but still a far better return for your fiver), and a 1 in 26 chance of...

Your fresh groceries are safe in Sainsbury's hands! They are throwing all that HR can handle at training, assuring that their grocery online shoppers are trained to pick the longest date. They actually (I was going to say "in reality, they" but what HR person lives in reality?) mean "pickers" but let's not split hairs here. This, after all, is the wild and wacky world of HR! The difference between a "shopper" and a "picker" must pose a terrible strain on the average HR person's comprehension of the world of retail groceries when factoring in the almost Nobel Prize-winning concept that shoppers do in fact become pickers when shopping! This training must have tapped the deepest recesses of HR at Sainsbury's. The difference between "sell by" and "use by" dates must be one of life's mind-warping quandaries that shakes the deepest neurological nooks and crannies of even the most mentally astute HR director and h...

  I have always liked the Jehovah's Witnesses. But I think I'll have to drop their HQ a line to complain. They very naughtily knock on the door in pairs, today, one a middle-aged gentleman who dressed like a Job Centre civil servant from the 1970's, the other, an extremely attractive girl in her late twenties/early thirties whom you'd want to ask if she'd care to help you book a cruise with the sole intention of not going out on deck too often with her (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more!), thus keeping the ports of call strictly within the cabin. Today's very attractive co-caller was a rather prim and proper Lily James lookalike who would otherwise have scored an admirable 11 in the Dudley Moore film "10". Tempted though I was to ask exactly what they had witnessed and to state that as I don't get involved - that makes me somewhat of a Jehovah's Bystander - following a few pleasantries and a leaflet titled "Will I survive...

  "𝒜𝓈 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝒹𝑜𝑜𝓇 𝒸𝓁𝑜𝓈𝑒𝓈, 𝒶𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝑜𝓅𝑒𝓃𝓈". I would like to take issue with Alexander Graham Bell over this statement of his. I closed the front door, went upstairs and patiently waited for the bathroom door to open. It did not. Plus, while I'm at it, as a co-governor of MS's 'Grumpy Old Man Club", I'd like to take issue with Mr Bell's latter-day equivalent mobile communication apparatus. This is the one that has spawned hordes of modern-day phone-hugging morons wandering the streets in what one can only assume is a perambulate form of coma that the cast members of zombie films have all been modelled on. Why do young ladies walk around carrying two bags yet they insist on holding their mobiles in their hands at the same time? Are they all financial traders or emergency response workers so vital to the UK economy that they can't place their phone in one of their bags and await it to ring or 'ting', thus announci...

    ChatGPT is for two types of people, possibly with an overlap 1. The hard of thinking. 2. Scroungers who think they can avoid paying a professional writer to do a job for them. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything else. HR people have been lazily scrounging off the employment system for years. Large employment mills like Michael Page have been screening CV's with auto readers for some years now, meaning that the totally unqualified can, by using the appropriate keywords, find and fill employment positions way above their capabilities for years now. Once they have sucked in the employment "con"sultant and gained an initial interview, the accomplished blagger can get past the average in-house HR professional numpty with consummate ease. And when you see the mess that the likes of "Dame" Paula Vennels (former CEO of the Post Office) and Dame Sharon White (previously only ever a civil servant, now CEO of John Lewis) have made, it's no wonder there ar...