HATING THE WORLD - a few annoying things January 27 2001 Please feel free to add your own or to disagree with mine. Want to comment? Visit the messageboard to start a discussion. See below for other visitor comments. Automated On-Hold Systems "All our representatives are busy serving other customers, but please hold. Your call is important to us. You are being held in a queue and someone will be with you shortly. You are number 78 in the queue." Oh, and by the way... you're paying for this call, sucker. The TV Licence Completely indefensible, the TV Tax enables the BBC to employ 'celebrities' like Dale Winton; meanwhile it runs adverts telling us to be grateful it doesn't run adverts. And think about it. Do you really want to pay for the World Service? Online Sign-Up Forms Forced to register with some crappy website you probably won't even use, you fill out seven screens of vital statistics (occupation: military, salary: $1 million PA) and press submit, only to be told "telephone number entered incorrectly, please complete." One problem: everything you just entered has now been deleted. Organic Food Smile as your friendly out-of-town supermarket sells that delicious genetically modified, pesticide-showered, Third World-raping, foreign-imported fruit and veg. Then gladly hand over five times as much cash for the honour and privilege of eating organic meat (ie chicken that hasn't been fed on the remains of its own family). Buses One along every 8-10 minutes? Bollocks. What are they using to construct these timetables- the Gregorian calendar? Sand clocks? Sundials? The Office Smokers' Doorway A laudable example of heath and safety in the workplace or the modern-day equivalent of a leper colony? Fast Food Photographs Be it kebab or Kentucky Fried Chicken, the meal in the photograph - pert, mouthwatering, voluminous - never corresponds with the lank, greying cytoplasm in the box. And if the food even looks bad in the photo, something is seriously wrong. The Volume In Cinemas Slowly creeping up to 140db - the sound level required to implode the human skull - just to make sure you take note of that crappy Smirnoff ad where Satan pretends to be a monk. The Audience is Deafening. Gift Shops Is there a way out of this theme park ride/ museum/ Buddhist temple that doesn't exit via an Aladdin's Cave of pointless, overpriced tat? And will that branded rhomboid chocolate bar really be a fitting souvenir with which to remember the catatonia-inducing experience? Poncey Restaurant Menus "A salopette of corn-fed chicken standing proud amidst a slowly drowning cortina of porchetta." That'll be the club sandwich, then... Pokemon Does anyone over the age of 13 have the faintest clue what the fuck this is all about, other than a hideously overblown version of Top Trumps with accompanying acid-trip-nightmare cartoon show? Smoky Bars and Clubs So Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man and 30 percent of the British population probably won't agree with this. But we think it's just great to return from a night out stinking like Philip Morris' trachia and suffering from a severe bronchial infection. TV Sports Schedules Well obviously no-one watches Seinfeld or Larry Sanders so let's shunt them aside to see five more nail-biting rounds of the Embassy Overweight Snooker Championships (Live From Margate). Aeroplane Seats Boasting just enough legroom to induce deep-vein thrombosis, aeroplane seats invoke one of the universe's most baffling spacial paradoxes: that while their angle of recline is so infinitessimally small as to be impossible to measure, leaning back nevertheless always breaks the knees of the person sitting behind. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion readers comments: thunk for the week - kat smoke - samfrel planes, cigarettes, cinema etc - anon pokemon - gryffindor seeker [about i-drive] writing index Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact me: mail@tobyslater.com back to top back to home page

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