You Love Us

Last night I went to see the Manics. A. Mazing. That's what they were. We were super close to the front and somehow I managed to end up standing behind a girl the same height as me, so I could see! I kept forgetting that I could actually see the stage and found myself standing in my usual gig position, where I look roughly 10ft above the band as that's all I can see. I had a lovely unobstructed view of James, as usual all I could see of Sean was his arms, and I was probably a bit too close to Nicky, got to see a fair amount of his undies once he donned his super short mini skirt.

What I have never, and will never get, are people who go to gigs to talk through the band. Tickets weren't cheap for last nights gig, so why would you fork out £26 and then just chat, in a LOUD voice all the way through it? Why?! Surely it's cheaper to stay at home, or go to the pub? What made this even more annoying was at the beginning of every song they said, loudly, something along the lines of "I f'ing LOVE this song" or, in the case of an acoustic number "this song is just beautiful" and then chatted away merrily all the way through it. I did say to them at one point, after an "I f'ing LOVE this song" "well why don't you shut the f up then?" but they were so busy talking they didn't hear me!

Wheels on fire

This morning my bus driver (well, the driver of the bus I was going to work on, I don't have my own personal bus) stopped to help a man put out his car that was on fire, whilst the rest of the bus tutted, sighed in an exaggerated fashion and swore at being held up for literally 3 minutes on their journey, and the other car drivers drove straight past him without a second glance.

There is nothing miserable Londoners hate more than someone getting in their way, especially with such trivial things as car fires. This man's car was actually on fire, and people were more concerned with the fact that they might be a few milliseconds late for work.

What people don't realise is that on the side of the building that says "Welcome to London" is that underneath in teeny letters it says "Please leave all manners and consideration for others this side of the North Circular".

Don't tell my mum

but yesterday I met up with a bloke I met on the internet. Luckily, he turned out to be a very nice man indeed and didn't kidnap or murder me, hooray! Even better than not being kidnapped or murdered was finally getting my hands on a pair of tickets for the Manics.

I found him through www.scarletmist.com after having been messed around, again, by See Tickets. In the past year they have charged me for Recorded Delivery (more or less £5) and sent the tickets by First Class Post (32p), I've had to phone them up to tell them a gig was cancelled and ask for my money back - they had no idea and this time they sent me a sale confirmation email only to follow it up 6 hours later with an email to say that there were 'not enough funds' in my account so they'd cancelled my order. Fibbers. Funny that the money they couldn't take on Thursday came flying out of the cash machine yesterday to pay the Lovely Internet Man. Hmm.

The lost art of customer service

I’ve spent the best part of the afternoon trying to set up electronic access to one of our journals, I won’t bore you with the painfully long process I had to go through to actually get it, but here’s the last reply I got:

"You can furnish me with a password and I can enter it in."

What?! That’s not even bloody English. If they weren’t on the wrong side of the Atlantic I’d be furnishing them with more than a bloody password.

Our Man on a spending spree?

Do a good thing today. Be entertained and get the itchiest feet you've ever had. Go here, read it, and before you pack your bags for and head for the nearest airport, leave a comment and vote for Our Man and make him a Rich Man. $500 to the winner.

Update! He won, hooray! The full weeks guest blogging can be found here.