I think you'll find that it is fair.

Please don't expect any sympathy if you come in here to tax a nearly brand new Lexus 4x4 and have to spend £300 to tax it for a year. If you can afford to spend (and I've checked the prices) over £30,000 on a car then £300 per year is a drop in the ocean you tight arsed wanker.

"Wah-wah-wah, it's not fair. It's not a proper four wheel drive, it's only two wheel drive most of the time. Boo-hoo-hoo. I can't afford that much. Why do they pick on us drivers of large engine, highly polluting unnecessary ponce-mobiles?"

If I had my way you'd be charged a shit-load more. And it'd only go up every time you whinged about it.

Computers? Fuck 'em!

I'm as big a fan of computers as the next guy. Assuming that the next guy has bought into the myth that using computers will save time, effort and give back so much more useful information than was available before.

I'm starting to think that computerising everything is not always worth the effort.

I've been struggling on with my swanky new till for a while now and am finally pretty happy with the set-up of the till itself. The software for it, on the other hand, is a great big pile of steaming horse-shit. It's OK for keeping the prices and descriptions of all my products backed up. It'll allow me to adjust those prices and whatnot without needing to fiddle with the till itself. Even though it's actually far quicker to do so on the till itself. It'll even allow me to download the sales data so I can see how much of each item I'm selling.

Great.

Sadly, the one main function that I really really want from this till is to analyse the sales data week on week. Can I do that? Can I fuck. The only sales figures the software will allow me to view is what I've just downloaded from it. As soon as you download one weeks data, last weeks data vanishes off into the ether. Fucking excellent. Will it export these figures into a spreadsheet so I can analyse them there? Nope, that would make far too much sense.

The best I've managed to do, is put the sales figure manually from one program into a spreadsheet. Y'know, by hand. Without the aid of computers and stuff doing it automatically and easily for me. I'm starting to get really fucked off with spending fucking hours every fucking week doing this. It wouldn't be quite so bad but as new products are added on to the till, it fucks up the positions of everything that was already on the spreadsheet and I've then got to spend my remaining free time checking that I've not accidentally buggered up the last few weeks worth of stuff. The stuff that I checked last week. And the week before. As you may be able to sense, I'm a tad peeved about this.

I'm now faced with a very annoying trilemma (what do you mean, that not a word? It is now, FUCK OFF!!!). Do I carry on doing what I'm doing to the point where I don't even have to time to sleep cos there's so much old data to check? Do I spunk away £500 on some new software that might actually do what I want it to or do I give it all up as a bad job and miss out on some potentially very useful sales data?

Also, my anti-virus software keeps alerting me to the fact that I have a wireless keybaord and it may be a keylogger despite the fuck knows how many times I've told it to ignore it and Windows media player keeps fucking crashing the second I try to listen to music on it. With this added annoyance and the lack of soothing music, I've been a bit on the stroppy side. Unlike my normal tolerant and even tempered self you understand.

La-di-dah

What is it about people with double-barrelled surnames? They're the most picky, demanding and borderline rude (without resorting to obvious rudeness of course, that would be far too common) twats I have to put up with.

And they've invariably called their children Quentin or Hugo or India or some pseudo-posh name. Christ on a bike, why don't they just call them pleasebullymeformyentireschooltime and get it over with?

Pretentious upper-middle class twats.

Regulars - Robert again

Just had another visit from Robert. To save you the dull minutiae of the 15 minute long conversation, here are the salient points in an easy to read format:

Number of moans about his bad leg: 6

Number of time the name he addressed me with alternated: 4

Number of watches bought: 2

Number of notepads bought: 1

Number of CD's bought: 2

He also managed to surprise me by saying that he's got a large pile of CD's that he's not got round to listening to yet. I was briefly tempted to ask him why he keeps buying more but the money-grabbing bastard in me prevented that. Just on the off chance that he changed his mind about buying more. It wouldn't entirely surprise me to find out that he's not even got a CD player.

Lame car tax protest

As I've mentioned before, car tax is a bit of a headache. The latest installment of car tax related embuggerance occurred this afternoon. An elderly lady came in a asked me if it was true that the annual tax rate for her car had gone up from £100 to £115. As she didn't have any of the documents for her car I couldn't confirm or deny this (there are far too many tax brackets depending on age, emissions, engine size etc). She then got the arsehole because her car's only got a small engine and she shouldn't have to pay much tax for it.

I'm terribly sorry. I'll have words with Gordon Brown next time he pops over and see if I can get a special dispensation for her. Y'know, cos she asked me so politely and I have such a big sway over the tax policies in this country. While I'm at it, I'll see if I can swing an increase in her pension too shall I?

Jesus H Christ. What was the point of her rant? If she comes back to tax her car and refuses to pay the full amount then I'll refuse to tax it. It's as simple as that. The DVLA won't hesitate to fine her for not paying her tax if that's how she wants to protest. It's not as if she's short of a few quid. It was a nearly brand new car for fucks sake. Don't tell me she can afford a 7 grand car a couple of years ago but now can't afford an extra £15 for the whole year to tax it. Nope, she's as tight as a gnat's chuff and really annoying to boot.

Also, why do people act like it's my fault personally that they have to pay car tax and things? If you don't like paying your car tax then write to your MP or organise a protest do something that might actually change it. Getting a strop on at me will change preciesley nothing except for my mood.

Who will rid me of this irritating priest?

A new regular has recently appeared on the horizon. We knew from the first time he came in he'd be a regular and he'd be a pain. There was something about him that my highly trained postmaster-sense (a bit like spider-sense but more interesting) went off. Obviously a few return visits have proved me correct.

The first time he came in, he asked if we could help him out with getting a bus pass. Easy. We gave him a form and told him to fill it in and bring it back with some id and photos.

The next time he came in, he asked if we could provide him with a bus pass. We gave him another form and more instructions. We then resigned ourselves to a run on our bus pass forms and many more visits.

The weeks went past and the bus pass forms were duly given out. As he became more comfortable with his lovely new local Post Office, he got chatty. This is fine when you're not busy and you're talking to someone who is both interesting and possessed of a functional memory. As you can probably guess, he fell into the catergory of not fine. Pretty far away from fine as it happens. In fact, bloody annoying.

As we got to know more about him (retired vicar, hence the title of this post) and a few more details the penny dropped and one of my colleagues remembered a phone call she'd had while at work. It was from a retired vicar who was looking for a nice village to retire to and had heard that this village was rather pleasant and could she recommend living here. Of course she could. It's great here. There's plenty of amenities and a lovely Post Office.

Bugger!

Needless to say, my colleague has been suitably punished for inviting this irritating twat to my (and it is mine) village.

I've been trying to put him off coming here by loudly taking the lord's name in vain whenever I see him. And talking about satan too if I can get away with it. It's not worked.

Just for the record.

If I ask you to put a return address on the top left of the front on an international parcel, it's because I'm supposed to. It's not an invitation for you to get the arsehole with me. I couldn't really give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut whether you take my advice or not but it would be unprofessional not to offer it.

If you then follow that up with another strop because I won't give you two proofs of posting for one item of mail then I'd have to offer some more advice and advise that you take your attitude, shove it up your arse and fuck off.

That is all.

To me, to you.

Nope, I've not just served the Chuckle Brothers, it's what old people like doing with their money. As they don't waste nearly enough of my time already by doddering around, not being able to find their cards/bills/letter/whatever or just droning on and on and on with banal and irrelevant details of their dull lives, a lot of them play pension ping-pong. Normal people when paying bills seem to manage passing me through all of the things they want to pay, letting me process them all and then paying for the lot in one go. This would be too easy for your average coffin dodger. A typical transaction can involve being passed a gas bill and the payment. I'll then process it and give change. I'll then be passed another bill and the payment which I'll process and then give the change. If it's just two bills, I'm getting off pretty lightly. The record is six. As annoying as this already is, it's topped off by the final transaction being the OAP getting their pension out. Their pension which would have invariably covered all of the bills they've just paid and given them change. Why the smelly buggers can't just hand me the bills and ask me to take it out of their pensions, I don't know. Actually, I suspect it's cos they're so desperate for human contact that being glowered at by me is the most pleasant human interaction they've had for a week.

It'd be a relief if the Chuckle Brothers came in frankly. At least their capering and tomfoolery wouldn't be accompanied by the acrid stink of week old piss.

Pricing out of proportion

The "new" pricing in proportion rules have been in force now for over 18 months (or so, I can't remember properly and my research dept is too lazy to find out for certain) but it's still tripping people up. This is despite every address in the country getting a size guide when it was first introduced and there being a fair amount of publicity in the run up to Christmas. However, I still have a little bit of sympathy for some people caught out by this. But:

People who can't be bothered to check the sizes and weights - FUCK OFF.

People who come in to pick up a surcharged item that's blatantly too large/heavy and then moan and bitch about it like I'm holding their firstborn hostage and it's all my fault personally- FUCK OFF AND DIE IN A FIRE

People who moan about the system being too complicated - GROW A BRAIN AND FUCK OFF

The bloke who, just now, moaned about having to send his letter as a packet (and therefore more expensive) who asked me why I sell envelopes that size - FOR LETTERS THAT ARE THAT SIZE YOU TWAT, NOW FUCK OFF

People who are surcharged for items that are ever so slightly too large or not actually too large but have been incorrectly surcharged - SORRY