Planet Me: Have the Scotch Gone Yet? Page 3

  Anybody who is mad enough to have fought their way through the first book ‘Planet Me’ will have probably picked up the fact that there’s plenty of stuff that winds me up. It’s not difficult. High end Technology stuff succeeds most of the time. However, much more mundane, regular, everyday items routinely succeed also. What pisses me off most of all, is simply anything that doesn’t do what it’s meant to do. What pisses me off even more, is NEW IMPROVED stuff that doesn’t do what it’s meant to do when the previous UNIMPROVED crappy original version DID.

  I’m not sure we’d have enough trees on the planet to be able to generate sufficient parchment if I really let rip on this one. You know, try and list ALL of the stuff that’s now complete crap and methodically detail why. And, irrespective of the number of trees available, I know I have to start trying (Jesus it’s hard) to keep my blood pressure in check and keep its’ associated fluid propulsion pump still sort of operating, even if intermittently.

  So, instead, I’ll just select a few examples, and try to quickly and briefly give a few hints as to why, on Planet Me, the persons responsible for certain commercial merchandise should be taken away and quietly shot.

  BBQ lighter fluid

  That is the “New Improved” shit that now, thanks to Elf ‘n Safety, has a 0.0001 % chance of being ignited under any circumstances. Oh, yes, it’s low fume, zero flash point and dermatologically compliant, for sure. But is there any possibility of creating anything remotely resembling a flame? Not the faintest chance unless you happen to have an ignition source marginally more explosive than 5 atomic bombs.

  Exterior water based paint.

  Again it’s all spot on. Zero fume, zero skin irritant, zero possibility of combustion, zero … ? Oh yes, I remember, zero adhesion to any material or surface for more than 45 seconds after the commencement of any rain. And where precisely on the surface of the planet would that be appropriate? Possibly not Blighty where it’s guaranteed to piss it down for at least 6 ½ hours a day, 348 ¼ days a year.

  Tea pots.

  Those tea pots in every Café, hotel, restaurant and tea room since 1237, which have a spout that every purchasing manager in every establishment knows for certain, is purposely designed to ensure that the partitioning of any shitty brown liquid between the cup, saucer and white linen table cloth is 0.01%, 15.7% and 84.29% respectively. But they STILL persist in buying them. Always.

  Presumably because they are 0.1 % cheaper than every other bloody design that happens to work. Never mind that the Café or restaurant now has a laundry bill slightly more than the GDP of Kuwait. How does this behaviour equate with any sort of financial or business teaching. You know, make sure that there is a demand for your product, make sure it meets the demand, is cost effective and marketed effectively. Where’s the demand for teapots and coffee pots that within 0.45 seconds of a customer sitting down at one of your tables your white linen table cloth will become shitty brown and the customer will now look as though they’ve pissed themselves? Yet they all still trot off to buy them. By the million.

  Bulk packs of pens.

  I buy pens in bulk because they are cheap (It’s the Yorkshire man again). And so I don’t run out. However, I must confess, I am now just starting to get a little bit suspicious (Me? Surely not?). You see I know, and I now suspect that the manufacturers know, that the bulk packs get bought a bit in advance and then thrown into the back of a stationary cupboard somewhere, probably for about 114,000 years. So, when eventually somebody ventures to the back of the cupboard and locates the pack and drags a pen out, maybe after he’s demolished 93% of the house trying to find ANY pen or other writing instrument ANYWHERE, the probability of any fluid of any colour emanating from the dick-end of the recovered writing instrument and making any sort of mark on a flat white sheet of an ex-tree, is zilch. Never mind, we’ve got plenty more in our bulk budget pack; probably about 999.

  Well, save yourself the bother, just bin the pack and demolish the remaining 7% of your house looking for a stick of charcoal left by the Romans. None of the remaining 999 supposed bargain bulk pack writing instruments will be any different. None of them will work. And the key thing is, I suspect, even if you had opened the pack the very microsecond you made the purchase, none of them would have worked either.

  Light bulbs.

  OMFG! Now, I just cannot let this pass. This is up there with the batteries and Global Warming rubbish that was touched on in the previous offering.

  So, once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, a clever bloke discovered electricity. Nice one - whoever it was (which is debateable). Then, another clever bloke discovered that if you stuck enough electricity quick enough through a thin conducting wire it heated up and glowed. And if you then stuck the bit of wire inside a glass bottle stuffed with an inert unreactive gas, the wire with electricity could be made to glow really bright and not blow up for a long time. Hey presto a light bulb! And that worked just fine for 100 plus years and counting. Inert recyclable metal; inert recyclable glass; inert gases. Perfect.

  Not in cloud cuckoo let’s fart around and screw everything up EU la-di-da land.

  Something to do with too much energy being lost as heat. Something else to do with using too much energy. Who really gives a shit? Probably something to do with a load of useless bastards that couldn’t effectively organise a piss up in a brewery, wanting to piss about and interfere; again.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disagreeing with the too much heat, not efficient enough let’s improve it bit. No problem with that. Perfectly sensible.

  It’s just the strategy of deciding NOT to do effective research and development behind the scenes UNTIL you have replacements that are effective, definitely work and are definitely improved for the ENTIRE LIFECYCLE of manufacture, use, recycle, remanufacture and reuse. But instead decide to ban current versions and leave a free for all for every fly by night con-man to flood the market with ineffective oversold crap that doesn’t meet any of the prime requirements.

  And certainly produces less visible light than the arse end of a female glow worm. And, although packaged and transported in a box marked “Life Time 50,000 hours”, I assume this must mean that the glass, metal and fancy inners, when wrapped in cotton wool and 150 square metres of bubble wrap and stuck in an undisturbed underground vault, will last that long.

  Not anything to do with the item’s ability to generate any sort of wavelengths in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because every single one of the 55,000 versions now available that I have acquired, seem to have the ability to produce some sort of light just long enough for me to put a positive comment on Amazon or EBay saying, “Packaged well, great service, arrived very quickly. Item exactly as described and an instant clear bright light”, before 35 seconds later going quietly and very discretely (so I don’t notice), pop.

  Never mind that the new things are about ten to twenty times more expensive than the original filament versions that enabled us to easily read, and have very adventurous liaisons with new girlfriends, for over 100 years. Never mind that they contain Christ knows what in terms of silicon micro-chips and pre-programmed software crap, or that they are meant to last 20 times as long.

  The reality is that the new-fangled latest techno-bulbs will kindly relieve you of £13.62 per bulb, plus delivery, every 36 ¾ days of your continued existence on this shitty completely mad planet.

  Candles.

  And so to the main bit of this extravaganza. The reason the chapter is called what it is. Not that there is any logic whatsoever to any of my chapter titles; or much of the chapter contents for that matter.

  So, the first candles were, apparently put into use some 200 years before the JC religious bloke popped out in a stable and started gazing at stars and sheep and stuff. Oh, hang on a minute. That might have been his mum and dad, who wasn’t his dad.

  Anyhow, once again, all that’s irrelevant. The point is, candles have been doing what light bulbs have been doing, but for abo
ut 2200 years longer. And, basically from about BC 200 to 1984, they seemed to do a pretty good job. Get some flint, or a match, create a flame and light the sticky-up floppy thin bit at the top, and bingo. Some night time vision.

  And the vision continued until the candle was finished. Finished as in burnt to the bottom with no thin floppy top bit left and all the wax either completely reacted with oxygen to help next summer to be warmer, or smeared in a 7 foot diameter slick of wax over your dining room table. Or dribbled extensively down the side of a Mateus Rose wine bottle.

  Again, it’s irrelevant, but basically they worked. For over 2000 years of the development of civilisation, candle maker geezers and non-geezers made the things so they ‘did what it said on the tin’.

  Now, my wife likes candles. And we got married in 1984. And I like to buy her small pressies now and again. Like for her birthday, Chrimbo and our wedding anniversary. Basically three times a year, unless I’ve crashed a car, in which case she gets extra.

  If she happens to eventually “go first”, which she won’t (because unlike me she knows that 1 ½ bottles of Chianti a night is possibly not conducive to carrying on breathing for an extensive period), I’d get her some nice Daffs as well that year.

  Now I know, like most blokes know, that underwear is definitely a no go area. It took me 27.3 years of trying (and failing) to be finally convinced of this, but I FINALLY got the message. I like exotic, lace, mesh, red, black and frills; she likes Bridget Jones stuff in battleship grey. Battleship grey it is then - but she can go and get them herself.

  I used to like buying her jewellery, and unlike in the smalls department, in the jewellery department I was usually successful. But, basically now she has all the varieties of jewellery she needs, so the Yorkshire man in me won’t allow myself to just buy more stuff to spend more time squat at the back of a cupboard or in a safe.

  She doesn’t drink much and chocolates allegedly negate the potential success of the latest exercise or diet fad aimed at making her arse closer to the size it was when I met her. So, like the frilly stuff, chocolate containing substances are also banned.

  So, that basically leaves candles. Which she likes. And I like, because they are cheap, can smell nice (the fragrance might put her in a vaguely romantic cuddly mood) they burn and produce emissions that could make the UK climate more Mediterranean and they basically ‘disappear’. That is, they don’t live that long and clog up a cupboard even more (that’s already full of complete crap) – like possible alternative presents such as a food blender or ironing board would, for example.

  Erm. “Disappear”? Since 1984? Not a bloody chance. Oh, I know I can get any colour I like, any shape I like, any smell I like and almost any size I like. But, the single common denominator for all candles, anywhere, the ONLY thing I can be absolutely categorically certain of is that the floppy bit at the top will stay lit for precisely 6 minutes 17 ¼ seconds before it drowns in a self-contained pool of molten wax, at which point my nearest and dearest will be left with no light, no amorous inducing smell and 17.6 kg of surplus to requirements fancy wax crap destined for the nearest landfill.

  Now, why is that? Why, after 2000 years of candle production perfection have we managed to move to a situation where NOBODY, nobody out of 7 billion people now farting around on this planet, can make a bloody candle that does what it says on the tin?

  Don’t answer. You don’t need to. Because, guess what, whether you like it or not, I’m going to tell you. The reason is simple. And it replicates across most of modern living. Form is more important than function. So as long as the candle looks good, and smells good, and is in a nice tin with a fancy ribbon around it, idiots like me will continue to go out and buy them for presents, predominantly because we are banned from buying what we would really want to go out and buy for people (or us).

  And, whilst I get to see the complete uselessness of a candle bought for my wife, which on occasion, may, allegedly cause me to become a bit vocal, most people who buy most presents for other people, don’t get to see the complete crapness. The result is that the person handing over the dosh never gets to see the shit result and even better still for Crap Candles Inc. is that the fact that the receiver can’t and doesn’t want to complain for causing offence to the sender.

  So, the fact that NO CANDLE manufacturer anywhere can now be arsed to buy the correct diameter of wick for the diameter of the wax in their particular candle, so that it has any chance of working, matters not one jot.

  Oh for all the new improved products and continual progress. My arse!

  3 - European Health Insurance Card