I Can See My Face In The Floor

What am I meant to do today?
The internet isn’t working (at work) so I can’t check out my favourite sites; no achewood, no football365, no digital spy, no Richie Herring blog, no, well, anything…
I would choose my 100 squid BAe “reward” gift from the on-line brochure (I suspect it’ll be a satnav) but that isn’t working either. Ho hum…

At least I’m leaving early because I have a landscape gardener coming round to tell me how much it’ll cost to turn the mess that is outside my back window into the ideas I have badly sketched out in my bonce. I suspect it isn’t going to be cheap, yet I’ve taken the first step of acknowledging that there is no way I’m going to do it myself. It’s my fault it is such a mess already.
I’ve been moving finances around in an effort to fund this venture, and have spent ages trying to find missing share certificates, streamlining direct debits and working out what the hell various monthly payments actually are. For instance, I found out that a 5 pound monthly payment has been vanishing out of my account since December 2000, and this is an insurance policy against a DVD player I bought for my parents that they’ve long ago stopped using.
Everything now seems in order and I’m just waiting for the right price before I cash my shares in. I’d check the price now but the internet isn’t working…

I was wondering last week why I’ve ended up as the sort of person who gets embroiled in confrontation and who finds it very hard to walk away from situations when I maybe shouldn’t have got involved. I questioned my part in various disagreements, fallings out and arguments in my past, and wondered if I should have done things differently. Anyway, I bring this up here because I came to the conclusion that there should be times when I don’t feel it is absolutely necessary to open my big mouth, yet at lunch today I did it again my friends.
I was stood in the shop across from work half-reading the Guardian I was planning to buy whilst I waited in the queue for a young woman to finish paying for whatever she was buying. This transaction was taking longer than it should because the lady was deep in a conversation on her mobile phone so was attempting to dig the money out of her purse with just the one hand. I thought this was a little bit rude as she seemed to be treating the woman serving as an irritant who by asking for money didn’t seem to understand how important this phone call was. It was only mildly irritating I guess, the same level of annoyingness as when someone takes ages putting money/cards back in their purse or wallet after paying at a till but refuses to budge out of the way whilst doing this.
What caused my head to flip was when phone-lady practically threw the money at the woman serving. She couldn’t count out her cash one-handed, so instead of showing the lady serving some courtesy by temporarily halting her phone call and handing the money over with one hand whilst holding her purse with the other she just kind of chucked the money in the vague direction of other lady. I could see the shock on the face of the woman serving and this was when my mouth surprised me by saying “what a rude bitch” out loud. Yeah, I was thinking it but didn’t expect my mouth to just blurt this out. The “rude bitch” in question looked up from her phone call and for the first time in this whole exchange seemed to realise that there were other people around. I stared at her, not with any look of disdain but with a mixture of surprise at what I’d just done and with wondering what would happen next.
Nothing happened next, the lady just scooped up her things and left without even looking at the woman who’d served her. This lady turned to me and said “I’ve never had anyone throw money at me before” and I just shook at my head at what had just happened.
Heh, I’m going to end up such a crotchety old fucker.
That’s if I’m not stabbed to death after calling some meathead a ‘twat’ in a chippy. This seems more likely.